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Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas

Natalie Alvarez, Claudette Lauzon, and Keren Zaiontz, Editors

This collection travels Canada, the US, the US-Mexico border, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, and Indigenous territories on Turtle Island. Essays feature Indigenous artists engaging in land-based activism and decolonial cyberactivism, grass-roots movements imagining possible futures through cross-sector alliance building, art-activists forwarding tactics of reinvention, and student groups in the throes of theatrical assembly. Artist pages, interspersed throughout the collection, serve as animated, first-person perspectives of those working on the frontlines of interventionist art. Taken together, the contributions offer a vibrant picture of emergent tactics and strategies over the past decade that allow art-activists to sustain the energy and press of political resistance in the face of a whole host of rights emergencies across the Americas.

Table of Contents

On Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: An Introduction

Natalie Alvarez, Claudette Lauzon, and Keren Zaiontz

 

INTERVIEW. Protest After Occupy: Rethinking the Repertoires of Left Activism

Micah White, Natalie Alvarez, and Keren Zaiontz

 

Performative Conduct for Precarious Times

Natalie Alvarez and Keren Zaiontz

 

PROJECT: The Great Collective Cough-In by L.M. Bogad

 

Their Dissidence Remains: Lessons from the 2011 Chilean Student Movement

Daniella Wittern Bush

 

PROJECT: Le Temps d’une Soupe by ATSA

 

Beyond the Strike: Creative Legacies of the 2012 Quebec Student Protests

Jennifer Beth Spiegel

 

PROJECT: For Freedoms by Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman

 

‘After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?’ Cartoneros and Sanmen in the Age of Financial Crises

Jimena Ortuzar

 

PROJECT: Down with Self-Management! Re-Booting Ourselves as Feminist Servers by subRosa

 

Your Trash is My Sustenance: Recycling the Image of ‘Waste Pickers’

Carla Melo

 

PROJECT: Journey for Activism and Sustainability by Escola de Ativismo

8. Sustainable Practices on the US–Mexico border: inSITE_05, Intervention, and Precarious Communities

Jennie Klein

 

PROJECT: Unstoppable by micha cárdenas, Patrisse Cullors, Chris Head and Edxie Betts

 

INTERVIEW. Art as Process in Everyday Life

Wilfredo Prieto and Zaira Zarza

 

PROJECT: Listen to Black Women by Syrus Marcus Ware

 

‘CAVCA Buries BIACI’: Activating Decolonial Tools in Cartagena de Indias

Martha Herrera-Lasso and Kimberly Skye Richards

 

PROJECT: Notes on Sustainable Tools by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, with Suné Woods

 

INTERVIEW. Performance in the Peace Process: Creating Cultural Brigades

Patricia Ariza and Beatriz Pizano

 

PROJECT: The Mirror Shield Project by Cannupa Hanska Luger

 

Pimicikimak Sovereignty: Cree Sustainability and Hydroelectric Inundation in Northern Manitoba

Jessica Jacobson-Konefall

 

PROJECT: The Human Billboard Project by Leah Decter, with Stop Violence Against Aboriginal Women Action Group

 

INTERVIEW. Already-And: The Art of Indigenous Survivance

Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Natalie Alvarez, and Keren Zaiontz