 Did we decide, oh, are these working? All right. Hey. How you doing? Hi. This has been really great and really inspiring. We did our little prep and we have a couple questions to ask ourselves. We're gonna talk about independence and interdependence. And I'm gonna ask Tempest the first question. By the way, my name's Amar. And Tempest, what are you in your practice independent of? Martin, I have to start, well, thank you for the question, but before I start, I just have to say that I'm suddenly in here feeling a little tender because there are some people in the room that I haven't seen in a really long time. So bear with me as I collect myself and try to answer this question without just wanting to hug all the people. So my name's Tempest Hazel. I am a writer, curator, one of the co-founders of 60 Interstrom Center. And the very quick version of what 60 is, 60 is a publishing platform and archiving initiative an advocacy organization that really focuses on queer, diasporic, indigenous trans and disability communities and artists in the Midwest. And so when I think about this question, it goes back to the, for me, it goes back to the origins of 60. When we originally started, I think what we were hoping to do as writers and documenters and folks who were really deeply interested in the archives was to look outside of the mainstream institutions and look at more of like the independent spaces within Chicago and do a lot of archiving and documenting around that. And that was really based on, in a lot of ways, our education and going through having a curriculum that really just didn't reflect us in our communities. I can say that for myself. 2010 wasn't that long ago, but it feels like very long ago when it comes to that conversation. There is a lot that has changed, a lot that has remained the same when it comes to education, what we understand cultural canons to be, how art history is taught, what is valued and prioritized. So 60 was definitely created as a reaction to that. And because we are art historians, we're thinking the important piece is to get to the heart of how knowledge is created. So we couldn't just be writers, we also had to engage with archivists and librarians and the people doing that documenting. But we initially thought about ourselves as being kind of reactionary and resisting and independent of certain institutions or these spaces that we didn't feel held us or reflected us. But over the years, I think we've gotten a much more maybe complex understanding of the work that we do. In that, as much as we're in the business of thinking about and building future cultural canons that more reflect our communities or better reflect our communities, it's not independent of the spaces that also were harmful to us in a lot of ways or didn't reflect us. There is a relationship that we have with that because history, the archives exist. So we're thinking about the ways that we respond to the knowledge and the material and the ephemera that does exist as we build, as we kind of like working on this, on the side to think about envision future canons, like canons that are more representative of us. So there's that simultaneous, I think we've already felt that those thoughts and that energy in the room this morning of like building the future we want to see. But I think that there's a simultaneous thing that happens where as you're building something new, you're also working within the things that exist. So in a lot of ways, we're really interested in how we relate to, well, I will say, I think the way we think about our relationship to institutions and the institutions of history and culture and archives and all of those things, that has changed in that we understand that these institutions are also made up of people. And a lot of those people are co-conspirators with us. So thinking about being independent of those institutions isn't quite accurate. We're more in relationship with the people who we're aligned with and who have a similar vision as we do and are working within as we're building outside. Yeah, because those people are also trying to be independent of their institutions, right? They're trying to not be of the institution, but actually of something that they themselves value. And these institutions, just to clarify, like universities, galleries, museums, these are the kinds of things. Libraries, yeah, it's interesting because everything you're saying, even though you work in completely different spaces than I do in some ways, is completely resonant at the same time. Just the origin, the arc of the narrative is like almost the exact same for me because, while I don't think about Canon because I co-founded this platform with Elijah McKinnon called OTV Open Television, which is a kind of anti-Netflix, if you will. It's an app that you can download on your phone right now, support queer independent art. I thought of it, yes, anti-Netflix. I'm independent of Hollywood, right? We developed all of our stories in Chicago where almost every TV show you see is developed in Los Angeles. And there were a lot of ways in which, yeah, we were bucking the system. We were local instead of global. The focus was intersectionality, similar kinds of communities, right? Queer, trans, women of color, disabled folks, undocumented folks, and those companies don't really think about identity in their programming decisions except to extract from our communities versus with OTV we wanted to invest in our communities. If, and I took a meeting with everyone who emailed me whereas to get a meeting with Netflix, you need an agent, you need a manager, you need connections, all these things. So thinking about being independent of Hollywood is not about the Canon because TV is in a lot of ways disposable. Like people, they're not archived often. A lot of old TV shows are missing but there is this question of value, right? That I think connects us that in art, the Canon is what ascribes value to stories, to artists. In television, it's access to this distribution, right? The money, the glamour. And we just very much wanted to be independent of that whole system because I think it's neocolonial, it's extractive. My lab actually did a study recently where we analyzed the black playlist on these platforms and found that overwhelmingly they represent trauma. And when they're not representing trauma, they're representing these like extraordinary lives, like Barack Obama's documentary, Tina Turner, which are great, but it's like totally inaccessible to the everyday black person. And when you look at OTV, our stories aren't traumatic. Many of the stories are actually connected. They're about solidarity between different types of people. They're joyful, but they're also complicated. It's not just like this hokey capitalist joy, it's like the joy that's won from real struggle. So there's a lot of ways in which we're independent of it, but very quickly I realized we're not independent of these systems. In 2017, we released a show from Sambalian Fatima Askar called Brown Girls that sold HBO. I love that. You should all check it out. It's a beautiful show. Amazing. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. HBO is checking for Chicago like this. And it just kept happening actually. By the time I handed the platform ownership over to Elijah in 2020, we had like, I was throwing brunches in LA and I could invite like 20, 30 people who were working for Netflix and Disney and all these places. And it was complicated for me because I was like, on the one hand, that's what these artists wanted, right? There was these migration from Chicago to LA because that's where the money is and people wanted to work as an artist. And I imagine you found the same thing too that like artists wanted to be in some institutions or recognized by these institutions in order to survive, in order to thrive, in order to be remembered. And so I think about, when we were after this conversation, I was like, oh, Tempest and I, we're the independent people. We were like, created independent institutions. And then we started talking and we're like, but are we though? Right, right. So maybe I wanna ask you then, who are you interdependent with? What does interdependence mean to you? Like, do you view yourself as interdependent with these institutions or other people or things or people, you know, spaces, places? Yes. Yeah, I mean, I think I'll echo again or just talk more about what I said before of, and to what you're saying, we're all, especially as artists, we're all moving in so many different ways and move through the world and change roles and positions and end up in different places for periods of time. And a lot of that has relationship to these places, but I think the more, for 60 at least, the more we understand ourselves as an organization that is interested in people and communities that automatically means just because of how we live our lives and how we move through the world that we're interdependent with all of it because we're all part of all of it. So it's, the separation is perhaps maybe more so in somewhat in ethos and philosophy and ideology in some ways and maybe in methodology in some ways, but understanding that the community archive, for instance, or an archive that like your personal archive or like somebody's or OTV's archive that might be held with OTV is just as important as the special collections that have a public library or the collections at Northwestern, you know, being able to, and to understand that the work that we do has to address it all and has to be in relationship to it all in order to have the type of like building a cannon or trying to push or shift or change or mold or feel the agency to be able to change a cannon is like a big, you know, it's a big question or it's a big tap. So for us, we see working in a lot of different ways in a lot of different places, it's really important. So that interdependence is everything. It's, yeah, it's, I mean, it's really the basis of the work is understanding our relationship to each other, to our communities, to our city or region, our country, the world and, you know, we have to, as an organization, kind of reflect the complexity of that so that, and acknowledge that we're connected to everything. It sounds like a lot of work for you. It sounds like you're in a lot of different kinds of people. Yes. But I mean, that's what we do, you know, like I look in this room and I'm just like, think about the work and I think about the work in this room, we're all doing a lot of work. And it's also because I think to your question again, to the interdependence piece, this is our lives. You know, I think part of what's 60, what's important to 60 is that we, what's important to 60 is that we understand that the art world isn't isolated. And I think we all know that it's not in a vacuum. It is very much so affected by everything that's happening in the world. So for us, that's, you know, it's hard. We strive to create something that is a reflection of the way we live our lives. And our lives are a lot of work. To live in this world is a lot of work. Yeah, I'm just, when you're talking, it's like I'm thinking about the ways in which I'm interdependent with just the team, the people around me, you know, and first and foremost, I prioritize them and care for them and supporting them. And then the artists and their communities and the deep relational work that that requires the dinners, the meetings, the parties, the seeing people around town, right? The like way in which I'm interdependent with Chicago and this ecosystem and everyone here and everyone I meet. And how surprising that is, you know, just thinking, even looking at the room and seeing that like we livestreamed Martin's opera, you know, and like- You did? Yeah, I think it's not on the platform. You had to be there. But it was brilliant. And looking at Angelique and like Field was our first funder. Like before Field, I didn't know if we would exist as an organization, you know? And how there's just all these like diverse relationships that have taken cultivation. And then, you know, flying off to LA and meeting with executives. How much time do we have? Yeah, Max says we got, we had to- Oh no! Oh, okay. Well, it was great to talk to you, Tephas. We just distilled about a three hour long tea time together into 15 minutes, so. Yeah. Thank you, Max. It's great to spend time with you. We'll pick it up over tea. Yeah, indeed. Okay, we'll invite you all to take a little break, get some sunshine outside. We'll take 20 minutes, stretch your legs, have some tea and coffee and chat, please. We also are really thinking about the coffee breaks and our lunch as the moment for you to share with each other, a hug also. So we will come back together about 10 to noon. Thank you.