 Alright, I think I'm going to get started for the sake of time, you know, I've got 90 minutes but I could probably skip through some sections. Some of the content that I'm going to be covering, some of it will be things you may have seen already, like with the shooting Columbus project, I'm going to reference that, maybe just do cursory kind of overviews of some of those that included that in the sales procession. So thanks for coming out as people are coming in. I'm going to just be showing a bunch of images and media. I'll be doing a lot of stories too and I'll keep it pretty conversational. The meat of my talk is having to do with creating art or art as creative resistance. So I'm going to be looking at a lot of case studies. I'm also going to be talking about my personal history and my family story as well, just to give some context about me being a Tucsonan and growing up with the family and the dynamic that I have with regard to that. I want to give just a brief cautionary discretion statement. Some of the media and content I'm going to show is going to be kind of triggering possibly, so just giving a warning that there's going to be images of incarceration, death, and extreme performance art involving hooks and blood and other bodily fluids. So just give me a heads up and be patient and bear with me as I get through this. To start though, I think I'm going to, I want to read a text that kind of like maybe states and gives context to what I'm talking about today. So here we go. This is a declaration of war. This is a declaration of art war. Everything must be questioned always. We demand a new vision of the world. We demand a world of free expression, one free of exploitative, oppressive and repressive systems of control. We demand a world whose rules are worth following. We demand a world of constant creativity to replace that of cultural stagnancy in which we live. We demand art war. It's tempting to start by saying that there comes a time when everything must be questioned, but that wouldn't be true. Everything must be questioned always. So we must always ask, we must also ask ourselves exactly what should be questioned and how. The same questions remain no matter what we address. Is it repressive? If so, how and why? What to do with it? Luckily there's always one good place to start. Art helps us find the boundaries of thought. By exposing the limits of the thinkable and sayable art also allows us to identify the restrictions under which we live. These restrictions are ideological centers, dominant norms, thought regimes. They are abstract systems of control that structure our material world. What art shows us is what people can and cannot say. What is considered deviant to explore the limits of ideology is to explore degrees of deviance from the so-called normal. Deviance changes over time and space, yet deviance itself remains constant. What is considered deviant is exactly that which an ideology cannot tolerate. Figure out deviance to gain better understanding of an ideology's fundamental assumptions and worldview. Once discerned, it can be addressed and undone. Deviance connects with radicalism, which we define as thinking the unthinkable and saying the unsayable. While the thinking must come first, it means little without saying. Since this affects others, it requires deep contemplation and introspection. There must be clear direction, purpose, intent, and practicing any kind of radical transformative action. This is especially important with magic, which we define as willful creative manifestation. Magical manifestation, through whatever means or methods, demands a clear sense of what you are doing. You must consider intent and other potential outcomes. You must be both conscious and conscientious. Magic is not another randomly and prestige postmodern toy. It requires discernment and judgment. It requires responsibility. The shallow arguments of anything goes, holds no weight in magic. Art is a magical space. It manifests. It creates what was not there before. It imparts new meaning into new things. Even if meanings reach beyond artist control, as always happens, art remains the ultimate human creation. So art is one of the first places that we should look for the boundaries of the thinkable and the sale. It is the restriction of art, no matter which sort of law comes from that shows what ideology can and cannot tolerate. It is the magician's imperative to test the limits of the thinkable. If the artist is imperative to test the limits of the sale, the magical artist lives in the edges of totalitarian tolerances because aesthetics are and always have been the edges of our expressive possibilities. Art has always served to stretch the sale. Art and magic share the powers of creation. More importantly, they share the power of manifestation. The most skilled magicians, the most creative creators, the greatest artists, will attempt to account for the reality that things are not always as they seem. All radical work is a challenge to the normal. This is why resistance is eternal. There will always be a center that excludes the margins. Our mandate is to break the boundaries between included and excluded. To puncture and draw those boundaries outward so they can include new ideas, new ways of thinking, new ways of seeing, and new ways of being. We are not attempting to establish a new system of control. We are calling for a new vision of freedom. One that is more thoughtful, reflective, reflexive, and authentic than what we currently have. A total rethinking that completely disregards existing boundaries between people and ideas. We intend to pull a coercive rationality up from the roots. More sex, more fun, less repression, less compliance, liberation over servitude. This is a culture of harm. There is a culture of harm that sickens our earth. Harm is causing others to suffer. Suffering is undue stress caused by circumstances beyond one's control. We all desire and deserve the right to live our lives unimpeded by anything, but none of us have the right to create a warrant of harm and suffering in others. This leads to a crucial distation. As creative manifestations, radical thought, magical practice, and other forms of unbridled creativity have no problem with causing distress. Distress is the precursor to change. Yet only impoverished manifestations distress others simply to aggrandize the self. This is bad magic. The richest manifestations get others to willfully willingly give up themselves. Exploitation is a negative force when it serves to subjugate other people, but it is also possible to see exploitation as a productive force, something that gives license for taking advantage of the world around us, however we see fit. Some situations of people not only deserve, but they have to be taken advantage of. We have no problem with taking that which other people don't seem to want. People whose ignorance, apathy, or inaction support mindless, ideological regimes will be the first casualties of hard war. The best way to start this war is not with externally directed physical violence. The best way to start this war is to interrogate from within, to question ourselves before questioning others so that we may have a better stance for understanding productive exploitation, directed magic, and other creative manifestations that enact the world we want to see, not the world we are told to see. I talk about my family, and I'm glad my brother's here in the audience. I'm the middle one of three brothers. Jacob, Abraham, my eldest brother, and myself. We're all very creative people. I'm honored to say that I have a lot of love for my brothers, and we're all very close and support each other. And a lot of our work, being musicians, writers, and performers and artists, come from a family of a mixed family. My mother, she's originally from Sonora, Mexico. Es de Batuc, a small little Yaqui village that doesn't exist anymore. And the connection with my mother's family is the Tehran family. This is why I adopted the name Cooper Tehran and started using that as a kind of respect to my mother and that lineage, and also as a way of connecting to my roots being Yaqui and Mexican. My mom's story is very interesting as well. The village that she came from, it doesn't exist anymore because there was a whole story around a dam that was built that ended up flooding her village along with two others that was part of the Yaqui River Valley, kind of near three hours east of El Mocillo. And I'm going to show a brief video, kind of summarizing that. It was a village that was built in 1629 by the Pesimites. My grandfather, my grandfather, my grandfather, all of them were originally from Batu. But we lived forced to leave the village because the government was going to build a dam, the dam of my child. The dam was built in 1964. So we left Batu in 1959. The water started to rise, it opened up the dam's pockets, like in the 60s, I think, in the 60s, because we went to El Mocillo, and we heard the news of Batu that the water was already rising, it was rising a little bit, maybe 10 meters up. I don't know how many centimeters, but it was constantly rising. My father was a hotelant, a man of people, but of liberal ideas, intelligent and different from the people of the village. He was an anti-government and anti-religionist, an impassable worker, and with impassable ideas. Batu was a big village, and he was like Andrés, he was the one who built the dam, he was going to build the dams. He was going to build the dams. He built a lot of dams that later became impassable, impassable. A lot of things, very incredible. Aunt Rosa, free like the wind, without natures, simple and genuine, he liked the life of the people, smoking and talking about the most novel news. I mean, it was from the old times, and my aunt Rosa was from Nacac, in February of the city. She had moved to two different places in the town. They said that my aunt and she went and lived in the house of my parents. And then from there, because the water was spicy, my aunt, she moved to different houses and they were empty by that time. They didn't think like about seven or eight more years there. Some people used to say that my aunt was living in the shore at one time. She lived there until my uncle got very, very sick. So she had to put him in one house because they never seen him. She was forced to go and live in a city about 18 years old, but all my family went there and the water was down completely. And this snow, the square that was there is nothing like that anymore. My mother and my father, they were trying to find a place where they used to live in every house because they were adobe houses. They were only like little mountains or... So that time when they grew up, the fathers, the mothers, the grandparents, they didn't exist no more. That was completely destroyed that they were older people that they lived there forever. They were born there, they married there, they get older there and they were really attached to the town. I mean they were... if you lived there, they were like longer but that was more like... they get sad, you know. They get sad just before they die and they're out of no place that they lived all their lives. And that was from one day to the other they come down the water and came from Mexico City and nobody, nobody that lives down the water in Mexico City, nobody knew the town that they didn't even knew the town. They never went, they were there. Only they said, oh, we need to down here in that part and that would be a nice place. So we get to, we get to destroy these three towns but to the people as well. My mom ended up growing up mostly in El Maseo with her family and through some interesting circumstances visiting family in New Mexico she ended up meeting my dad. He was a Russian Jew from South Philly as he always liked to describe himself. He moved west, got romantically connected to the west and oddly reading Carlos Castaneda and discovering that, those books which I don't like that much. But he ended up moving west, met my mom they didn't know each other's languages through two years of courtship they ended up learning enough to be able to connect, got married and settled in Tucson because it's the nearest town they didn't want to live in Nogales because it was just the closer bigger city to El Maseo which is where most of my family was based. We grew up here in Tucson my parents settled here and that was probably in like 1980, early 80s and in 84, mom had a braum and that had me in 85 and when I was nine months old in 1986 our family kind of came into a strange set of circumstances where my dad was wrongfully arrested for being Tucson's prime time rapist. There was a strange set of circumstances involving misidentification through fingerprinting and through evidence that was found at various sites where the suspect had been committing like 30 acts of rape between 1984 and 1986 a lot of pressure was brought on by the community to arrest the suspect and through misidentification my father became a suspect they arrested him this footage was broadcast the night of his arrest so his name and his identity was put out pretty immediately and it led to us well, for him, they kept him for like 17 hours and interrogated him and ultimately after that amount of time they discovered or realized that he wasn't the person after doing further DNA testing on him all of this subject without a lawyer present and denying him is right to a lawyer as well but it was definitely fueled by which that was very present in Tucson at the time that was brought on by a lot of different communities around town were afflicted and pressure was put on the Sheriff's Department and the Tucson Police Department and so their task force ended up trying to find suspects and they had a very interesting way of wanting to find a suspect interrogate them and try to get a confession out of them pretty much like a witch hunt so we were kicked out of our home dad lost his jobs he ended up getting PTSD, diabetes and other health problems that kind of afflicted him for the rest of his life it ended in a civil suit ultimately between my dad and the City of Tucson Police Department and the Sheriff's Department what financial gain came out of it was enough to just invest in the house which is where we grew up and dad continued to have growing up with the father with PTSD and chronic pain and illness led to a lot of complications late into his life he ended up becoming addicted to painkillers through the VA hospital system and ended up ultimately getting cancer and he ended up dying in 2013 after a lot of years of fighting his addiction and then during the last year of his life he actually wanted to kick his habit but that was when his cancer was hidden he was very stubborn too he never wanted to go and get to test done and find out if he had something but he always complained about pain in his stomach and ultimately when he got off and was clean it was sort of like when the cancer emerged and he went in at the beginning of January 2013 and after three weeks he had died and it was his death that kind of spurred on a lot of things within me at the time I mean I was 26, 27 I'm 33 now but as a 27 year old being an artist as well and being a creative person it affected a lot of how I wanted to express myself how I wanted to deal with the grief I didn't really have a lot of tools or structure in place or expertise or wisdom in dealing with his death a lot of rage and anger emerged from that a lot of blame and pointing fingers blaming the justice system blaming the people that arrested him the medical system and I blame myself too for not really knowing more about the complications surrounding this very complicated person who growing up with was very volatile and someone to be feared but then at the end of his life and as an adult I found a lot of friendship with my father and a lot of positive outcomes came out of these conversations we would have towards the end of his life so I chose as of my interest at the time I mean I would say that art saved me from processing his death and the grief of his passing and a lot of that was like tapping into a lot of years of experience trying to work in collaborative spaces with other artists and art was a cure and art is a healer and because art is also magic and my focus and interest in the occult and ritual and ceremony there was a lot of room to explore other realms with spirit and with regard to his spirit in processing his death and a lot of work was inspired by that there were a lot of performances and actions and physical ephemera that I was collecting and creating work around him and who he was and trying to understand what that all meant and there's still more work to be done me and my brother keep talking about this project that we're still doing about Dad and how it's meant to address a lot of injustices and then for me it's also trying to address a lot of issues with my dad being a problematic person growing up with someone who instilled a lot of toxic masculinity too and who wasn't a viewser in his own right that's all work that's developing still but being able to tap into this knowledge or this kind of space of using art as sort of the medium to heal it comes from a long history of being a teenager growing up in Tucson stumbling into different spaces me and my brother would like wander around downtown as teenagers and just stumble into a gallery and just look at spaces that were very creative and we were attracted to just happenings that would occur that was kind of how we met Flam Chen that's how we discovered the all souls procession we sort of stumbled into it we had no idea that this thing existed being involved with the all souls procession led to working with the ancestors project obviously my work around the ancestors project has been its own space to heal especially around dad's passing and it comes me and my brother often talk a lot about what it means to like tap into this sort of creative space this energy that is very much it's like pure like when we were young we always like arc and back to talk about when we were younger and that there's this creative energy that is on tap that is sort of like primal and raw and how to use that shape that into like any of the body of work that we're doing now and being involved with such public spaces like with procession and with the ancestors project it's been interesting to just see how it's like the technical expertise and skills that have been developed being through all of these kinds of events have led to like seeing how like the raw motion of the real human connection of how people engage the event and especially when they like honor their dad and the way that I've honored my father through the event itself and how that became like a holding space for healing and it doesn't have to be in that spectacle either but being able to share that and put it in a public space I think the vulnerability as an artist and a creative person to put out that kind of work and to be that vulnerable in front of people makes a lot of room for transformation and healing especially if it's coming at that time or around dad's death it's like coming from a place of anger and like wanting to fuck some system up but don't really know what it is but to reflect on just his spirit and his life and showing that publicly I think it's important but yeah my interest in these other kinds of spaces that I've been exploring mostly since like 2008, 2007 really like hit home and like seeking something specific or systems of knowledge that are more esoteric and kind of mystical or not really like cater into a specific religious ideology and we grew up very irreligious in our household we didn't really go to church my mom and my dad both had their own views about their respective faiths and so they were very much like just open we didn't really practice anything but there was a lot of room for spirit and a lot of spirituality that both my parents expressed and felt but for myself growing up I didn't really know how to express those things or what that information was I was tapping into until I came upon I moved out of Tucson I lived in the Bay Area I started exploring I came upon a torrent file if anybody knows what torrents are Piratey or Pirate Bay or any of that stuff there's a torrent that exists it might still be out there but it's called the occult carrot and it was like some guy that I met in the Bay Area who was just like check out the occult carrot looked it up and it was this file that just had hundreds of texts compiled from all of these different esoteric people occultists and people that were dabbling in mysticism and writing like radical texts and presenting alternative views of like what reality is and some of that went into spaces of exploring like sensory deprivation or the idea of psychonotting which is this concept of like exploring your inner landscapes and then at that time too it was really important to like other kinds of music and exploring transinducing music and extreme music too like things that brain synchronization sounds and entrainment and getting into drone music heavily and noise music and music that would create or affect a sense of gnosis which is like this concept of going into these altered states either through hyperactive or sensory deprivation kind of exercises and then within all of that stuff too I was discovering this concept of like the alchemy of the body and how the body is as a canvas can be used within a medium to create art and how the body is sort of like its own battleground as well with exploring and getting into like the tensions and complications of identity of your own history but with that there was like a very physical element to that and the elemental nature of that was this notion of like capturing and scanning fluids and it was very much inspired by some of the other work that I'll reference later but so like spitting on glass with mucus and then scanning that like seeing what that would look like at a really high resolution getting extractive blood from myself and mixing other types of mediums with that keeping a record of these two in different like kind of gnostic states or states of sensory deprivation or hyper in spaces where it's just like the feelings of putting you into these other states capturing that in some way and it was like through the fluids and through the scanning of that those then became like elemental mediums or samples or ingredients that would then be used for like other work and being a digital artist as well was sort of like again utilizing this technology in a way in this magical way and looking at a scanner sort of like its own portal to like these other spaces and the idea of like the micro can become the macro and that these things that are of the body are like their own dimensions and galaxies and portals into other landscapes that given the context or the space or the attention of the time that they're being captured have all this energy and then and so it became a process of continuously kind of like destroying my ego and then trying to rebuild it up again and then trying to find other ways to do it through capturing the fluids and capturing the essence of my being and being able to record that in a way but then with that too was like the notion of using and being very inspired by the work of this artist Austin Osmond Spear it was like a a draftsman and a magician from like the late 1800s early 1900s London he developed this concept called sigil magic which is this idea of like writing out phrases of intention or words of power and then synthesizing them into a symbol and that symbol becomes like a magical device that could be used the idea is you want to destroy that or forget about the symbol or forget about like what the words mean and that's supposed to imbue you with the power of what you're writing so being an artist and someone who really grew up drawing too there was this idea this profound space of influence of using artistic practices but in this very psychonotic way this very psychic way and using them in a way where they're hidden their spaces where the symbols are all there nobody else needs to know what they are what they mean but that they became kind of a practice that I've been using I use it all of my work now even with any of the visual work I do any of the video work I do even in shooting Columbus there were spaces where sigil magic was explored in some way shape or form and then speaking to that too is like how that kind of inspired influence working with other people in that context and being able to be in community spaces with other collectives and other artists and how those my information that I was getting was informing information working with others like vet of obala is a good example vet of obala is like a binational performance group that started in 2007 between myself and Logan Phillips he was a dj dirty if you went to the congress last night he was the dj that dj is at El Tambo one of them but he started as a spoken word poet and toward all over the country met me we started doing this thing this concept called spoken video and it was this notion of kind of combining videos poetry live music and performance to create work that at the time it was a lot of his own writings and body of work was concerning the border lands being someone who grew up on the border lands or on the border is male identified and white but then got very immersed in Mexico and Spanish and got involved with a lot of the politics regarding the US and Mexico he wrote a lot and a lot of those pieces became sort of the basis for a lot of the work we were doing and we collaborated with artists in Mexico City and Flagstaff and the Bay Area and Canada and this collective was very much about site specificity and also utilizing media in a variety of ways that it in of itself was kind of literally and figuratively were like crossing borders were breaking down about ideas around like just what people might perceive as performance art or what they might perceive as a video or what they might perceive as sound art and bringing them all together in a very kind of intentional way especially in a way that that addresses the political nature of where we're from the other work that I've done too has led me to meeting folks like David Sherman he's part of a venue space here in town called Exploded View Microsinema and we developed a project with a collective of other artists which is a mon photographer and media artist and Heather Gray called Sight Map and it was about challenging and using psychogeography in a way with media to create interventions and political actions that work led to a variety of different like interventions that we did in Tucson which I'll show in a moment then the work with Denise Yohada was also she was one of the co-creators of the Shooting Columbus project working with her over many years since 2007 led to projects involving video and performance art live painting addressing issues regarding migrants and undocumented people undocumented voices working with PanLeft as well. PanLeft Media is a really cool organization based out of the Global Justice Center which is like a really awesome community space it's like all of the like the joke that it's like all of the rabble-rousers of Tucson are kind of like all based in this one building so you have like the Edges Manos you have what is the other one the Indigenous Alliance used to be there you have PanLeft you have like a number of different groups of people together working in resistance to the powers that be and meeting Denise and working with her led to other projects like Shooting Columbus as well and those are all just reiterating to like projects that were site-specific that had a lot to do with the nature of where we're from looking at the resistance of these stories with the people that are telling them and who was telling them by us going out and finding those voices or connecting to those voices and sharing in those voices and those stories all led to creating work that was very much in the spirit of resistance and highlighting what the resistance is in a very tactful way I'm always trying to stress what's the sincerest way that we're doing this and not trying to impose a template over any of these stories and then another work too is involved my involvement with the Church of Cuyol which I'll talk more about later but that's kind of like more strange stuff but as far as creating work that is in resistance is the notion of what the public spectacle aspect of that is and how do you make things that can be resistance and private exposed and out and the notion of spectacle going big and going hard is kind of like this idea that we implemented with PsychMap when in January 20th 2016 2017 I'm sorry on that day we had an action where we just the studio that exploded was at from the city court building or the county court building and we just got a projector and boldly just projected a bunch of text and just text on the building made an impression it was very bold and simple there wasn't anything there were other elements to it but yeah we had like a bunch of projectors set up in this space projecting a number of different things and also playing a lot of different sounds addressing the state of things for that day for what has been since then and the idea with PsychMap specifically it was very much this project born out of bringing together all of these different artists that are coming out of media but then also weaving together spaces where ephemeral technologically mediated actions could occur so they're pop-ups they only happen one time or on a very specific day and they're not meant to be the archive is just the documentation that's how it works it's that's how we know that it happened some of the other work that was projected that night too was also going into like my animated work and the idea of like sampling and what sample culture is all about for me and my work as a digital artist goes into this space of constantly referencing photos and finding photos online and creating like massive montages that end up being animated in time and the idea of being able to animate the cabal, this cabal of like evil who I consider like evil horrendous people became like one of the images that was projected on the building that night and then it's been used for other types of live public space performances and stuff but the notion of of using media, sampling it copying stuff and even like stealing stuff like because I'm a pirate too I taught myself how to use all this technology I was very much into DIY I didn't go to school for any of this I'm a college dropout and the only way that I knew how to learn anything was when I got into computers when I got into building my own computers when I got into the internet and what piracy was it was so easy especially like going with the VEVOLLA project everybody in Mexico City only pirated that was sort of like the way that you got anything because it was either too expensive or too much of a hassle to try to legitimately pay for a license like for Adobe so a lot of the first years of like teaching myself any of this media or any of this skill set solely came from pirated stock black software and now it's a little bit different with the spaces that I've been working in there's definitely more like I have a license that I pay for now or that many mouse ones don't I pay for and it's kind of an interesting thing like shifting from that to like being like more legit but it's a strange space too because it was always like growing up you have these layers of kind of boundaries of like well you have to go to school to learn this stuff where you have to buy if to spend like hundreds of dollars for this software and it's like well how hard is it to get the software that's why there were all these questions as a teenager I was asking and then I was like oh there's a way you can like crack something or you can download this thing that a hacker made and unlock the program and now the program is yours and I didn't have to pay for it I just had to download it and I felt like that consistently influenced a lot of the way that I work too like I don't put it I know there's an inherent copyright in anything that I do but I never claim copyright because I don't care if people steal my shit and like want to reproduce it I take honor in that I think that is flattering whenever those situations have ever happened because I don't claim ownership with this work either because it is so heavily sampled and referential to other things around me it's more like my skill set and the spirit of how I work is what defines me and the work itself is sort of it's like a byproduct of the intention behind creating any of it there's just some footage from another intervention that I did with psychmat on December 19th 2015 there was a a national day of protest or a worldwide day of protest that was organized by ad-husters called it D-19 and that day also happened to fall on the holiday parade that happens every year in Tucson the holiday parade is like a very quaint nice Christmas parade that goes down one of the main drags of downtown Tucson Downstone and ends at the park near Armory Park where the procession of little angels will be tonight we wanted to intervene the space by building a cart that we could project two projectors on to any of the buildings we were going through and put a sound system on I was playing a bunch of yaki drumming beats and noise music by sampling from Raven Chicom from Post Commodity it was another native indigenous performer out of New Mexico an amazing installation artist and musician in his own right but it was this idea of mashing these sounds together jumping into the parade we had to like get a permit to be in the parade but we just kind of like got into a point where we just jumped in and everyone thought we were in the parade it was like another flow and so some of the projections were some of those images of the text that you saw earlier there were photos of some of the original homes that were in that block which is called body viejo it's like one of the oldest bodyos in downtown in Tucson bodyo stories we'll probably talk about that tomorrow for the other panel that I'm going to be in tomorrow but that bodyo was a level pretty much to build a Tucson Convention Center and how homes of all these Mexican American communities and families were pretty much just ousted because yeah the city of Tucson wanted to build the convention center and they basically stopped cleaning the streets and basically made it so none of the trash companies would pick up in the streets so trash collected and then they basically condemned the neighborhood and then that was the excuse to level it so showing photos of what was in that space before sort of like this other impression of what psychogeography is like the idea of you have multiple layers or multiple discrees going on at once because the past isn't just like before I believe like time kind of is always happening like the past is always happening on top of the present on top of the future and the spaces that we get into to express that I feel like technology is sort of the middle ground or the mediator for that to allow an impression or a window to open to perceive time in different ways and to recontextualize buildings or spaces that people are physically walking through on the regular we were also kind of like not into the Christmas spirit so we were showing a lot of like footage of Chinese factories like making mass producing toys and showed stuff from some pagan festivals like the Krampus festivals that they have in Europe and showing a lot of other pagan imagery up at the Masonic Temple where we ended up setting up and basically just projected on that building for the rest of the night but what was interesting is that our sound did like get on people's nerves there were families that came up and told us to like turn it down and then some folks were really offended by the pagan imagery that we were showing the more Christian kind of folk so it was an interesting engagement this was kind of like the most direct in your face that like this like map collective project was about and jumping into a public space and just sort of taking it over using video and media and sound without trying to be didactic but then ultimately that work sort of informed the public spectacle in nature of what body of stories is what has become the body of stories project who's going to the fiesta tonight? cool, yeah it's sweet so the garden that you're going to it's a community garden that is kind of like maintained by the elementary school that's across the street from it that became such a magical space for the event that we had in that neighborhood Barrio Anita that neighborhood is very different from Barrio Viejo Barrio Anita is a still it's an historic neighborhood it's on the registry of like historic spaces or places in the country just because of the architecture dates back to over 100 years and you have a lineage of history of many many families who first settled in Tucson or Mexican American families who were here before Tucson and became Tucson coming in and living in this neighborhood so it's protected in a sense it's never going to be gentrified it's never going to be torn down but there's there's sort of like a lot of sad history with the neighborhood too because during the 70s and 80s there was a lot of gangs in the neighborhood a lot of territory between different gangs was established it was dangerous to be in the neighborhood a lot of kids that were growing up in the 50s and 60s some of them got into gangs some of them got into drugs one of the beautiful takeaways though from that project was just the whole notion of the resistance to the gang culture and drugs and violence and how the resiliency of the neighborhood comes through and it was a lot of it was represented with the community center which is a community center next to the elementary school our center became kind of like the safe space for all of these kids to go to since like the 40s is when it was built maybe even in the 30s it was built they had a lot of sports programs through there there was a lot of counselors and coaches that ended up mentoring a lot of the kids and some of the videos or interviews that we did that you might see tonight addresses that like just how important our center is and still is today with regard to having the space for young people to go to but the name of the place the our center it's also really funny too because Barrio Anita project what we did with Barrio stories we got caught up kind of in the history of our center what does our refer to our center is named after William Owry who was one of the first mirrors of Tucson and also his claim to fame is being responsible for the massacre of hieroglyph patches that happened at Camp Grant back in the late 1800s this guy basically rallied a bunch of Mexicans and and other natives on Auckland as well and some friends together and they ended up raiding this camp that was not too far from Camp Grant so there was this like notion of how to address that and push back too because so many of the residents and people that live there in Barrio Anita they're very much they love the name that's how they grew up like knowing that name or in this history or even if they didn't know the history the name still meant a lot to them but to present the history in this kind of flip way was sort of really important to show like the other side of it so there was an animation or video that we did make that was made in collaboration with some of the residents of the neighborhood like these two younger kids who we had some sessions they kind of like scripted it or did this the storyboarding of it and through like our collective efforts we put together this animation County, Clark first president of the Arizona Pioneer Historical Society and reading leader of the Camp Grant Massacre but Bill already had an interesting life even before he got to Tixaw he was born in Virginia in August 1817 at 16 he came to Texas looking for adventures he was at the Alamo in 1836 but was sent on an errand just before the famous battle started so he missed it Billy was still looking for a good fight he joined the Texas Rangers in the Texas Rangers he got to shoot Comarities in his main dog one of those times was at the Battle of Plum Creek the Battle of Plum Creek actually started March 8, 1840 in San Antonio Comarities underwives had come to make a peace treaty but the Texas shoulders killed most of them there was one chief still alive Chief Buffalo Hump he led a raid in prevent against the Texas whole killed all his friends Buffalo Hump and his men stole a lot of horses and killed some of the white people and their slaves along the way and the rest of the Texas Rangers found Buffalo Hump they killed 80 Comarities but Buffalo Hump got away by 1849 Billy Ford and his new Mexican wife ran off to California to strike each race as 49ers but he didn't find any gold he shot YouTube on the way home I'm Sam Q here see what's been P.K. suffered and Don was working in British S. Town and merchants on the land that been the home of Apache for hundreds of years they taught Billy that when the cowl fled but Cochie would raid their raptures so on April 30 1871 they'll let a vigilante group of about 140 Anglo-Mexican and the home of Aham meant to pound about 50 miles north of Tucson this was where the Apache had surrendered as prisoners of war starving and tired the Apache had turned in their guns to the U.S. Army months or more a different man of Apache had allegedly attacked the Spanish mission and stolen a few weeks earlier but the at Alipha where the Spanish sold out was who bore at his men attack to the pinealive historical society they were going to sell not a single man of our company was hurt to mark a full measure of our triumph an Apache and Alipha Apache murdered just before dawn as they slept men of them were women and children among the children that didn't get killed were sold as slaves in Mexico or given to rich families in Tucson to work as servants the night before that Alipha men had given a dance to celebrate months of peace with U.S. Army Sherman Pearly and Apache who survived the attack said massacre was found not guilty men they named streets schools, neighborhoods and buildings like the Oral Center after themselves there's past and the people forgot who the names of these buildings belong to and what they had when we already died at Tucson in two truck hours we showed live in the space in front of the hour center and it was just a conversation because there had been people in the neighborhood who do want to change the name of the hour center there are others who don't but it's just a conversation stuff obviously with the work with border lines led to and working with Denise and Rachel led to working on the street columbus project which you most of you have seen last night and working with T and Ryan and addressing indigenous resistance through the media through the storytelling through these interviews that we gathered over many years the project itself took five years in the making three of those years we're just figuring out our process and figuring out how to represent any of these voices and thankfully because Ryan was a beautiful amazing performer and very passionate about his story his representation in the piece and how he functions within that became a very critical figure and metaphor for what type of story we're trying to tell with that yeah the process of working with different communities like the Yaqui community addressing their water issues going to Tanahautam reservation meeting another performer who worked on the actual show Matthew was an amazing performer too he was getting into theater studies he was a student of Rachel's in ASU grew up on the Reds but this is in the Tanahautam Nation out by South grew up out there but ended up moving to Casa Grande and was going to school at ASU all over the place but he was a very amazing contact going with him to the border and literally like he literally walked me to the border like this is us we're already in the Reds but he like pulls off on a dirt road it's a little more than what we thought it's a fence but I know that we have a block are protected and wanted to like you know in and out but even then it's still constantly washed over like I said there's people living on the other side but some are not referred to as citizens but they're still all the people they're still part of the people we used to cover all this land far with the outside of Mexico all the way to the Phoenix Tucson when the government came that's when they ran a borderline straight through a reservation and they're trying to tell us to come on this side if we want to be recognized as U.S. citizens but we set it up in a very safe way wherever we are and because of that we now have people on the U.S. I don't know because of that we're not abandoning them we're not disowning them and that's when it's about to stay united stay home God having the borderline come through us and we better stop this it's not going to find where our land ends we share with the Mexicans you know other indigenous tribes people who are different from other ethnicities cultures it's not just ours it's everyone's but now it's just people being divided and saying this is us in that step no, it wasn't it'll always be not just us all but other indigenous that was the border and because it cuts through the reservation they're not allowed to build a wall or anything and there's all this conflict going on right now with the Taunautum tribe and the U.S. government current president wanting to build a wall and they're like just come and try it you're not going to build on this it's a nation it's their own isolated or separate nation but what's sad is that the border this arbitrary line cuts right through their ancestral land it's bizarre like the Taunautum tribe itself is like the second largest tribe in Arizona and as far as space and area they take up their second to the Taunautum and they're often not really looked at or talked about as much but it's huge huge like this component with the shooting Columbus project was very much like what kind of rooted it to doing it here and being able to acknowledge and recognize those voices too I'm just going to kind of see through some parts because that's me flipping up people I'd call mine this is me during a sound resistance protesting at the San Francisco peaks and Flagstaff doing a shooting Columbus project kind of radicalized me with a lot of these anarchists indigenous native groups based out of Flagstaff and out of Phoenix but yeah we participated right in a protest I wanted to come with the sound so it just like did sound more basically and had a mic so that people could be protesting or making their voices heard louder the San Francisco peaks is one of the holy peaks of the the Denay tribe it's one of four holy peaks or holy mountains that kind of establishes what's Benetta it's like the Navajo Nation and the San Francisco peaks they're right outside of Flagstaff they have a ski resort up there well because of climate change and changing weather and everything it doesn't snow like it used to up there so a company actually blasts them out with fake snow that's from recycled sewage and it's basically like shitting on their temple or their church kind of like how they await that so getting radicalized into the work that we were doing um West Union Columbus led to engaging really fully these different spaces of resistance and connecting in a way that I felt was like my way to bring it I'm coming from southern Arizona going up to Flagstaff to protest that's like what is my position in that space what am I supposed to be doing what is the respect and care and the agreements that our group is making wants to get arrested, who's okay to get arrested what are we doing if the cops show up what is your role in all this and I took it to be I want to be in a space of support but then also be a surveillance so I have cameras all over me GoPro connected to my head and holding two different phones and the sound device that was my way or my tactic that was sort of like I'm going to bring a skill set of what I know how to do um the work with Logan Phillips and then voila again that led to doing a project called Sonoran Strange it was kind of like looking at the whole kind of complicated history of the Borderlands and the Sonoran Desert we ended up building this structure um that was like a huge orb that we projected both onto on both sides of and we perform inside of it outside of it and around it um all of the synthesis of like sort of the ceremony ritual magic using video and sound live mixing all of that all those elements um was sort of um using this vessel or this structure as kind of like um an engine for transforming the space and how people engage that depending on the spaces that we presented in um became very poignant insight specific um so we performed this all around the Southwest to taking it to Ato, Albuquerque uh San Francisco uh Douglas uh Phoenix uh Bisbee Tucson and um and and so this became sort of for many years from like 2012 to 2015 or so 16 I would say was the last time we performed it um it the mobility and the versatility of using of using all of these kinds of materials and tech to be able to move something and make it pop up anywhere I think was kind of like the strongest point or power of that particular project and to contextualize like what is this area that we call the Sonoran Desert and what does it mean when we're addressing any of these issues and histories through this installation piece um there was another project that involved uh how many of you like went up Tumamuk Hill or know about Tumamuk? It's like not the A mountain it's the one that's the taller one next to it it's uh you could hike up it after 5pm every day um 5 till 7 in the morning I think is it's open to the public um during the day though it's a science center it's a laboratory that's based up there a desert laboratory that was built in the early 1900s and then I did a project built around that I don't know if I have enough time to go into it too because there's a lot of things that we were addressing with that that kind of is a longer story but um there was an artist that was like making all these placards um kind of informing people about the hill and the animals that are on the hill and then I got into like remixing that stuff too um yeah that thing with Tumamuk though uh like taking over the hill kind of um we were wanting to do a project up there the desert laboratory and the U of A they didn't really want us or they never acknowledged an application that we submitted for an arts initiative that they had to invite artists to work up there or do projects up there so it was like a year and a half process of like not communicating or getting any feedback from them and then we finally just screwed we're just gonna like set up a gurney and a battery and go up the hill and project onto the hill uh again projecting sigils and then there was a a poet piece that we did basically asking like uh because we were addressing really the history of the desert lab and what the desert lab represents it's a historic big deal lab for botany and for southwestern botanical uh sciences for desert plants and it kind of like started the whole science of uh studying botany in in the southwest established by Carnegie Andrew Carnegie and what was funny about him is that if you look up the Latin name for saguaro it's actually um it's named after him like Carnegie um whatever it's like one of the in the Latin word Carnegie is in that and it's because he funded and started the desert lab so it made all these breakthroughs in the science of botany and our thing was like well who gets to like why is this science being acknowledged and honored but then there's all of this other history of thousands of years of history of all this other knowledge and indigenous knowledge that has existed and it's it was a very complicated process and project to get involved in but it was kind of like our way of sort of staging um a creative space to do that and address some of these questions that we were asking um I don't know how much time I have how much time do I have? eight minutes yeah I can get into like the heavier stuff I've been involved in with uh working with uh Stephen Johnson Lava and the church of coyote uh any of you that are staying through tomorrow check out the mocha I have a show there right now I'm in a group show which is what I was kind of wanting to cover was the work that I do with Stephen Johnson Lava he's a Mescalero Apache also a priest from the church of Satan who I met in San Francisco in 2010 we developed a lot of work around the food war specifically Monsanto did a whole series of performances around GMOs we made like death curse altars that we allowed the public to participate in with an iteration of that is in the mocha museum if you want to go there it's open through Sunday and there's an installation of a lot of the work that we were doing and media that we were building around that time including like an altar that you could put your curses in if you want um yeah so to bring it all back to how does my art or how does anybody's art address resistance and how does one of the things that I often got like conflicted with is like working with a lot of activist communities and activist groups and it was always hard to find people that were using art in an activist kind of way and in a radical kind of way or trying to challenge the notions of how to present yourself in different spaces if you are in resistance to something and we're all in resistance to something I feel like to acknowledge one's own history and look at your roots and kind of like go deep within that's sort of the basis of the foundation for resistance once you start realizing how you fit into this world and into these communities that we're all inhabiting and then if you're an artist and working through art there's this opportunity to really get into using your talents using your skill sets but in collaboration too with other people to be able to create really meaningful statements or really address meaningful stories or address topics that I don't think are easy to explain like in a very didactic way or it's like if I'm just standing up here and telling you a story this is a sensual somatic experience of experiencing somebody else's art and somebody else's vulnerability in a creative way I think that leads to so much more healing and so much more transformation yeah so I mean with that there's so many questions that I end up keep asking with regards to any of this work like again it's like some of the A's that you were mentioning are the same A's that I was mentioning it's like who's the audience but who's also the target of wanting to age and I think in that it might seem like aggressive but I also feel like it's a necessary skill and a tool to use as an artist and to not deny that it's good to have the fury and the rage and the fire to spark things and to start fires and to be in a space where you could be like oh fuck that I don't agree with this I'm going to express it and it could be as angerily and as sloppy as possible but the craft of the art and the artist is like learning from that and sharing those tools and sharing those skills and experiences and I think that's what will build maybe a better world or transform things better or address the things that just talking about them won't do so I'm sorry I wanted to cut out some time so any questions that you have how much time do we have? four minutes four minutes creation core of celebrating these white guys damning things up and it was so disappointing to me so I love that idea of culture jamming plaques in public spaces culture jamming, yeah that's the best and there was a plan in Duke for all the plaques but then it became Logan got a little I'm always like pushing too because it becomes these things like we should put our Logan on that then he'll chase it back to us and tan yeah thank you for mentioning that I was walking over to the convention center and there is it appears to be a official city plaque recognizing the neighborhood that was there it was the first time I saw it there's a there's a statue if you go down pushing towards the freeway too it's like of a woman and her child like pointing at the convention center that was made by one of the residents Luis Mena from body onita also addressing and acknowledging that but that's like yeah it's an interesting like nice afterthought thanks thanks for reminding me yes I did see a mural on the side of calling for the entity I'm not born in 1973 and it's painted around it but the old paint is there someone's decided to save that who knows I was wandering this damn city this morning I'll be able to show you at some point but I'm wondering what the effect on your community is are you seeing anything this kind of assault work we would call a gorilla in our day is it having an effect are you seeing more of it done by other people are people changing the conversation I feel like you know I can't really speak to the gorilla work there used to be a bigger like scene back in like 20 years ago like in Tucson I think because the changing landscape Tucson's going through a lot of gentrification right now there have been more conversations with other like-minded people in my communities who do want to get back into weed pasting my partner was just talking about this the other night he was like we should be weed pasting this alley here and bringing to light whatever we want to weed past I can't say that that type of gorilla art is really present either I feel like it died in some ways or like it went underground a little bit and sort of like there was a huge graffiti scene here back in the 90s a lot of great graffiti some of the murals I just see around downtown they were painted by some of these graffiti artists that were like doing it really gorilla and hidden but then there was a huge movement on graffiti abatement that happened like in the late 90s early 2000s so they were like hitting really hard on anyone who was caught graffiti or I mean laws just got stronger but then you have like there's an indigenous hip-hop group called Neoblifix that's based out of New Pasqua and I think Cells as well but they do these pop-up events in some of the barrios like Barrios Centro has usually like these events where they'll put up huge panels like this and it's just like people are graffitiing on them for the day what happens to those right you know as you go to those yeah like whenever all the graffiti artists are like done with the panels the scene here is a little bit rising from the underground you know for such things you know they have the hip-hop festival which is every year and that takes place right at 191 Tool but yeah I mean I think everything is still kind of underground right now as far as the graffiti scene and the mural scene I feel with Tucson like there's these waves of kind of communal action that and like that's not to disregard like any of the current political activism that's going on here that Tucson is super rigid but relating it back to like the artistic practices and artistic communities and collectives that work in that space I've seen it like rise and fall and all the years that I've lived here and even when I went away and came back so much happened in just like one year but yeah I really appreciate hearing your personal story and how that drove you into some of these aesthetics and I'm curious if you could just say more about your own experience with taking intergenerational trauma and combining it with resistance and how you see that as a healing practice to me healing and confrontation they're difficult things to hold next to each other but I see you doing that in your own I mean there's this notion of like just trying to be fearless around getting that deep and then I think and it's because I mean thankfully we had parents that were totally supportive of our creative endeavors and that's something that I very privileged to talk to, to speak to that there was a lot of support for anything creative that we were doing growing up so it just seemed like this logical step in taking that kind of trauma and the trauma of growing up and trying to address my dad's trauma because it was like in all these conversations I would have with him and it's like well my dad did this to me and my grandpa did this to him and it's just like this cascade of problems that the rest and what he went through kind of like just augmented all of that like it unlocked all this stuff having those conversations with my dad I think at the end of his life as an adult like when I was 16, 17 is when I kind of really started talking with him and he was a very like open person he kind of like wore his like emotions on his sleeve so there was always like space to talk about things but I think as I got older I kind of wanted to get deeper at like how he was treated or I had more of a mind because I think I was also very curious and wanting to document so much of my own life growing up that there was like a wealth of information there and feeling like okay I need to bridge the gap between not just the trauma and the anger but doing that through the work and at the time I didn't know that that was the healing process either it's sort of like stumbling through that through intuition was what did it for me but also like just trusting my artistic practices or my creativity as a space to feel anything and I think it's a combination of things too because it's like yeah like what if my dad didn't want to talk about any of his pain or any of his trauma or didn't want to talk about how he was abused as a child or how his grandfather was abused or like and him acknowledging that he abused us too in like the ways that he would apologize to me like very candidly about how he treated me as a guy with PTSD and very volatile behavior and so it's hard to find that connection where it's like it suddenly clicked because it's like I feel like my whole life was programmed or set up or built and encoded with like a process that I kind of only only through this presentation or in the last year that it's like been clicking like oh yeah our heals like this way of going into my history and then through the shooting Columbus project too learning more about like what intergenerational trauma is relying more on that idea that like art can heal art can be the arbiter of trying to find space to let go that trauma or to process that trauma but it's not I don't think there's like a blueprint that I could still like figure out like X, Y, Z then put it in the function and then suddenly like your heal I think it's like it's going to be it's a lifelong process like still for me being able to talk about it and present my story in that way it helps with the process but then I also see and I realize it's like oh man there's so much more work to do and where do you stop because I feel like especially when that kind of trauma leads to a death that's not really resolved you're going to spend the rest of your life like figuring it out or trying to make it to get it to a place where it doesn't hurt so much and maybe I don't know if that's healed or healing in that way maybe you're slowly healing but I don't feel like I'm ever getting to like that space of total release and maybe that's the tension that I have to fight with for the rest of my life and that's why that's what I do like to create this way thank you