Collapse in the Collective Dream Space
Some reflections on our recent symposium and the many meanings of collapse.
Welcoming our New President
On October 7, Crystal Williams was inaugurated as the 18th president of Rhode Island School of Design. Her moving inaugural address described RISD as a “collective dream space” that “challenges the status quo, eschews calcified thinking, and asserts new aspirations for how humanity can and should be,” where the principles of social equity, inclusion and diversity are central to the work we do together. 🔥🔥🔥
Notes on Collapse
“There is not a simple definition of collapse. Even the legal definitions are contested,” said Lorraine Barcant, who serves as a building inspector in New York.
We spent the 4th annual Center for Complexity Symposium investigating the idea of collapse.
Artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed defined collapse as a betrayal of a structure or system’s integrity. They spoke about “the ongoing Western colonial desire for transparency, despite the impossibilities of clarification.” They suggested that colonial knowledge involved “a certain ownership of things, nature, other humans.” They called collapse a refusal to be held together — a refusal to coalesce. They linked collapse to opacity. Collapse, They said, can create a disorientation of the structure and resist transparency. It suggested an image of living, even flourishing, amongst debris and ruins.
Cultural historian Jack Halberstam explored this explicitly. Through the works of photographer Alvin Baltrop, he showed a vibrant experimental art scene and cruising culture in the 1970s ruins of Manhattan’s West Side Piers. Often shot by telephoto, the works are dominated by lumbering, slumping buildings — “sculpted by entropy,” said Halberstam — you have to search for the tiny nude bodies amongst the crumbling remnants of Manhattan’s shipping industry.
The scene — collapsing warehouses protected from the rest of the city by a collapsed highway — seems to offer a literal instance of the kind of opacity that Rasheed described. It was a place where a marginalized group could find freedom and one another away from the prying eyes of a stigmatizing society. One mustn’t be too romantic about it. I’m writing about it now because the opacity was pierced. Baltrop took the photos. The art world found them and circulated them. Now those people and their fleeting intimacies are the subject of academic discourse and design newsletters — their private moments endlessly reproduced in magazines and search engine results.
Speaking on a panel, social critic and community activist Ed Whitfield suggested four elements necessary for a community to sustain itself — something you might very much want to do as systems collapse and fail around you. You need a way to feed people. You need a way to get more people. You need a way for people to find meaning. You need a way to defend yourselves.
“Defense” conjures associations of violence. And that’s part of it. But Whitfield referred to other ways of protecting a community. You could bring people outside the community on side. You could forge alliances. Following Rasheed and Halberstam’s examples, you could hide.
In an era of planetary-scale calamity, it seems to me that questions of security have less to do with war or policing and more to do with health and safety. In a breakout session, poet Laura Brown-Lavoie and activist artist Vatic Kuumba had participants redeploy Providence’s policing budget to a department of food justice. Participants sketched out a powerful bureaucracy that distributed food before it became waste, ensured food safety, and enforced good access to food for all. It suggested a system of monitoring, distribution, education, and intervention.
Over three days, more than two hundred RISD students, staff, faculty, and visitors joined us to explore, examine, and expose many facets of our theme. As we pull together what we’ve learned, we are struck by the power of the imagination to explore the potential of something as simple as a single word and to move beyond the expected or clichéd.
On Ruins and Portals
Reflections on Portales: Reimagining the Future (September 1 – October 9 at Waterfire Arts Center) and Collapse (September 20 – October 23 at 20 Washington Place, RISD)
Collapse is like a garment that we wear every day. We can’t remember when we started wearing it — maybe we’ve been wearing it forever and we are just now noticing it for the first time — but we know that this word and all that it signifies now feels normal.
Pandemic lit chronicles these times, reporting on life under these conditions (now and in the before times…a pandemic works well as a literary device because it creates conditions of conflict and stress). Two exhibitions that were up at the same time — Portales at the Waterfire Art Center and Collapse at RISD, which was organized alongside the symposium — add to this picture, exploring the psychic and social costs of collapse as well as the possibility of transcendence. Who is the work for? In some cases, it feels like it is for us in the present, in other cases, for lost ancestors, and in still others, like these are messages to the future. Maybe that’s fitting as memorials are designed to commemorate and preserve, but also to warn.
Portales is curated by the artists Shey ‘Ri Acu’ Rivera Rios, MA ’24 (Global Arts and Cultures) and Anabel Vázquez Rodrígues, and it includes work by nine local artists who think a lot about community, justice, and how art-making fits into struggles for social change. It’s a raw exhibition, with some works that are so intimate that in other times, it may have felt uncomfortable to bear witness to the wrenching pain that is on display, as in V.A.T.K.’s charged video performances, which mourn relatives lost to Covid-19. Many of the other works memorialize these times as well, including Eric Sung’s photographs of buildings and cultural centers emptied of people, Justin Case’s documentary photographs of protests and actions, Janaya Kizzie’s “obituary,” and anjelllblack’s graphic piece that connects Rhode Island’s role in the slave trade to last year’s vote to abolish the word “plantations” from the state’s official name. Are we emerging from this recent history, or are we still living it, shaping it, and being shaped by it? Some of the works point to the former, and some to the latter — we don’t yet know.
This ambiguity is at the heart of other works in Portales, like Shey ‘Ri Acu’ Rivera Rios’ “Mano de Obra,” an annotated photograph of their childhood home that tells the beautiful story of their journey and serves as a metaphor for our times. Similarly, Sokeo Ros’ video self-portrait, “Bodycount,” shows Ros performing movements that live somewhere between dance, martial art and embodied narrative, expressing pain, catharsis and transcendence — it’s riveting.
“We have been rebuilding for such a long time. A recurring cycle of destruction and reconstruction. Cut and bruised hands and hearts. This foundation is so strong, we take it with us even when we are forced to leave Borikén to settle in the diaspora.” – Shey ‘Ri Acu’ Rivera Rios, MA’24
Three paintings by Jordan Seaberry, BFA ’14 have this same sense of liminality: all of them depict masculine-presenting Black people laboring at tasks that are unclear in mysterious landscapes that merge elements of the natural and industrial worlds. Are they digging, burying, planting, or reaping? It’s impossible to tell, giving these scenes the feeling of an infinite loop, where the work cannot be completed because its goal has not been defined.
“I want to paint in a way that builds power. In times of injustice, artists are the griot, historian, architect, activist.” – Jordan Seaberry, BFA ‘14
Across town at the exhibition that the CfC organized, 16 artworks contributed by 23 staff and faculty, some working in teams, explore themes of destruction and disintegration as they are manifested literally in textiles, in soil, or in the precarity of objects in balance — while others salvage materials, photographs, and memories to build new things out of the bricolage of the past. Art is one place where we reflect on the passage of time and loss, and imagine new futures, and the range of work made for Collapse does all of these things.
One of the most satisfying elements to the Collapse symposium was the range of RISD faculty and staff who participated in creating work for the exhibition. The departments and centers represented include the Center for Social Equity and Inclusion, Digital + Media, Experimental and Foundation Studies, Film/Animation/Video, Industrial Design, Landscape Architecture, the Nature Lab, RISD Museum, Sculpture, and Textiles, and the authors who submitted essays for the Collapse anthology add to this list Counseling and Psychological Services, Fleet Library, and Theory and History of Art and Design. Mark Moscone, the Director of Campus Exhibitions, co-curated and installed the exhibition with his team, and Rene Payne in Graphic Design created the exhibition signage. For us, it was a terrific privilege to work with all of them.
What do you think of the idea that the opposite of internal collapse might be connection? In the larger collapses we are witnessing and experiencing, and with the collapses that are coming, our alliances will save us. Without each other, what do we have? – Damion Vania, “Collapse and Connection,” Collapse Anthology
Field Notes
Our partners on the Horizon 2045 team set up shop in Times Square to envision a future free of nuclear threat. Amnesia Atómica in NYC.
At the investiture ceremony, President Williams was bestowed the chain of office. In our studio course Design for the Anthropocene, we’re thinking a lot about how institutions decorate themselves, and how symbolic objects carry and change their meanings through time.
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Running September 16 - December 18, 2022 at the Bell Gallery at Brown University, “this exhibition highlights artists who are or have been incarcerated alongside artists who have not been incarcerated but whose practices interrogate the carceral state.” Don’t miss the live talks on October 27 and November 2.
Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere at MIT brings together international artists “whose work prompts us to reexamine our human relationships to the planet’s biosphere through the lens of symbiosis, or ‘with living.’” It is running October 21 - February 23.
Worth Reading
What must we do to be free? On the building of Liberated Zones. Ed Whitfield’s essay is an argument for making liberated zones, large and small, to model and prototype what a better world could look like. An argument that we need to be defining what we are moving towards, not just what we are moving away from.
Interesting Links
Dracula made the trains run off schedule. For your Hallowe’en enjoyment: Bram Stoker's Dracula is a beloved horror story about secrecy, seduction, and … shipping time tables? This essay discusses the important role that time zones and trains played in the conception of Dracula and what he represents.
Cascade Failure in Identity & Community. In a massively multiplayer game, everyone is immortal. Victory in war is achieved by making your opponents not want to play anymore. This interview with a successful player introduced Tim to the idea of a Failure Cascade, where an organization falls apart because people no longer want to be seen as members of that group. It links how we understand our identities and how group identities can collapse.
Who Took the Fish from the Goddamn Water? A case study of a vital natural resource industry that was so crucial to a community's survival that it became part of the identity. And then it collapsed. Thirty years later, the fish aren't back. A survey of ideas about what, exactly, were the causes.
The Bezzle. This article describes the strange phenomenon of the period between when a fraud (or overestimation) is committed and when it is discovered. During that happy middle period, the overall wellbeing goes up because two different people consider themselves to have the same wealth. Eventually it comes crashing down. How many bezzles are we in?