August 2020 Newsletter
Greetings! We hope this email finds you well as we continue on through the pandemic and as protest continue in the streets for racial justice, around the world with daily actions where City Repair HQ is in Portland, this land of the Chinooks. There are many Black led actions, and some groups we encourage to check out are Fridays 4 Freedom, Dont Shoot PDX: https://www.dontshootpdx.org/, and Reimagine Oregon: https://www.reimagineoregon.org/about. FON. https://www.instagram.com/friendsofnoise/
And our dear friends/collaborators Friends of Noise:
“Save the date! Labor Day: Sept 7th. #BLM Peace, harmony, compassion and empathy will be needed to navigate and get through these perilous times!
We need all ppl that believe that #blacklivesmatter and wants to see a future where justice and accountability prevail? Please join us and many other orgs this Labor Day for a BLM PDX Solidarity march around the Portland Waterfront and Esplanade.
We'd love for this action to spread across the country so please share with members of your community to spread the word!”
Since our Village Building Convergence (VBC) events in early June, City Repair has been continuing to pivot to stay a-float and plan for our next program year which starts in Autumn. Keep an eye out in the near future for announcements for registration for annual courses we are moving online:
The Urban Permaculture Design Course. Multi-session course over many months.
The Village Building Design Course. 4 session course early Winter.
In the remainder of this newsletter, we have content from our VBC artist in residency, Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. and collaborator Jordan Rosenblum. There are reflections, info on how to contribute to placemaking projects at a distance, as well as physically distanced on site events.
A message from our Artist and Community Organizer in Residence Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr.
Hey folks!
As Artist and Community Organizer in residence I’d like to thank everyone for taking the time to watch the VBC 2020 programming. We were excited to see such a great overall turnout and at this point many views of the video recordings that are now on YouTube. You can see
The intro for the residency reflecting on the theme of my work Won’t You Be My Neighbor can be found here.
Building Community Through Work With And For Young People featuring Amanda Leigh Evans of The Living School of Art and Arianna Dato of the Growing Seed Workers Union is available here.
Building Community Through Gathering Around Food featuring Carlos Reynoso and Abram Bañuelos of Mis Tacones and Erica Escalante of Café Reina / The Arrow is available here.
Building Community Through Cultural Organizing featuring the work of Nat Turner Project who is currently raising money to provide a third round of stipends for Black artists, as well as that of my personal project Afro Contemporary Art Class is available here.
And for those of you who saw the Afro Contemporary Art Class event, or will see, and enjoyed the work happening there. You can now donate at our newly launched Patreon which will be used to find paying Black artists to join the various iterations of ACAC starting next Fall here.
I’m also excited to announce that I’ll be working with the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) at this year's Time Based Arts Festival to produce a project called Grandmother(s)’s Kitchen Presents: Bring Your Own Blanket Free Community Picnic and Discussion. The event will be on Sunday September 13th, from 1-4PM at Irving Park, and you’re invited!
The Picnic will create a physically distant social event that sets the stage for participants to enjoy a meal and the company of friends, family, and neighbors. The gathering will allow folks to meet new people from around the city, share stories about their everyday lives, and engage in relaxed discussion about the state of our city, nation, and world.
Our goal is to offer a respite from quarantine by getting to safely spend time with friends/family new and old, and providing an opportunity to reflect on current events. The Free Community Picnic will encourage all to organize around building a better future, and will feature food from Black businesses.
This project is inspired by my focus on food and the act of gathering. The Free Community Picnic aims to create a similarly rich congregation around food for Portland.
More information about this project can be found at my site here.
And follow along at PICA’s website for more details about the larger TBA 2020 festival!
I have also been posting more in-depth about my food work on the Five Oaks Museum Instagram. You can follow that here!
I am also an engager for this year's Metro Community Placemaking grant, and I was recently on RootedTV talking all about it, which can be found here.
A Living Time Capsule: a message from Jordan Rosenblum
Time Capsules have been around for a long time. I was first introduced to them as a grade-school student. The asphalt for the basketball courts was being torn up and replaced, revealing the compacted, gray soil underneath. I can’t remember exactly what we were asked, but my third-grade class sat down together to create things for future students to unearth. Who were these future kids? What would we want them to know? We made drawings and wrote notes, hoping to communicate aspects of our daily lives, both the mundane and exceptional.
The basic premise of a time capsule is the creation of a vessel that will carry information into the future, to be recovered at some future date.
A time capsule requires three things: a reckoning with who we are now, a record of what we would preserve for the future, and an imagining of what a future person would need to know. When we are creating time capsules, we are always considering what the future looks like—even unconsciously—because we are choosing objects and ideas that we think are in need of preservation. Our assumption of what will be needed in the future reflects our fears and hopes, as well as unspoken assumptions about what that future will be.
Time capsules can contain a myriad of objects and ideas, seeking to represent a culture and time. One of the better known time capsules of the 20th century was the Westinghouse capsule. The bullet-shaped stainless steel vessel, loaded hundreds of feet down into the Earth at the World’s Fair grounds in Corona, Queens, New York in 1933 contained a holy bible, a camera, and a barbie doll, among a thousand other objects. It also included letters to future inhabitants (human or otherwise) from Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann.
Time capsules are created by specific populations of people, expressing specific sets of values.
The Nazi party created buried one underneath a training compound for the regime in occupied Poland. The capsule housed photos of the upper echelon of leadership, and Mein Kampf—Hitler’s autobiography.
In the traditional method, a location is chosen to house the time capsule, to be unearthed at some future time—often indicated in advance—and commemorated with a marker.
A powerful aspect of a time capsule is that it creates a direct lineage—even if unknown—from this moment to the future.
The Project
Our project, the Living Time Capsule project reimagines the time capsule as an open, decentralized, living document. Instead of being buried, it is active and evolving, living as a set of commandments above the mantle, as a reminder tacked onto the fridge with a magnet, or as a stack of notes tucked into the back of a drawer.
We live in a time of precarity. A Living Time Capsule assumes survivorship. It also assumes that the future we envision is just, equitable, thriving through biodiversity, teaming with life.
The project aims to collect human wisdom through individual contributions, or through self-organizing communities to be compiled into an evolving document. The time capsule allows us to preserve for the future. Of equal or more importance, it also serves as daily reminders of what we know about our time, asks us to blueprint plans for the future we would like to see, and to be specific and strategic about what we are willing to do to get there.
The Invitation to Contribute
The most pressing issues of our time are also the most basic requirements for the survival and thriving of life on Earth.
The time capsule we are creating focuses around these topics:
Food
Shelter
Education
Land
Body
The project assumes social, racial, and environmental justice are at the core of each. That the starting point for any reflection imagines a future where these set of concerns are central.
We ask that you contribute two-dimensional of media for the topics, addressing the following questions:
What would you preserve for the future?
What is the future you would like to see?
What can you contribute to make that future possible, now?
For each we ask you to be as specific as you can.
Submissions may include text documents—poetry, prose, fortunes, manifestos, photographs, drawings, and visual art. Responses will be compiled in an evolving set of documents that will be shared and available to any contributor.
Send media to:
You will receive confirmation of receipt, with further instructions.
Thank you so much for your participation.