a proposition about autonomies and their meanders by gloria galvez, fran ilich and clara lópez menéndez – with contributions from the larger Los Angeles organizing community

Opening March 7th, 4 – 8pm

For all related public programs please see bottom of this page

autonomous together*

autonomy is an act in motion, a practice, an attitude and approach to experience, but one that is not pursued alone. autonomy is a perpetual joyous negotiation of the conditions of our shared freedom from the mandates of colonization, commodification, exchange, dehumanization, and the destruction of nature.

like ants move by sensing other ants, tracing their routes through walls, around trees, and into the earth, we move towards our desired autonomy following the trails that others have left behind in its quest. 

works throughout this exhibition study various social and political practices that move away from dominant systems that deprive the many and, instead, build towards collective, non-hierarchical people and earth-centered infrastructures.together we seek to invite the audience to co-imagine a new commons, because, as some friends said over ten years ago, we owe each other everything.** And liberation is not a solitary practice, but an interdependent one.

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Programming

March 7 at 6pm Tumbleweed Soup Kitchen & Recipe Share session with Community Chef Chris Rodriguez

Our knowledge of our surrounding edible environment has been intentionally severed by the dominant systems that seek to keep us dependent on their low wages and commodity. Tumbleweed soup is a generations-old recipe that has been passed on by indigenous communities and shared amongst people as a survival food during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl period. Chris Rodriguez, a mutual aid chef of Mexican-Indigenous and Iberian ancestry, will continue the culinary lineage of this soup and share with attendees a bowl of soup and his recipe for how to make it.

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March 15 – Tumbleweed Foraging session with Community Chef Chris Rodriguez, Atlakatl Ce Totchli and clara lópez menéndez

In this session attendees will learn how to i.d. and harvest tumbleweed from Chef Chris Rodriguez. Through the hike to forage the plants Chris, Atlakatl Ce Totchli and clara lópez menéndez will share stories about how traditional knowledge of foraging medicinal and edible plants around the world has actively suppressed as a means of status quo control.

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March 20, 7m to 9pm Autonomous Convening with Skira Marinez – Cielo,  Kruti Parekh – Youth Justice Coalition, and more Food served by TBD

This convening invites the community to share a meal and strategies for building resilient autonomous communities. The convening will be facilitated by community organizers who work in housing, community safety, and arts projects that practice community autonomy. They will  share strategies from their work and facilitate a conversation that explores how we can together build the world we desire.

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* in 2017 virgil b/g taylor made a series of screen printed t-shirts that said “autonomous together”, as a commemoration of virgil’s friends’s traumatic experience as part of the counter-rally that gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. As an expression, “autonomous together” articulates a form of reciprocity that resonated deeply with ourselves and the ethos of this project. So we asked if we could summon it for the title of this show.

** Fred Moten and Stephano Harney in the Undercommons, 2013.

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gloria galvez is an artist, educator, organizer, and nature steward whose artistic practice zig-zags across drawing, video, sculpture, and communal experiences — while every so often interweaving into these forms and their making, community organizing and citizen science insights and frameworks. within this practice, her current focus invokes alternate and simultaneous realities that prompt rebellious and revealing questions to the current social-political conditions of things – both living and nonliving things – both human and non-human things. and her work offers people physical and abstract spaces of learning, recollection, possibility, self-determination, and imagination.

Fran Ilich is an artist and writer based in NYC. His practice deals with narrative media, economy, games and hacktivism. For instance, the creation of collective wealth and alternative financial flows, inventing unorthodox ways to fund and maintain social infrastructures. He draws on ancient modes of exchange, and uses narrative and creative devices to forge organizational models that transform capitalist systems into solidarity platforms. Rather than reject existing financial tools and capitalist mechanisms, such as banks, bonds, hedge funds, and capital accumulation, he shuffles them around in such a way that they instead can foster community building enterprises and non-vertical economies. He is the author of 3 novels and the book-long essay Another Narrative is Possible. His works range from interactive web telenovelas to alternate reality games and utopian experiments in social organization, like the Diego de la Vega Coffee Co-op and Spacebank, a virtual community investment bank.