 Hi, I don't have any images and we can't go on the website, so if you want to get on your gizmos and go to a couple of sites here, please go ahead and do that, artspacesanctuary.org and sanctuarycaravan.org. I'm not sure what I'm doing here exactly, but I'll do what I do and I hope that it falls somewhere. I founded artspacesanctuary a few years ago and you'll see that on the website. It's a project that's trying to get artspaces at different levels to sort of take on sanctuary-like practices, declare themselves sanctuaries, and stand up in this moment where migration is an important part of the way that our current arrangements are being challenged. Our arrangements on a state and nation level around borders on all kinds of levels, right? You know this. I work closely with the new Sanctuary Coalition in New York City, I'll say a little bit about that, and as well as the Sanctuary Campus Movement and Karen Coney who is sitting over there with the Vera List Center is part of that group at the new school and then at NYU, Columbia, etc., etc., and it's also weird to be here in this building in what my other friend who's sitting there, Sandra, called a fortress, not a sanctuary, and to be part of this real estate company called Columbia University that has displaced so many people right around here in this corner and has done exactly the opposite of anything that a sanctuary practice would actually encourage displacing people and breaking up communities and not being in solidarity and so on and so forth. So with that irony in mind, we'll be here talking about sanctuary. So if I'm talking about sanctuary, I think I'll set up the stage a little bit by saying what sanctuary is. I think people know pieces of it and not all of it. I'm already hearing the music coming, so I'll rush through my words. Sanctuary is essentially, it started as a Christian policy and the Christian church where people could go inside and in a way hide from the law or to say that your law is not my law, that there is a higher law and people who were charged with various things by the state, say the Romans, would go into the church and say, I'm immune here. So that practice continued, but it got taken up in the 80s by a number of pastors along the border who were giving refuge to people who were fleeing U.S. sponsored wars in Central America. And we're getting then kicked back out by what was then the INS. And so they were saying, this doesn't sound right. We're making them flee and we're not letting them come in. Sanctuary, people were in there. And that took its course in 2007. It got revived nationally, including with the New Sanctuary Coalition here. But with important changes, one, it was immigrant-led. It was led by the affected populations. Secondly, it had an expanded notion of sanctuary, which means that it took that idea, the concept of this protected space where you could be immune from the earthly law, the unjust law, the law of those people who are causing oppression by wielding the law, et cetera. So creating that space, but in fact taking it outside of the church. So we do accompaniments by walking, going with people undocumented and precariously documented to official check-ins at ICE, at courts, et cetera, et cetera, right? To create kind of a citizen shield. We do things like that. And one of the projects is to create sanctuary spaces in neighborhoods so that slowly, between businesses, art spaces, any kind of space, homes, et cetera, you can build out sanctuary as a practice, right? As a practice of openness, as a practice of welcoming, as a practice also that criticizes all the machinery that creates these conditions, right? Which includes petty policing and racist regimes that create the kinds of displacement and the kinds of mass incarceration policies that we've seen. And includes working against gentrification. So all of these things, that's what we kind of call expanded sanctuary, right? Because we understand that immigration isn't just this little discreet box filled with immigrants only, right? It is, as I said, something that is a process of movement that's challenging all these kinds of arrangements and all the regimes that are trying to contain the movement. So if you want to, you have to move with the movement to see, to have a vision of what to do in the future. So expanded sanctuary does all that. And we also do transnational sanctuary. We had a conference, Karen was involved in that too, where we're thinking about a whole network of shelters from South America, Central America, all the way up here down over to Canada. So a bunch of activists and scholars and so on were invited. So it's in that kind of context, and I'm probably missing stuff, we can talk about it, that I have kind of kept on saying, make sanctuary not art. And by that, I mean, you know, if you think about the stuff that I just said about what sanctuary is and what kind of space you might be entering in when you enter a sanctuary space, and then think about what kind of space you might be entering when you enter, I mean, to choose the worst of the worst, but when you enter MoMA, right? When you enter an art world space, right? What is the political ecology? What is the moral economy of the art world? Now, of course, it's expansive. Of course, it's very different and there's diverse and there's cultural organizations all the way up to the other side. Nevertheless, there is something like an art world moral economy and art world political ecology. And just to quickly cite a couple of what I think, you know, the way I think about it a little bit is this, that if you think about, I mean, you know, there's a lot of foundations and other people here with big money backers behind them, right? But that's essentially the ecology that I want to just point to a little bit. If you have somebody like Leon Black as a chair of the board of MoMA who has made a lot of his fortune and I'm not, you know, this is a caricature in a sense and it's not because all the boards are filled with versions of Leon Black, right? Who's made his money sitting next to holding hands with the Kushners and the Trumps, making Manhattan a real estate venture, again, creating displacement, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? And so that person who is also then on the board of a bunch of other companies, whose board members are also on the board of a bunch of other foundations, like the Barish, right? So you have this level of, I don't know, a network, right, of these financial workers. Now what else do these financial workers do? They have a lot of them are hedge fund managers who themselves or their partners are on the board. They invest in companies like Rio Tinto. This is the case with somebody on the Barishnikov Center. Rio Tinto has not opened up, it's a mining company, extractivism. It's a company who has never had a place that has been opened up without protest, without labor issues, without displacement of indigenous populations, and without major pollution. And that becomes the source of, the major source of money that feeds one of the hedge funds that feeds the Barishnikov Center. What do those policies do? They displace people and migrants start moving, right? So it's a whole cycle, that's what I mean by the political ecology of the art world. And I think until we also tackle that part of it, right, that displaces people, brings people all the way here, unprotected, we're not going to have the full on sanctuary space and the sanctuary policies that at least I would like to see and advocate for. So one of the things I encourage people to do is, you know, not just have diversity and safety policies and so on. All that is great and good and we want to push more, but also to look at the board, look at the investments, look at where all that stuff is also producing the things that we claim to not like. Okay, that's it. Sanctuary Caravan, the new Sanctuary Coalition, an amazing organization here is putting together a caravan of supporters to meet. We're in touch with the refugee caravan that's coming up. In fact, many of them have already arrived in Tijuana. They're moving to the Tijuana border. They're slowly already getting there. We're putting together, look it up, newsanctuarycaravan.org. The team of people, large as many, thousands of people who are going to go down there to do various things including processing claims, accompanying a cross back and forth, but also witnessing because there's been a promise of violence and we know that one of the things, one of the only things that this administration has delivered on is their promise of violence. We see it in Pittsburgh, we see it in Kentucky, we see it everywhere. So that's part of what we want to do, meet there, witness, sign up. There's ways to do that on the website.