RULE 2:
theft. pilfer. loot.
SOLIDARITIES: anarchy
A conversation with: Theresa Warburton + Jorell Melendez Badillo + William C. Anderson.
Friday March 11, 2022
Watch the event below. Available until April 15, 2022.
guía para dejar un país sin techo
"Yankee Go Home" is displayed on a vehicle during a protest against U.S. mainland tourist arriving from coronavirus hot zones outside Luis Munoz Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on July 25, 2020. Xavier Garcia—Bloomberg/Getty Images
Yo nunca he robado,
ni sé robar.
Pero todos los días me levanto con una mejor
idea de cómo hacerlo.
No son muy discretos.
Los he visto cómo se llevan en los bolsillos
las líneas amarillas de la carretera. Hasta los semáforos los han
cambiado por rotondas y letreros que nombran cada municipio
como ciudad gringa.
Aunque las aceras rompen cada día
en su espera anhelada de pies que anden sin tropezar,
los scooters motorizados se encuentran
hasta debajo de las suelas de los zapatos.
Aparecen en las puertas de los condominios,
más candados en espera de su nuevo huésped
jugosas tentaciones para los vecinos
que babean al contemplar subir la renta.
Las leyes sirven como servilletas de gastrobar,
legislan como meseros desdoblados buscando una mísera propina,
mientras van sacando poco a poco cada granito de arena
para hacer un infinity pool a la orilla del mar.
Mami no quiere vender el terreno de casa.
Ya casi no hay aplausos al aterrizar.
Me dice en voz baja: ¿y si lo compra un gringo?
Agnes Sastre-Rivera
Virtual Gallery
En tiempos de pandemia
"Finca Yagrumo"
Ballesta 9 ©2o2o
“I use sampling to pay homage to artists that I love and create something new out of what they’ve created. I think art is never finished and it takes a new meaning when it connects with other people, sampling keeps art alive and relevant to a new culture.”
A sestina for a black girl who does not know how to braid hair
Your hands have no more worth than tree stumps at harvest.
Don’t sit on my porch while I make myself useful.
Braid secrets in scalps on summer days for my sisters.
Secure every strand of gossip with tight rubber bands of value.
What possessed you to ever grow your nails so long?
How can you have history without braids?
A black girl is happiest when rooted to the scalp are braids.
She dances with them whipping down her back like corn in winds of harvest.
Braiding forces our reunions to be like the shifts your mothers work, long.
I find that being surrounded by only your own is more useful.
Gives our mixed blood more value.
Solidifies your place with your race, with your sisters.
Your block is a layered cake of your sisters.
Force your lips quiet and sweet and they’ll speak when they need to practice braids.
Your hair length is the only part of you that holds value.
The tallest crop is worshipped at harvest.
So many little hands in your head. You are finally useful.
Your hair is yours, your hair is theirs, your hair is, for a black girl, long.
Tender-headed ass won’t last ’round here long.
Cut your nails and use your fists to protect yourself against your sisters.
Somehow mold those hands useful.
You hair won’t get pulled in fights if they are in braids.
Beat out the weak parts of the crops during harvest.
When they are limp and without soul they have value.
If you won’t braid or defend yourself what is your value?
Sitting on the porch until dark sweeps in needing to be invited, you’ll be needing long.
When the crop is already used what is its worth after harvest?
You’ll learn that you can’t ever trust those quick to call themselves your sisters.
They yearn for the gold that is your braids.
You hold on your shoulders a coveted item that is useful.
Your presence will someday become useful.
One day the rest of your body will stagger under the weight of its value.
Until then, sit in silence in the front with your scalp on fire from the braids.
I promise you won’t need anyone too long.
One day you will love yourself on your own, without the validation of sisters.
No longer a stump wailing for affection at harvest.
What if Biggie was just asking what was owed to him? What if that demand was ignored? What if Biggie just wanted the loot? When do materials become loot? Could loot be land that is currently being lost due to conquistador-settler colonialism? What if people want their land back? What if people just want their way of life back? What if their demands fall on deaf ears? What other choice do they have?
“Stealing away from Black film is reducing our art to merely just singular projections and documentations of our present struggles. Stealing our ability to exist in multitudes and magnitudes. Denying us from an infinity of past, presents and futures. ”
Shan Wallace
SHAN Wallace (b. 1991) is a nomadic award-winning visual artist, photographer, educator and freedom fighter from East Baltimore, MD.
Inspired by the harsh racial, social and economic realities of her surroundings in Baltimore, SHAN learned about the importance of service, the power of collaboration and the effects of social change at an early age. Now, she uses her lens, collage and in situ installations as the basis of her work, demonstrating the cultural and political narratives of black life, confronting oppressive politics and histories within communities of the African diaspora, and challenging ideas surrounding existing collections, culture and archives of Blackness. Much of SHAN Wallace's work is focused on the Archive-- its history of development, challenges of the modern Archive, Archive as Artwork and how to ethically accumulate primary source documents.
SHAN has received recognition from publications like the Baltimore Beat for 'Best Solo Show', the City Paper for 'Best Photographer', and the Association of Health Care Journalists' awarded her '2nd Place - Small Outlet Feature' for her photojournalism piece “Losing Conner’s Mind” in the Atavist Magazine. Her work has received widespread support from publications like The Daily Beast, Essence Magazine, Black Entertainment Television (BET), the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, VICE, Red Bull Amaphiko, The Charlotte Observer and The New York Times.
SHAN's work is in both public and private collections across the US. She has exhibited work internationally in galleries and museums including Okay Space Gallery in New York, NY, We Rise in Los Angeles, CA, Elsewhere museum in Greensboro, NC, the New Gallery of Modern Art in Charlotte, NC, the Mariano Arts Center in Havana, Cuba and Maryland’s the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, The Contemporary and Prince George’s African American Museum and Cultural Center.
SHAN lives and works in many spaces between Los Angeles, CA and Baltimore, MD.
Explore the artist and the work: http://blacksandblues.com/
stealing yourself, stealing away
“Liberation is a velocity rather than a state of being.”
Savannah Shange, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco, 2019.
“This was the story I was looking for while walking on perched trails, imagining the women and men who had escaped the plantations looking down on the world of bonded labor, servitude, brutality, and death. Seeing without being seen. Carving spaces of freedom in a world organized around black unfreedom; a world that proclaimed that there was no alternative to the enslavement of black women and men and that this was as natural as day and night.”
Françoise Vergès, “Politics of Marooning and Radical Disobedience” 2019.
“a dark hole
an attic space
she plots, she plans
she dreams of possibility from within impossible strictures of enclosure and confinement
her escape is immanent, as her imagination is boundless
her enclosure is an incubator for a practice of refusal and a roadmap to freedom.”
Tina M. Campt, “The Loophole of Retreat — An Invitation,” 2019.