Deep Roots Break Bricks

The drive to form institutions around art and culture was not an afterthought in Westward expansion and the colonization of Indigenous lands. From the Midwestern plains to the ancient old growth of the Pacific Northwest, decaying 19th century opera houses mark the landscape of settlement and resource extraction. Throughout civilization, art and culture have readily and consistently been used as the caressing hands of authoritarian rule, just as they have been suppressed when they support an expanded view of how we might live outside the rigid narratives that same authoritarianism insists upon. This paradox has always been at play. And, in part, it is this tension—this space-between—that provides us insight on art and culture and their power to transform.

As the country grew, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul were geographically situated perfectly for the times. Extraction and exportation: grain was milled and timber felled, making routes down the Mississippi River and across Lake Superior. In turn, unlike many other “Western outposts,” the Twin Cities maintained a longevity that less advantageously situated areas did not. It is not inconsequential that a young Herman Melville briefly made his way to St. Paul before deciding to ship out on a New Bedford whaling ship instead. Museums, manicured parks, and ubiquitous opera houses soon followed in his wake.

As decades and generations passed, cultural institutions and support for them have played an outsized role in Minnesota’s art and cultural ecology. Minnesota consistently distributes more non-profit funding and state dollars directly to artists and institutions, large and small, than nearly any other US state. This broad expanse of philanthropy as a form of social stabilization, (or, more cynically considered, social control) has been central to the narrative of the Twin Cities ever since their establishment as urban centers for the Upper Midwest. This “support for the arts” has played a simultaneously beneficial and detrimental role in art and culture’s abilities to push against norms and challenge power. While support for art and culture has undoubtedly created a wealth of resources and opportunities for artists and the wider public, a thin veil divides work that is acceptable from that which is seen as impudent to the hand that feeds it. As one would expect, this division, in relation to creative practices that question power and wish to authentically challenge it, has presented roadblocks to a public's ability to establish long term spaces for gathering, forming community, and creating social tools for transformative living. In that sense, despite the Twin Cities and Minnesota’s unquestionable financial support and public devotion to art and culture, the social terrain is no different than any other urban center with a vibrant arts establishment. It allows for artwork that adheres to a strict narrative, no matter how seemingly expansively, and through its largess treads a fine line between creative radicality and institutional normativity. 

For the last seven years, given the history of art and culture’s roles in Minnesota and the state’s financial realities, this paradox of support has, arguably, never felt more challenging. A timeline could be suggested, beginning with the state murder of Jamar Clark, at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department in November of 2015, after which an occupation of North Minneapolis’ 4th Precint began, and soon after that, the early stages of the opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Reservation. 

While the urban / rural flow in Minnesota has historically been a narrative of (social) removal and (resource) extraction, since 2015, that from-below flow—-a widening, brackish estuary— has begun to represent a mutualism unique to our times. As the planet burns and the state apparatus becomes more callous and violent, the oligarchy more entrenched, the social ecology that supports an alternative has never been more rich (and, at times, chaotic). The mutuality between urban centers and rural expanses has enlivened it. This biotic mix of distributed knowledge, cross-current creativities, skill sharing, parallel histories, multi-generationalism, and a collective understanding of the breadth of time outside of the clock of capitalism (People’s Time!) has created a vibrant (and at times, necessarily opaque) creative landscape. By often furtive and cryptic design in urban areas, while entrenched in rural enclaves, since 2015 Minnesota has seen the rise of what could be argued is a truly authentic social practice: an arts movement that skirts inside and out of institutions at will, and exists across generations and geographies, integrating multitudes of practices and perspectives to the point of indecipherability, and the point where it stops being art / work and starts looking like life itself, in all its messiness and hope.

In consort with longtime collaborator John Kim, Confluence Studio (Sam Gould and Duaba Unenra) have sought to highlight this moment in a form that seems most applicable to its nature: conversation. The role of “critical downtime” is essential to the creative social ecology that has formed in Minnesota. Hanging out is as much a political and creative practice as any more nominal action, project, or platform, so much so that it is often impossible to find the difference between the two. We’re the better for it. 

- Sam Gould

CONVERSATION ONE
Situated in what Duaba Unenra refers to as Confluence Studio’s summer office, aka Sam Gould’s backyard, Gould, Unenra, and John Kim set about to unpack their feelings about Minneapolis and Minnesota’s landscapes of creative resistance and transformation, sociality, and skill sharing, both in the present moment and beyond it.

Over the last twelve years, the three have collaborated frequently together, often with voluminous bleed-through between projects, people, time, and attitude. As the years go by, these attitudes and activities began to create a cosmology that now necessarily seems far more expansive than any of its individual parts.

Here, in the first part of a two-part conversation that hopes to outline some key elements and themes of art, life, and the social and political ecology of Minnesota, Gould, Unenra, and Kim introduce upcoming conversations in this series just much as they stand on their own: an example of three friends among many.

Sam Gould (SG): Not only are each of our various conversations for the MDW Atlas this summer deeply intertwined, but the longevity between the three of us, the work that we've done together—how much that interplays with just being with one another is indicative of a type of work in Minnesota. It’s a kind of creative activism, or Critical Downtime, that is different from a lot of places I'm familiar with. The difference is subtle, but it’s there. It starts with hanging out, then turns into something more structured, and just continues the back and forth to the point of being indecipherable, as opposed to beginning within a more structured organization, institution, campaign or project. It’s less attuned to a structure that’s seeking a particular goal. The elements of what we do that resonate with me most focus on a creative process towards social and cultural transformation. It’s something that I really love about here, and about you two. 

It's not like that quality is pervasive, huge or everywhere, but there certainly is a contingent, and it's long lasting. It has a multi-generational quality that has been passed down. It's prior to John and I knowing one another, and prior to John and I meeting you, Duaba. It’s a quality that has existed and been cultivated well before the three of us moved here, or were even alive, really. 

Of course, to varying degrees that’s the case everywhere. It just seems more palpable here. So with that as context, I’d be interested in talking about this kind of urban / rural mutuality that we've all engaged in to varying degrees, and how this social ecology, however tenuous at times, plays a vital role in connecting an environmental and social landscape in Minnesota at a time of deep conflict. But how do we want to start with that? And how do we want to bring that up?

Duaba Unenra (DU): Well, you put it, a lot of movement happens here from folks. It's hanging out. So I would say, as a way to contribute to the frame… I feel like we've been hanging out for like the last…

SG: Six or seven years. John and I for around 12 years now.

DU: Wow… yeah. And I met y'all both up here. But I really vibe with that, because I think the struggles and campaigns and experimentation that people are engaged in up this way, like: the shit takes a really long time by necessity. And it goes well beyond the attention span of a campaign or project. And what sustains it, similar to how both y’all work: those interpersonal connections. Relationships. People kind of form families here. Or, they trauma bond and then blow apart at the seams. [Laughs.] But that's what sustains people from campaign to campaign through the different struggles that are here. And I think it's the fullest kind of blooming, like people get out of that mindset of, “I'm gonna go from one campaign to the next.” I'm too fucking burned out to campaign. But also, it's not leading to anything. And so what I'm gonna do is just live the way that I want to be in the world, with folks that I've kind of survived the end of the world with. That focus on the day-to-day is self-sustaining.

SG: With the people that we often gravitate towards, whether it's within South Minneapolis, the larger Twin Cities area, or in more rural areas, the focus is that this shit is all personal. All this stuff—systemic degradation and oppression within the cities, resource extraction—is personal. We see it when we walk around in the streets. It affects people that we know. It affects us, our home lives, and the land, whether in the Cities or in rural areas. 

The tenor of it has certainly changed over the time I’ve lived in Minnesota. It's changed over the 12 years John and I have known one another and worked together. It’s become more deeply personal over that amount of time—-most especially over the time of our friendship and collaboration, Duaba. The last seven years have been nuts! But from the get-go it wasn't purely theoretical. It wasn’t even a mix of theory and practice. It was those things, but it was also a tool to figure out how to live a meaningful, authentic life. Those two things melding together—being very personal, and then having people it could be personal with—-it wasn't an isolated psychology, or an event to show up to, but a collective psychology and a social landscape that you could talk out and live out day-by-day. 

It made it very different from any work I had done before. Not entirely, but in a far more practiced and grounded way. Something very different than the art world that I was used to, prior to moving here. And different from the political circles I was familiar with. By the time I met you, Duaba, I was like, “You know what, I can't even go off and do projects in other places unless it relates to the neighborhood—something really grounded in my own experience.”

DU: Yeah, I think that practice of being grounded in place was definitely something that I picked up from you. And something that I committed to around the time that the struggle at Standing Rock started. (Which was also around the time you and I met.) I had some really close homies who were there. And I went out at the beginning. It was my first time in the Dakotas. It was my first time participating in the land defense struggle. I also had this like… day-by-day, as I was there supporting, building a camp for people to come out to—so this was before things even kicked off—very quickly I was just like, “Man, this is super dope. And also, like, I feel like where I should be, actually, is in the city.” I was a transplant into that struggle at Standing Rock, and I'm already a transplant here in Minneapolis. And also, it's like, “when this fight is over. I'm not going to stay out here. I'm gonna go back to Minneapolis.” So I felt that if I stayed out there, I was always gonna be split between the two. 

And I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to contribute in the fullest capacity if I stayed out there. I was just kind of like, “if I'm gonna be a connecting point for anywhere, it's got to be close to where I sleep and have the most familiar kind of bonds with people.” Because at the time, I didn't know anybody out in the Standing Rock struggles that I didn’t already know from the Cities. I felt like those were rural and different struggles. And I have a deep appreciation for the people who did make time, and dedicated a substantial portion of their lives to doing that and building those relationships. But they still wind up in the city.

SG: Which is the interesting thing, right? So many of the people who have deep roots in rural areas, they all also have really deep ties to the city. And there's this circuitous route that informs us, and then we inform them as well. Again, historically, generationally the same struggles inform why those ties exist: resource extraction, labor struggles, colonization and its varied effects. For example.

John Kim (JK): I’m thinking about your really interesting take on your relationship to Standing Rock land defense, Duaba, and your decision to focus your attention and your work in the Twin Cities, rather than spend time out in the Dakotas. It calls to mind some of the work that I've been trying to do over the last couple of years, though in an inverted way. What it sounds like you learned in the time that you spent at Standing Rock was that it was important for you to refocus your attention on struggles within the Twin Cities. By contrast, over the last few years, I've been doing more work within rural areas of Minnesota, specifically on frontline initiatives surrounding Line 3 and elsewhere. I've learned so much in the time that I've been able to spend on these projects. Being invited to be a part of these movements in Northern Minnesota has really opened up new artistic and activist possibilities for me that have deeply reconfigured the ways in which I think about my own relationship to the Twin Cities. And so, similar to what you're saying—-that Standing Rock had you rethink your relationship to the Twin Cities, I've committed myself to the flipside: that it's important to engage with rural activities and Indigenous struggles happening in rural Minnesota. In the time I’ve spent with these, I’ve come to recognize that a lot of the thinking and the political action that’s going on up there is grounded in important cultural work and offers a lot of inspiration, because they're configuring a unique response to the social and environmental crises that we're facing, and for which Minnesota has become such a crucible over the last few years. 

SG: Well, that's the narrative of Minnesota, not only for so-called police brutality issues, but also environmental devastation and Indigenous rights. Duaba and I were talking about that the other day, and this idea of like, “Why here?” One of the things that we zeroed in on, and thought was really interesting, is specifically that this neighborhood, South Minneapolis, where Duaba and I are dedicated to the work that we're doing, has this kind of multi-layered, generational work—a multicultural, multiracial, multi-class social ecology that is all on top of one another. It’s a weaving of people and time. 

And that's obviously been going on for quite a while. But we currently have, like, three or four living generations of people who can talk about the social struggles of this place, and who interact with one another, you know? People who can, through direct experience, discuss changes from the 1940s to the present moment. From being able to talk to Douglas [Ewert], who spent the early part of his life in Chicago but moved here decades and decades ago, or to my neighbors Amy and Mike [Blumenshine], who have lived at the end of my block coming on fifty years and are still very active in the neighborhood. Being able to talk about those histories—-to talk about AIM being founded down the street. The Co-op movement. All of these things interact with one another to form a really complex social ecology that is decidedly not about “the past”-–like, the so-called past is so much in the present here. And as much so for Indigenous struggles up North, which are equally ongoing histories here in the neighborhood.

Unlike most other areas that I've been to or lived in, the past is very much present here. That can be good and bad, of course, in terms of how much of a hold the past has on us in terms of, as Grace Lee Boggs says, not getting stuck in old ideas.

DU: What I took away from Standing Rock was a sense that in the Cities, we cannot match that intensity or clarity of purpose. For me, it was particularly felt in Black communities descended from enslaved folks. And part of that, of course, is historically, our relationships with the land aren’t continuous and always feel tentative or precarious. But, you know, the common thread that in some ways we have with Dakota and Lakota folks is that we're exiles from the places that we're from too. The Dakotas are a place of exile for those nations. 

So what was also kicking around in my mind was like, “I can't sustain my presence out here, because there's not enough people that I share ancestry with in the struggle.” And having experienced what I've experienced, it gave me enough of a sense of like, what I could come back to in the city and share with folks who I share ancestry with, so that they could be prepared to go back out. As more land struggles take place, there's more and more Black folks that are showing up in those struggles too, and that's something that I've seen happening as well. And so the other part of it was like, knowing that on the tail end of those skirmishes—which is what they really often are, because it's so short lived at this point—afterwards, there's care that has to be done for folks. Folks are gonna wind up coming down to the city. And like you were saying, Sam: pour that into the intergenerational soup of stories and knowledge and wisdom about these different struggles. The city, because of the nature of its social ecology, can be a place of respite. And also, people are going to be looking for ways to survive until the next fight takes place. 

So one of the other things that I found myself doing by being here was—-when my homies came back from rural areas, and land defense campaigns, you know, everybody was wiped the fuck out. So those of us who stayed behind attended to the different things that they needed to heal up and make it to the next fight. We haven't had a struggle yet where we have to leave the city and go out to rural areas and be on the receiving side. But part of it also feels like, you know, good practice. It creates a culture of reciprocity between the two areas. But it still feels more one sided towards the cities than it does to rural areas.

SG: In the last couple of years, we've really started to feel that shift. For me, John, you're the fulcrum of this in the last two years. Specifically with the work of Roberts Shoes being this kind of fulcrum point, because you were going back and forth with us at Roberts, and then heading up to work at Line 3 encampments. Derek [Maxwell] too—-maybe we should talk about what all this means? That moment in the Spring and Summer of 2020, in the neighborhood with Robert’s?

DU: I've never really debriefed with you about it either, John. 

SG: Robert Shoes was a neighborhood kind of anti-institution. No bylaws; nobody in charge. It was just a building. It wasn't necessarily supposed to be any sort of thing except, again, multi-generationally, at least from my knowledge, a deliberate kind of space for art production. In the late 60s, you have Robert Persik writing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the building. But it's called Robert Shoes, because there was Robert’s Shoe Store–that was kind of the anchor tenant in the building. But it was this space for artists and activists, small immigrant-owned businesses, going back generations. Many different cultures. In 2018, it burned down in an electrical fire. Then, in March, just before the pandemic, Duaba and I were asked to steward this participatory design process, because a number of people were very concerned about the possibility of what that space could turn into.

DU: You could turn it into a T-Mobile shop.

SG: Yeah, well, a T-Mobile shop, maybe—as a baseline fucked up thing. But we knew that there were these high price condos going up across the street, so to have those two side-by-side was just this harbinger for displacement. In March of 2020, we begin this process on this empty lot, to really involve the neighborhood in figuring out what could come next, knowing the history of this site. We’d known people who lived in, had studios, or ran shops in the building. After the fire, the whole neighborhood was nervous. The Trump-supporting liquor store owner across the street knocked down one corner building on his massive lot to build a high-priced condo. The idea of another popping up on the other corner felt ominous. A sure harbinger of things to come. 

Just after the fire, I remember Alondra Cano, the then-city-councilperson, and I organized a small meeting to see how we could band together to secure the lot for the neighborhood so another condo didn’t happen. Nothing really came of it. The lot sat dormant for two years until after years of moving word around, a local family foundation purchased it, with the idea to redevelop in time, through from-below neighborhood input. Or, at least that’s what they said. It didn’t 100% turn out to be as transparent a process as we were assured it would be. But with good intent being the introduction, the foundation asked me to develop a process to involve the neighborhood in discussion. Since Duaba and I had just shuttered Assembly, a social center we were studio partners at and that was yet another Beyond Repair platform, it seemed only natural for us to develop this platform together, which is how Confluence was established. At first it was supposed to be Duaba and I, and Tom Carrauthers and Jennifer Newsom from the architectural collaborative Dream the Combine. But, while they’ve continued to be close to the orbit of the Studio, it became evident that they needed to focus on their own work, and that the Studio was a natural extension of the collaborative aspects of the work Duaba and I had already been doing together, both formally and informally, for years.

But a few weeks later, just a few blocks up the street, George Floyd was murdered, which totally changes the context, in terms of intensity. Really since Standing Rock and the murder of Jamar Clark, roughly around the fall of 2015, there had been this intensity in Minneapolis. And we just kept building—-obviously, there are historical antecedents, from Clark up to George Floyd, such as Philando Castile, or, you know, sadly many other people. But that's the context of where we're at. And throughout that summer of 2020, we're holding down this lot at one of the main intersections in the neighborhood. John, you're coming back and forth, doing a lot of work there, but then you're going up for Line 3 work. 

JK: There were a lot of different activities happening at Roberts, and you guys invited me to collaborate. The one that I helped to initiate was “From Emergency to Emergence," and it has a lot to do with our conversation today. It was focused on initiating public conversations about mutual aid and solidarity, to reflect on how it was being implemented on the ground in the aftermath of the George Floyd Uprising, from food distribution to community defense and public community education, and more. It's important to note that the site, a vacant lot where Roberts Shoes once stood, is one of the main intersections (Chicago Ave. and East Lake St.) in the neighborhood, and just eight blocks from George Floyd’s murder (Chicago Ave. and 38th Ave. S). The site was surrounded by burned-out buildings for blocks in either direction, destruction caused by the uprisings. The space at Roberts was, day-to-day, transformed into a garden. People would show up to help build, garden, eat together, or get a book. We built a newsstand, which acted as an info shop. The shipping container that became the Autonomous Mobile Media Unit (AMMU) was being worked on. All of this, with people sitting around, surrounded by wood chips and compost. Native plants were re-growing from the fill dirt dumped over the rubble. This is where the conversations took place.

Additionally, I thought I could contribute by creating opportunities to take a step back, to think about how mutual aid and solidarity might speak to a political alternative for rethinking the ways in which we understand and structure governance and democratic institutions, both locally and nationally. We put in conversation guest speakers from outside the Twin Cities who had been practicing mutual aid and solidarity in response to crisis situations with locals who were actively engaging with them in order to think about context, temporality and possible futures for these practices.

SG: Building off the work we had been doing for a while around Municipalism. 

JK: Yeah, and so growing out of this work, there's multiple connections for why I got really interested in being involved in frontline camps in rural Minnesota, with land defense and environmental resistance movements against the Enbridge Line 3 oil pipeline. One reason is that despite the fact that I've lived in Minnesota for over a decade, I hadn't had an opportunity to work closely with Indigenous communities. I thought it was important to learn more about their struggles, rights, and histories, especially in the region, something that I'd not had an opportunity to do. These issues were central to the Stop Line 3 movement as a fight about tribal sovereignty. A second factor was that this anti-pipeline activism was informed by mutual aid and solidarity that was simultaneously being nurtured in the Twin Cities. When we were invited by Indigenous leaders to be involved in frontline camp activities, where the oil pipeline was crossing the Mississippi River, it became another opportunity to put mutual aid and solidarity into practice, specifically in the organization and coordination of this camp. So while I was working with you two, having community-based conversations about mutual aid and solidarity in the Twin Cities, I was actively practicing these ideas as well, and reflecting on the ways in which we can continue to grow this collaborative networked infrastructure, as a political mobilization that can issue a substantive challenge to ineffective governance in this country. These were some of the linkages for me, connecting the work that we were doing at Robert Shoes and frontline resistance camps.

DU: One of the things that a lot of folks learned was inner city police from across the urban areas of Minnesota get deployed to land defense struggles in rural areas across the upper Midwest. 

SG: Sheriff's departments from municipalities all over the Midwest were going up to Line 3, but then just a few weeks before, they were all congregating in the same exact fashion through the same exact tactics, here in our neighborhood. The means and ends of state control in our neighborhood and at Line 3 are strikingly similar: keep the operation moving at all costs. In the neighborhood, during that time period, they called it “Operation Safety Net,” or whatever. We were seeing these mirror images of the police state attempting to clamp down in supposedly different environments, but often with the very same people, tactics—and, arguably, motives. And you know, our friends are in both places, often moving back and forth. And just as with the state, ideas, desires, and motives move too.

DU: The other part of it is like the power plays between urban and rural areas. You have most of the population split between five cities. It seems like energy extraction really is a large part of what you have to be tapped into to be a state politician. So, you know, Walz, and who was the senator who ran for president and lost? Klobuchar. They're plugged in on that side. And then you have lower level politicians like Jacob Frey [Mayor of Minneapolis], who are holding things down for the developer class here in Minneapolis. 

SG: I’m gonna publicly agree with you there. [Laughs.]

DU: Now joined at the hip to the Democratic Party. Yeah. Or to the Republican Party, depending on what time it is.

SG: There is this idea that there barely is, at least in urban areas, a Republican Party by name. There's the DFL, the Democratic Farm Labor party. But within that is a micro populace of the political spectrum. When you get to the rural areas, all of a sudden you're publicly allowed to be a Republican. But then there are the Republicans within the DFL right now. Not by name.

DU: You had a little neoliberal faction that currently has power in the DFL, of which Frey is definitely a part. Yeah, and the other thing that I find interesting about what you're sharing, John, is like, at the point when I met you, you were already living rural part time, and in the cities part time. And I always admired how you structured your life in that way. And now, it's kind of ironic, because I'm literally going to the same area. 

SG: In terms of a transformation over time, I think that was really interesting and important. You know, John, and I both grew up on the East Coast, and then spent our 20s and 30s on the West Coast. And when we met, we were coming out of, and I think bonded over, a certain sort of utopianism. That was very prevalent in the work that we did, the friends that we knew out on the West Coast, and the work we were interested in doing here. I don't think that's gone away. And John's place was kind of a think tank, an ad hoc school, sometimes more formally than others, and a way for us to get away from the city. 

JK: I think about the work that you're doing, Duaba, out at Lily Springs Farm with Wild Path Collective, which is very distinctive and important work. And in a lot of ways, the kind of utopianism that you're describing, that informed why we might have been interested in doing rural work on the West Coast, was, for me, definitely a very naive kind of utopianism, right?

SG: Yeah, absolutely.

JK: I think this is kind of where you're going. It's like, oh, “How do we just get people out of the city?” And, like…

SG: …then everything will be perfect! [Laughs.]

JK: As if the rural is “uninhabited” space. How do we reimagine, through mutual aid and solidarity, new forms of collectives that can be a model for transformative possibilities?

SG: I love those ideas. But you're right. There's a naivete. There was something going on that made it feel like “Oh, that's fine; let's experiment.” And that experiment, that idea of experimentation was fruitful, but give it a time period—like 2015, with the Dakota Access Pipeline and Jamar Clark’s murder, and everything changes. And that utopianism exists, again, coming back to this idea of multi-generational knowledge in one place here in the cities—-you know, they were utopians too; they were also talking about utopian ideals, and then shit got real, and then we started. There was that fulcrum too—not that shit wasn't real prior to that—-but somehow there was a buffer.

JK: What I've learned is that the rural, of course, is not uninhabited, and people living in rural spaces have been struggling to imagine and create powerful solutions to contemporary problems of social and racial inequality and environmental ruin. (This sounds like the direction that Duaba is taking at Lily Springs Farm too.) For example, these frontline camps are deeply indebted to the long-term work that Honor the Earth and other Indigenous-led organizations have been doing to envision substantive environmental, political, and economic alternatives based around cooperative models and, sometimes, forms of mutual aid and solidarity. And so, this naive utopianism shifted, for me, when I came to recognize that there's inspiring work going on in rural spaces. If you start digging around, you can discover people experimenting with these ideas.

SG: Right. It may use different terminology, coming from different histories, but the ideal is generally the same.

DU: One of the things that I wanted to ask is how you are conceiving and conceptualizing utopianism. Because especially when you mentioned, like, Honor the Earth and [Indigenous leader] Winona LaDuke—-not only are those projects intentionally projects, about literally materializing political power for native folks, but they are also about that power in the interrelationship between rural and urban. The direction that power flows is rural to urban, rather than the reverse. 

I'm also thinking about how in Indigenous and African traditions, there's not even a word for utopia. A lot of things, I think, are kind of grounded. There are parables. But even parables are designed, and intended to be like, rhetorical devices that support politics. Like, you invoke a parable to change somebody's mind about shit. You invoke a parable to give people a really accessible sense of what you're asking them to support. And then what's built in a tangible way, you know, is actually realized. So it's not a utopian project to say, “We have sovereignty over this territory, and it was stolen, and now we're plotting out how we're gonna get back.”

And it's not utopian to say, we're not going to allow police to come through our neighborhoods and shoot us the fuck up anymore. And we're gonna strive not to do that to one another either. We need to create new systems of care. Like, those are things that folks had before we all got captured here. So it's not like it didn't exist. 

SG: I see utopianism as a really positive force. I don't know if John felt the same way. But in the utopian side that I was talking about, first we were focusing more on a historical, theoretical notion of Utopia: a kind of an everyday pedagogy. A worldview.

DU: Not a place that doesn't exist and can’t exist?

SG: No, no. More of a horizon line. So that you think a certain way, so that you're moving in a direction that you never thought that you could actually get to, you're never gonna get to that horizon line. But then you find all these interesting things along the way. So it's a prismatic and pedagogical function, and that was something that was really prevalent on the West Coast when we were in our 20s. Obviously, we were learning from the residue of folks from the 50s, 60s and 70s, who were still very much around. And then they were learning from folks at the turn of the century, who were dealing with labor struggles and land struggles and immigrants’ rights issues, specifically intersections of labor, and anarchism.

JK: If I can bring the two things that you both are talking about together, I mean, I definitely think that this idea of utopianism that you're just describing is still very much grounded within a sort of Western political ontology, in which you're trying to reimagine. You’re trying to rethink the present into some sort of more amenable and viable future political alternative. So what you said, Duaba, was really provocative and interesting—folks in the new world, in the Americas and Africa, were already living in political utopias.

DU: Some, yeah.

JK: Communities of care is actually how you were describing it. Realizing communities of care in the past, right? What I find really compelling about this idea, is something that I’ve taken from David Graeber’s last book, The Dawn of Everything, in which he challenges how political utopias are imagined within the West as continually being projected into the future. Graeber argues that we need to refuse the ways in which we think about future-oriented temporality, because there have been communities of care that were vibrant and viable in the Americas prior to colonization, and in Africa. Prior to the supremacy of the modern nation-state, there was a lot of dynamism in political life, with care-oriented politics, direct democratic, cooperative societies… What Graeber is basically doing is up-ending this future-oriented idea of Utopia that's deeply grounded within Western…

SG: Political theory and structure. 

JK: Yeah, that’s future-oriented. This is what I was referring to specifically as naive utopianism earlier. But to quote Nick Estes, perhaps “our history is the future,” which is a call to decolonize the ways in which we think about political utopias as future-oriented, as if things are teleologically getting better with time. We need to recognize that people who have been here in the Americas and in Africa have suggested political, economic, and social possibilities that can enable us to rethink, restructure, and rebuild what happens in the city too.

SG: And that's the bridge to the second part of what I wanted to say: that other stream, which is kind of permeable within the subfirmament, was exactly what you're talking about. That, at least for me, was also always part of the work. It wasn't, “Alright, let's write a paper,” or “Let's have this far off place,” right? That was the whole point of Beyond Repair, and Red76 up to that point. It was creating these lived parables that seemed really utopic. But they were also ways to challenge present arguments about how we’re living, rather than creating these models and trying to say, “No, we can live this way. Just do what we're doing.” Right? It was theater, and provocative play. 

The work was definitely informed by the ideas of Hakim Bey and [his book] TAZ. When Red76 first started, that book wasn't even a decade old, and it was a huge inspiration for many of us. But there was so much more that was an inspiration for Bey, as well as work that was inspired by that book, or work that was completely out of the scope of either. The Diggers for instance, or rural anarchist communities of the 19th century in the Pacific Northwest. I'll often go back to a quote that Matthew Stadler clued me into, by the theater producer, playwright, and actor Charles Ludlam (Theater of the Ridiculous). To paraphrase, it's something along the lines of the need to be a "living mockery of your own ideals, if not you have set your ideals too low." So by design, they were temporary. The visible parts. The idea was to wear them on to see how they fit so that, in time, it was hard to figure out what was your theater costume and what were your street clothes, if you will.

DU: Yeah, but when you described it as a pedagogical utopia, it also made me think, “Oh, that's prefigurative politics.” And also, we keep saying that “There are a lot of things to unlearn.” Which is true. But there's not a lot of space to unlearn things in. 

SG: That’s been like, the core important thing for me, throughout my life. Because up until my early 20s, I never had that, except by my own creation. And then I was like, “Why don't I just do that? Do it with other people and not be isolated? 

DU: So the other thing that's coming to mind is like, I think Thomas More [the author of Utopia] being Thomas More is one thing. Very, very, strange man. So I think the value in you invoking the utopian thought is, like, in Europe—Western Europe, Central Europe, and then later, Eastern Europe—the closure of the commons happens almost four centuries before it does in Africa and Asia, and in what became the Americas. And so for someone like Thomas More, who is deeply invested in by the power elite in Europe, to even like, I guess, return to that kind of thinking, that future history, I think is important because it created a touchpoint for folks who are coming from that experience to think beyond like, “Oh, like if I don't pay taxes, some motherfucker in like, steel plates is going to come and bash my head.” Or, “I used to have land out past Yorkshire, and that shit all got folded in by the Walton dynasty, and now there's a fucking supermarket department store on it.” 

Maybe, you know, the utopia is a different name for a commonly held practice amongst populations that have been pulled into colonialism, and is all about provoking, invoking, and embodying ways of being that haven't been created yet, or ways of being that we used to practice before we got captured. And a core element of that is having spaces like the pirate utopias that More’s talking about—outlaw spaces, or spaces that hide in plain sight, or places of disrepute that can't be co-opted—where folks are coming, and unlearning a lot of shit that they had to learn to survive inside of the colony, so that they can take the fight to other parts of the board, so to speak, or to connect with people in other parts of the board who are fighting from a much different positionality. But for that to even be possible, you have to unlearn your identity, from like, “I'm from this city. I'm a city dweller. I'm an urbanite.” Or, “I'm a country kid. I'm a bumpkin. I'm a whatever.” Because the people that we're fighting against don't—-they're not limited by those dichotomies. They're like, “I'm wherever the fuck I want to be.”

SG: They have free movement. Their identity is based solely on power, rather than place.

DU: Right, so I put on my cowboy boots when I'm going to go out of town, and I wear my fucking loafers when I'm in the city. And I'll speak to both sides of the fence to get what I need to get. 

JK: Yeah, making what you're just talking about a little more concrete, there definitely was a lot of traffic between different sites of disturbance over the last couple of years, specifically frontline camps (both in Minnesota and elsewhere) and the uprisings that were happening in the Twin Cities. You know, there are definitely people who are like “pirate outlaws,” moving between these different spaces, and practicing alternative forms of political power and cooperative coordination, whether organized through mutual aid or solidarity or in other ways. And so, to your point, what seems alive and well are these temporary zones in which people migrate between different nodes or sites of disturbances, as a challenge to state power and capital in this insurgent way. 

But bringing it back to the rural and the urban, what's been really eye opening to me is the idea that perhaps we don't need to practice insurgent politics solely in this kind of mobile and distributed way. One of the things that I've learned in the work that Indigenous communities have been doing is that it is possible to envision or model political and economic alternatives while holding down space, and to imagine political alternatives in ways that aren't temporary or migratory. This has a lot to do with reservations as a spatial anchor for their work, but how might we [non-Natives] capture and hold down alternatives too?

SG: What I'd add on is that one of the things that I've found most powerful—and it's fleeting, it doesn't happen all the time, but it has been prevalent—is challenging relationality rather than challenging political structures. Or, you know, the frameworks of how we're living here now. Challenging how we see one another, and then, how we support one another. 

That's been the thing that's been most consistent throughout the last seven years. This kind of constant work of “How do I see you? How do you support me? How do I support you?” Those are the things that have lasted beyond any interstitial conflicts and any particular campaign—these deep bonds of “I'm going to do the long work of how do I recognize you in space, and support you within that space,” and the land and borders and the powers that be at the moment are irrelevant. And then, we do that through lots of different things. We do that through building a news stand or a media center. We do that through creating a radio station up by the pipeline. We do that most often through hanging out. That's kind of the deep political and creative work that I've found most resonant and most lasting. 

Duaba Unenra, John Kim, and Sam Gould are the July Editors for Minnesota. They are all a part of Confluence Studio.