Wiggling the Frame: “Philadelphia Assembled” and “Trainings for the Not-Yet”

 
Mick Wilson (MW): Perhaps we could start by inviting Jeanne to give us a short account of the two exhibitions, “Philadelphia Assembled” (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2014-17)^[1] and “Trainings for the Not-Yet” (BAK, 2019-20).^[2] As I understand it, there is a logic of relationship, whereby developments within “Philadelphia Assembled” informed thinking as to how “Trainings for the Not-Yet” unfolded. The initial invitation for an exhibition in the Philadelphia Museum of Art was framed as something like a mid-career retrospective, but that project became a radically different proposition as a city-wide mobilization of grassroots initiatives. While there is also this mobilization of self-organized and emergent initiatives with “Trainings for the Not-Yet” in the city of Utrecht, there is a thread of earlier moments of practice woven through the exhibition space, so it has an aspect of a mid-career retrospective.

Jeanne van Heeswijk (JH): Yes. But of course it’s always difficult to summarize these things. I’ll try to approach it through the lens of exhibition-making. When asked to work on an exhibition in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, rather than presenting objects that in someway belong to my work or that came about through its processes, I thought it was more interesting to look through the ways in which I have been working. This meant bringing together methodologies of approach, of connecting, of building, of learning, of listening, and of all these practices. When initiating “Philadelphia Assembled” I used some of the ways in which I normally start works, creating what I call “protocols of engagement” or “pathways of engagement.” In Philadelphia I started with this process which is called “deep listening.” This entailed engaging in over 500 different conversations in the city over more than a year. This process was used to create a set of questions that that could outtline the contours of the project, what I would call its “fields of interactions.” I remember taking this little book, The Spirit of Philadelphia (2012), with me.^[3] The book is about the 1944 ‘Declaration of Philadelphia” a full-fledged social bill of rights that was foundational for Philadelphia.^[4] I used this as a starting point to talk to people about what the spirit of Philadelphia is. Where are alternatives created? Where are the acts of resistance and resilience? Where are people creating new imaginaries for the future of Philadelphia? Importantly however, this was a question about futures oriented by, or founded upon, practices that were already happening on the ground. Whenever I spoke to somebody, the questions that came out of that conversation I would then take with me to the next conversation. This engendered a kind of journey through the city. Starting from this question of the spirit of Philadelphia unfolded into a whole subset of questions that then formed the different fields of interactions, the atmospheres, that structure the project, which are Reconstructions, Sovereignty, Futures, Sanctuary, and Movement. These fields of interaction were also called “atmospheres,” so as to better understood them as diffuse and porous. This was preparing the ground to start collectively building and ideating in working groups in which to start to unpack these questions. It is important to describe this because it is about bringing together, a lot of different people, around certain emergent questions, and then starting to share work, methods and different expertise. It was always the intention to end up in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) with an exhibition, however, the process had to become a collective one.

The process of creating that exhibition through methodologies of engagement–what Maria (Hlavajova) would term ‘civic practice’–became the foundation, one could say the curatorial premise, for making the exhibition. There were many extra layers of activity to this. We set about amplifying what currently existed, the conversations and actions on the ground, not focusing on creating new things. We did this by highlighting, putting resources into, and making critical platforms to show some of the discussions, assumptions, questions that came out of these working groups, in differen parts of the city in the spring of 2017. We did this by working with artists, activists, and other people creating images or imaginations through a collective process. I think for most of the people involved in “Philadelphia Assembled,” there was especially in the beginning more excitement for this public phaze, than for the exhibition at the Museum in the fall of 2017. This was especially so in the beginning. I think that was also important. We had said from the beginning that this exhibition would be the stage onto which/where the city was to be performed, presented, narrated. The different working groups were subsequently asked to think of what they wanted to bring to the museum from their collective working process and amplification in the city. In this sense you could say that the exhibition was an amalgamation of objects, ranging from craft, spiritual objects, and artworks to furniture and tableware. There is an interesting side point here. In the lead-up to the exhibition there was a very long discussion about how these different types of objects were to be treated.

I often say that the registry, the way the objects were itemized and entered by the registrar for this show, is probably the real artwork. There wese protracted discussions: would artifacts be treated different from art objects, from spiritual objects? What would be the nature of the agreement between the museum and the exhibitors be? It became extremely complex because of the different nature of all these different objects. In the end the decision was made to catalogue all of them as art objects. This means that the whole show consisted of hundreds of registered works of art. It means that the kitchenware used also became part of the registry, and the registry became gigantic. This was one way in which the practice of formal exhibition-making was extended and challenged, as the content became diversified and impromptu, because very often we didn’t know what people were bringing until the very last moment. There was a disruption of the institutional pace in making an exhibition, with the insertion of things that were produced and selected within the emergent processes of the ongoing conversations of the different working groups. The speed and the considerations of these different processes were totally different from normal museum practice. Some conflicts arose because of this, and these were also learning moments.

There was, for instance, a textile display upstairs in the building where the exhibition took place. For conservation resons it was important that moths would not enter the building. To ensure this, all objects needed to go into “the freezer.” But how do you then bring in a spiritual object and put it in a freezer to sterilize it? This emerged as a conflict about how value is attached, how meaning is read, and what are the prerquisites of exhibition. There were many interesting conflicts like this from an exhibition-making standpoint: How should the objects be delivered? How should they be received?

There was a curatorial critique from the museum that there was not enough of my “signature” in the show. I was told that I had to make a stronger edit, to be the one making decisions. It should not be a “free-for-all,” where everybody brings whatever he, she, they want. However, for us it was a matter of collective ownership and the different discursivities that these objects brought with them. The public program therefore was not just about symposiums and educational activities. It was seeing the objects as living things and living them. Some needed a ritual, or required guidance so that they were not simply construed as dead objects but were seen as actual spaces of living. The Alumni Ex-Offenders Association, for example, occupied the Framework for an Affordable House, a house like object created by the Reconstruction Atmosphere working group in the exhibition.^[5] It comprised furniture from there meeting room, and they held some of their meetings publicly there during the run of the exhibition.

This back and forth, this betweenness, also became manifest in the fact that the museum hosts for visitors to the exhibition were also the project collaborators. This meant that you could walk through the Sovereignty Atmosphere gallery and see it through the eyes of Jeannine Kayembe from Urban Creators or Ramona Africa from MOVE. This made a great difference to the dynamics of viewing. Then there was a constant stream of programming, which drove everybody mad, especially Damon. This had so many levels, so many different points of entry—from simple daily programming of, say, a coloring workshop to an open mic or speakers’ corner platform at the Paul Robeson stage; from the hosting and the activation of certain objects in the exhibition by the people involved to do this, to the more formal discussions and events and addressing fundraisers… It was a constant working and reworking of these objects, a constant retelling of them, within the exhibition and public program, within the city and the museum, like, for example, the Sanctuary Atmosphere working group and the different uses of the Toward Sanctuary Dome by the Sanctuary stewards curriculum. The process was to exercise together with certain objects, artifacts, or spaces, to understand their different value-sets and how these are placed within different networks of relation. This dynamic is very important to any understanding of the exhibition process as a whole.

There was an attempt, shortly after the exhibition closed, to create another phase of “Philadelphia Assembled” ; to go back to the peoples and communities involved and talk about what the learnings had been, and what it actually is that creates an object of learning within a community. For instance, the dome went to Urban Creators, it’s their communal learning space now.^[6] The Futures Bus is now taken on the road by Cassandra Green as the F.A.T.O.E. art bus and is doing amazing work in the city.^[7] During “Philadelphia Assembled” it was not yet what it could be, but it became more fully itself afterward. The exhibition was a stage in a process of making, of learning, of becoming, in which one thing, one scenario took the process to somewhere else. This was when I started to think about “learning objects,” and what might be the intrinsic value of community learnings in some of these objects, how they have been essential for community learning.

People gathering around a set of questions that they bring themselves to the atmospheres, does not necessarily mean that they share the same value sets. I think that was clear within the Sanctuary atmosphere working group. As Damon might very well remember, in the second meeting of that group of twenty five people, it turned out that there were not many value sets that were held in common among them. The interesting response that the group produced was to say: “OK, let’s pause for a moment, let’s put judgement aside and let’s go and practice some of each other’s toolsets, in order to understand the works done and take it from there.” The idea of working collectively with different people’s skillsets or toolsets or value sets was born there, to deal with different undrstandings of Sanctuary. This idea became a very valuable way of thinking through and understanding different practices of care and engagement across the city at large.

I have been speaking about preparing for the not-yet, training for the not-yet, as a way of saying that what we are trying to do is to collectively rehearse and practice certain toolsets together, to learn in order to build forward. Denise Valentine,^[8] member of the artistic team and editor of the Reconstruction Atmoshere, was incredibly important in shaping the understanding that these things are non-linear, and that there is a need for a constant repetition for these things to become embodied practices. What became essential for me from these experiences, is the need to start thinking about these objects not as artifacts, not as art objects, but rather as objects of embodied community learning. They then could become something with which practices unfolded. Not a methodology to practice with the community, but a community learning to be practiced with others. This then formed the basis for “Trainings for the Not-Yet.”

MW: The move to the “Trainings for the Not-Yet,” the BAK exhibition project, was already mooted while you were still in the thick of the “Philadelphia Assembled” process. It seems clear that this insight about the learning object, coming out of “Philadelphia Assembled,” would become an important point of entry into the project at BAK.

JH: I became a Fellow at BAK in 2018, almost a year after “Philadelphia Assembled” had closed, and then we were in a process with Museum and Philadelphia Assembled collaborators looking at what could be learned. There was even the idea that there could be another iteration, that other collaborations might emerge, or there might be a continuation. The attempts at continuation didn’t work at that time. Looking back at it now, I think I can understand why. It’s probably because it was too early, and perhaps also because these things need to take their own route. Looking now at the present landscape of Philadelphia, there are a lot of people involved in “Philadelphia Assembled” who are still very actively pushing forward a lot of the agendas involved. I just heard… I saw Chris Rogers the other day online Damon…

Damon Reaves (DR): Yeah?… I haven’t talked to him in a while.

JH: … I spoke recently with Chris Roger, co-editor of the Futures Atmosphere who is currently working at the Paul Robeson House and Museum and part of bringing together a lot of different community participants—many also involved in Philadelphia Assembled—in an ArtPlace project called “The Philadelphia Assembly.”^[9] Philadelphia Assembled was not created in a vacuum but in the relational tissue of the city. It left different traces in the cultural frabric of the city and created a moment of amplification for already existing forces and made cross connections. … What that “in-between” time—after Philadelphia Assembled closed and the BAK Fellowship began—gave me, was an opportunity to think through some of these aspects that I describe now. I can describe them now because I undertook this whole trajectory. What was it that I thought was important? If I think about these learning objects as a kind of embodied vessel of community resistance, and that these are things to be learned from and practiced with, then how might that apply to some of my other works? What would be the objects that would embody the kinds of learnings within the practice? I started to think that through.

I moved from methodologies that are about civic praxis, civic engagement, into embodied vessels of community learning. Then the idea came up for a programme to train with these learning objects. I started to develop this during the BAK Fellowship, and then there was the idea to think of an exhibition as a series of traings with learning objects. I’ve been thinking a lot more about what it means to become collective, thinking through what is needed for ways to commit oneself to share other realities. Originally the title for the exhibition was “Becoming Collective At The End of Time,” which was something that also emerged in “Philadelphia Assembled.” I became very aware of the question of how we share our realities, of how we commit to that sharing, and of how to uphold this in practice and with care when we might not even share the same value set. These questions became very important for me. Marina Garcés says something to the effect that we are very bad at this, that we are bad at committing to share other realities besides our own.^[10] So how do we practice that then?

This led me to consider how to create ways of spending time together in practicing these different community learnings, learning from other projects and from those moments where this sharing of other realities has emerged. The idea was to bring all these together. From Philadelphia I brought the Towards Sanctuary dome and the timeline exercise from Denise Valentine, which is about ways of mapping non-linearly, ways of thinking through time and relationship. I brought the idea that “all time is local” from Black Quantum Futurism, the interdisiplinary art practice of Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips. This was an important way to think given that I don’t see the local as a postal code but rather as something that embodies global conflict with local specificity. If you relate that to time and say that all time is local, than thinking about non-linear time space coordinates becomes important. I started to look also at practices of durational listening into territory. For instance, I have been working over longer period of time now on this listening into the emotional tissue of a place through a series of so called “Public Faculties”; the one that I did in L.A. working with Dont Rhine from Ultra-Red and their practice of deep listening was especially important to my understanding. Ultra-Red’s notion of deep listening has been very influential to my practice. I see their practice as one of those trainings in learning with, and from, a community, and so it continues like that. That is how it has been built. This is why it’s important to describe how the “Philadelphia Assembled” exhibition was a stage on/in which the the city is performed through objects and program, but I think there needed to be another step taken. The BAK exhibition is a series of training moments/events, learning from and with others, and so it is no longer a stage. It is in the act of the embodied learning, in the training itself, that the exhibition emerged.

MW: Thank you for this compressed but extremely useful account of these complex, layered, and highly considered processes. Two things that resonate very strongly for me: one is the way in which the exhibition was seen for some of the institutional players in Philadelphia as a kind of culmination and terminus. Whereas the grassroots communities and agents involved in the process had a different relationship with the prospect of exhibition, moving from something not so important to something that acquired value because it allowed certain things to happen and unfold rather than to be finalized once and for all. Also interesting is the difference of protocol, the difference of understanding of what it means to be in exhibition between say the registrar’s role, on the one hand, and the people bringing their objects to the museum, on the other hand, whether those are spiritual or ritual objects, or the furniture and utensils of everyday living and encounter.

This change in the exhibitionary dynamics with the BAK show, where the trainings are conceived already within the exhibitionary process, as happening inside an exhibitionary frame, is important. But they are not conceived, to my understanding, as things to be looked on as performances in display, they are not framed as occasions of spectation. You were in the training or you weren’t there. There wasn’t a set-up for a spectator withholding themselves from the training for the not-yet. Perhaps to bring in Maria and Damon at this point, could you speak a little in terms of your experience of working with these exhibitionary processes. What might be the salient features of the exhibition process that departed from your usual working methodologies? What were the opportunities, challenges, differences that came into play?

JH: Perhaps I could just make one short observation here. Damon was both a participant in the artistic team as well as associated curator of education of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and is an accomplished artist and educator in his own right. I thought it was important to invite Damon to speak about this from both his participation perspective and from his educational background, since we are talking about this notion of learning and embodied learning within the process, and I think it’s important to contextualize the invitation in this way.

DR: It’s of course very difficult to take over from Jeanne, when there is so much to consider, so I’m hunting a little bit now as to where to begin…

Maria Hlavajova (MH): So many things were brought to my mind, Jeanne, as you were talking. Jeanne, as you were talking, so many things came to my mind. But to begin somewhere: It’s quite interesting to observe that you refer to the project in Philadelphia as “the Philadelphia project” and the project in Utrecht as “the BAK project.” There is a quite interesting shift from the city to the institution, and maybe there is something to unpack there.

Institutionally, we see BAK as a space where one can, concomitantly, think about how “things” are; imagine how they could be otherwise; and live these imaginaries, these alternative imaginations⎯as if it were possible to do so. We try to think of BAK as a base, a basis, that operates at the intersection of art; knowledge (or “science”; although I know the language is not helping here); and what we refer to as social action. Yet each time I hear myself saying “intersection,” I am also asking myself whether they are not actually held in relative separation: here is “something” that relates to science and knowledge and theory; there is an artistic project; and overthere still, there is work that we do alongside activists. I think that the radical challenge that Jeanne brought in, was to collapse the distinctions and distances between these (often) separate worlds.

I am not sure though that this “collapsing” means the complete removal of spectation from the complex set of propositions that the exhibition “Trainings for the Not-Yet” makes. You could still visit the exhibition as an exhibition if you so chose. There were visitors who⎯relying on the archive of knowledge of Western modernity and the “certainties” about art and exhibitions and the world it instills⎯were just looking at objects and people inhabiting the space while training together, even if the trainings weren’t performances and the objects weren’t (necessarily) artworks. They were reservoirs of community learnings, and of resilience, and of possibility, as Jeanne said. Setting up the exhibition as “a series of trainings” anticipates a practice that is in excess of reflecting and viewing. Building intrinsically on the legacies of project-exhibition and research-exhibition, the exhibition-as-a-series-of-trainings engages something I refer to as “anticipatory learning”: a coming together, with and through art, to learn that which does not yet exist. And I mean learning by doing; hands on, through direct involvement and intervention. In this sense, I see Jeanne’s artistic practice as micro-aesthetico-political experimentation, aided by fiction, around the question of how to be together otherwise. This is not utopian imagining; it does not partake in the fallacy of “one day, somewhere else, better human species appear to build a new world to live happily ever after…” No. Rather, the notion of the not-yet is (to borrow a term from Omedi Ochieng) a chronotopian category Instead of an endlessly deferred realization of the questionable promise of a better world “to come” within the linear progression of time, it stands for the collective commitment to carve the propositional life-world-in common, by strengthening the muscle (that’s what trainings are for!) of that possibility. One could thus think trainings for the not-yet as enacting a collectively negotiated understanding of what would make for a good society.

With this, I am reminded of what was ultimately my school of politics, coming of age in the aftermath of Charter 77 in former Czechoslovakia. I am thinking in particular of a humble, yet an incredibly powerful publication Parallel Polis (1976) by Vaclav Benda. The way I read the text originally was not as a mere imagining of a just society, but as a concrete set of tools and protocols for building a just society⎯by learning and doing, embodying it simultaneously with building it. Importantly, this was to be realized not merely against, but in spite of, the totalitarian circumstances all aroud. Practicing an affirmative disengagement with powers that be, if you will, Parallel Polis proposed creating and sustaining infrastructures, both physical and relational, of a world otherwise than that one we knew at the time. If really existing in an “underground” modality, these parallel structures were not just envisioned; they were brought to life, materialized, lived, embodied, etc. through⎯to retroprospectively apply Jeanne’s lexicon⎯training for the not-yet. That meant the concrete, longue durée, laborious, dangerous, delicate and uncertain practicing of the skills and ethical relationality (just think of the alternative educational system, ecological agenda, workers’ support, culture and music scene, legal system, alternative library and publications, etc.) necessary to prepare for, and to sustain, livable life in common, in a politically latent form now, and as fully public practice once the political circumstances present themselves as such.

I would like to suggest however to think “Trainings for the Not-Yet” as a “mere” phase within a longer-term itinerary, resisting the logic and the temporality of the “project” in the life of the art institution, and thus perhaps even reworking the notion of “the contemporary.” Thinking specifically about the relationality of those engaged in trainings together, it didn’t start, and it didn’t end, with the exhibition. It is an ongoing process within which the exhibition is just one moment of public surfacing; surfacing to the public realm for negotiating things collectively. Jeanne and BAK continue working together on multiple grounds: a number of people involved in the trainings became BAK Fellows, to work with Jeanne on concrete protocols of sustained relations between their respective communities and BAK; they then stayed with us as BAK Accomplices; and now we are engaging with them and many others in seeking ways how BAK could function as a “community portal” of sorts, continuing to inquire into the meaning of the art institution in people’s lives in the world in the state of increasing brokenness. Can we “institute otherwise” this relationality stemming from the trainings for the not-yet, de-authorize the normalizing voice of the art institution,^[11] and turn it into a site of public practice of living-in-common?

MW: This is a very interesting theme that you bring us to: that the exhibitionary event or process is also an operation on the institution and not just an operation by the institution. There is an older analysis of exhibition as a form of institutional utterance. It is the institution that announces, speaks, declares “look this is what is, this is what matters.” However, you are describing very different dynamics. This is more than seeing the exhibition as one surface, one moment within a more complex unfolding and multiple process. It is also positing the exhibition as in some sense an operator on the institution. Perhaps this is a point to come to you Damon, in relation to your experience working with the “Philadelphia Assembled” process. What are your thoughts on these exhibitionary dynamics?

DR: You bring up a really interesting point. Hearing you talk Maria, about the process at BAK, makes me a little envious when I think of how some of those conversations might have played out in the museum. I love “Philadelphia Assembled” and I wouldn’t want to change anything about it, however, I do wonder what it would have been like had we gone through a round of training before going into the project. What would have happened? The exhibition as the institutional voice in contrast to the exhibition as an operation that works upon the institution, that was an ongoing tension point for the museum as it tried to figure out what to do with this thing that was happening to it. I use those words with all sorts of love and excitement and energy. It was a force that was being harnessed, coalesced in the project—something powerful was happening—and I think that became apparent early on in the process, when the atmosphere groups started meeting, and the conversations started trickling and percolating through. We started thinking, even in this very early phase, about how marketing and communication, other institutional systems and process, might not be nimble enough and adaptable enough to really keep up with the forces and dynamics the project put into play. Much to Jeanne’s credit, I think the project was seeking to find ways to insert this energy and build enough relationships across the wider institutional structure to maintain this already from the beginning. Institutions are made up of individuals, made up of people. When we dissect and act upon that, and build relationships with the individual people, this can help tweak and pull things as needed, and find other ways to get things done.

There is an engine at the museum that makes these things happen. For an institution of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s size, it is very common for exhibitions to dictate everything that happens: programming structures, marketing dollars, donor conversations, so whatever special exhibition is happening drives everything else. We had this special exhibition that was built from a different kind of relationship. It wasn’t an artist’s voice or a curatorial voice being put forward. I think the institution was even confused about where it fit within the dialogue, without that singular voice hang it on. This manifested in those conversations about “where do we put the logo?” “Does this have a logo?” “Is this allowed on our website?” Jeanne smartly suggested we needed to create a separate website, to remove it from getting caught up in the impasse that we have this one standard way of working in the museum, etc. It was clear that this project couldn’t function like a standard output from the museum’s exhibition engine. We would have to think differently.

Perhaps Jeanne, you remember this. I can’t remember which exhibition was on, it was either the Johnson collection or it was “Old Master’s Now.” It was the most extreme opposite exhibition that could have happened. I don’t know how intentional that was, but it spoke volumes. There was this engine turning over in the main building that was like super traditional, super basic, while our satellite space, the Perelman building across the street was where this other thing, this other dynamic, “Philadelphia Assembled,” was happening. I think this spatial arrangement worked. It allowed this place, this building, to be taken over and it allowed a partial step back from the institutional routine. This benefited the project. However, it was an interesting lesson in how hard it is to get beyond the system that drives the traditional exhibition. There were moments where I felt like the institution was trying to impose that normal structure, whether it was issues like “I’m not seeing enough of the artist Jeanne in here.” A phrase that I was really fond of using throughout the whole exhibition, was: “This isn’t something were presenting. This is something we are excited to be a participant in.” This was formulated to acknowledge that we were participants, that we were wrangling with things and providing some spaces, but that was even more reason why we had to position ourselves as an equal participant in the conversation, and not as the leader or as the driving force for what was happening.

JH: Yes, I remember. I think there was even a newspaper article that said to forget about “Philadelphia Assembled” and go see the old masters in the main building. It was a very deliberate choice to do it in this satellite building, because it enabled us to take over the whole space, take over the café, take over the auditorium, take over the library, take over everything, the gallery spaces, even the way we dealt with the entrance and things like that, to create a Parallel Polis if you like. If we had had two or three rooms in the main building, these things would not have been possible. We also had a different door policy. The guards were also instrumental in this. They became advocates at the door for what was happening in the exhibition because they also related in a different way to this exhibition than to the others produced by the engine. The exhibition became its own universe. You could say that was its strength, though it was sometimes also its weak point.

DR: Maria, I’m thinking back to something that you said, which I’m now going to horribly misquote. You were talking about practice, the word kept coming up, talking about “Trainings for the Not-Yet” as a series of trainings as exhibition. I would say that “Philadelphia Assembled,” and Jeanne, please shoot this down if you disagree, was the practice of doing all these things that we, as a museum, often say we want to do: that it was actualizing the otherwise pie-in-the-sky proposition that we really are a “community center”; that the museum is actually at the intersection of the community and art; that art should and can be very democratic; and that art doesn’t have to represent everyone’s ideas but that everyone’s ideas are welcome in this space. It put an extreme demand on everyone to figure out how that worked, how we could try to really embody all that. For the institution it meant “how do we get out of our own way?” “How do we rethink what food service means?” “How do we actually get ourselves to ask what is it that we are trying to protect when we say we can’t have moths in the building? Why is that?” The core issue is supposed to be about protecting some objects, however, what can we do to actually protect those objects? What does it mean having seventeen different rules that in theory are supposed to be protecting the objects, but instead create alientation.

I think that the exercise in taking over a place, forming a network that can function within an institution was also a learning for the collaborators, The understanding, for example, that we want to cook in the kitchen, but because there is a ventilation system that through poor design mechanics circulates air into the costume storage, we have to consider what kind of fish we cook, and how it could permanently alter those objects through smells. There were other moments, such as when at the end of our day, ushering collaborators out of the space saying “OK. It’s seven o’clock. It’s two hours past when we close,” someone turns and says, “Oh we get it. The museum, the bureaucracy, you don’t want to have us here that late.” There was the need to push back a bit and say: “Actually, I have two security guards who need to get home. They don’t want to miss their last bus. They have kids that they need to do their homework with. They are part of the community that you are embodying in this space.” This is about understanding the multiplicity of people that exist in the instituion. This is a matter of trying to acknowledge the institutional structures and bureaucracies but also to acknowledge the individuals, who make up that institution, but who don’t hold the institutional power. We also have to make sure to think about them when we have these conversations. I think there is so much learning that moved back and forth on both sides, throughout the entire process. It was not always easy, but when it worked (which I would argue was more often than not), it was just so wonderfully magical. It is one of those things that people still talk about. There were just these key moments when it really worked.

MW: The reference to the review of “Philadelphia Assembled” instructing readers to go see the other show at the museum, reminds me of one of the BAK show reviews in the Dutch press, which also had this, perhaps not quite so dismissive, but nonetheless similar critique of the exhibition as not working as a “proper” exhibition. I’m curious about the wider critical reception of the exhibitions in both cases. Perhaps you have some thoughts on that? Another issue which might take us in a different direction is how through these exhibitionary processes, there are users of the institutional space, there are people using the exhibition, they are active agents of putting things in display, they themselves are performing in the space, or doing things in the space, and they are also bringing in other users of the space, who are perhaps not the traditional constituencies for these institutions. With respect to brokering relationships between different constituencies and the space of exhibition, how does that play out? Is it a co-option of those constituencies? What kind of agency do they have within the exhibitionary space? I’m saying the exhibition could be understood as an operation on the institution, is that really what happens? Maria you mentioned this community portal, and Damon you mentioned the significance of working in the satellite building, in the across-the-street site, where different things were possible.

I’m wondering about the afterglow, the aftermath of what for some is the “primary” moment of visibility, when the exhibition has passed, what are the consequences, or traces, or legacies? I’m wondering what happens in those exhibitionary spaces afterwards? Another question might be whether the institutional protocols get revised a little bit, or not? This is not quite asking if they will have moths in with the oil paintings and textiles, but maybe some things are adjusted—in how the registrar works, or how the opening hours are planned, or how other simple, pragmatic operations are conducted. Are there changes?

DR: I want to pick up on the critical response question. What I loved about what Jeanne did in response to the review, something that we would not normally do, is that she invited that critic in and constructed a dialogue within the exhibition itself. They had a conversation one Saturday afternoon at the Paul Robeson stage. Jeanne did an excellent job of not letting critism exist as an isolated event, but rather incorporated it, made it part of what the exhibition was about which was the ongoing dialogue and the constant processes of learning and trying to inhabit different realities.

MH: Maybe I can connect to this, because your question probably refers to the review in the main newspaper in the Netherlands, which labelled Jeanne’s practice as “relational aesthetics,” using the term that Nicolas Bourriaud introduced in 1996. Of course, there is a deep problem here. There is a particular understanding of what exhibitions (should) look like on the surface, and not what exhibitions do; not what kind of relationality can be built from the exhibitions⎯like Jeanne’s⎯to the communities and back. If only the author took part in any of the trainings! In Community Futurisms, for example, with Black Quantum Futurism; or in QFCPSSBBXOXO: Queer and Feminist Physical and Critical Self-Defense and Support Bloc of Bodies, with a subdivision of To Be Determined (Clara Balaguer and Gabriel Fontana); or in Disrupting Neoliberal Urban Governance: New Organizational Forms for the Immediate Future, with Urban Front (David Harvey and Miguel Robles-Duran); or in Exploring Untimely Togetherness, with Beatrice Catanzaro, in collaboration with with Kolar Aparna, and with Mehratu Efrem Gebreab; or, well, in any of the trainings, actually.

I am saying this humbly, as I would like to understand what can we do together to recognize the complex realities of the present conjuncture in art and community relations, incommensurable with the yesteryear that still governs the art critic’s vocabulary. And thus, the biggest challenge ahead of us is to rethink the extant categories and build together a new lexicon: not of terms and labels, but of relations. And if, indeed, the notion of relation and relatedness is at the basis of this exhibition and Jeanne’s practice, it builds more on the genealogies of, say, the poetics of relation by Edouard Glissant than on Bourriaud; on visionary fiction rather than on the violent neoliberal present; on fugitive studies and anticipatory learning rather than on “art as information exchanged between the artist and the viewers”;^[12] and on relational ethics of the processes of communing⎯based on mutual respect, deep listening, care, embodied knowledges, multi-vocal and transversal processes of interaction, more-than-human cosmopolitics, uncertainty, and so on⎯ rather than its relational aesthetics counterpart that is internal to capitalist relationality.

That said… Damon, a small remark in response when you say that you are almost “jealous” of how we operate at BAK. You know, unlike PMA, we don’t have a collection; we don’t carry that gigantic responsibility to history to archive and canonize, or that gigantic responsibility to private sponsors to partake in the competition of the latest hypes or for larger-than-life audiences. BAK is a small, experimental, theoretically-informed and politically-driven art institution. By choice, I need to add; knowing how the museum infrastructure⎯with its demand to be conserved or to be resisted⎯allows for little, if any, room for the “otherwise,” that we want to make claim upon at BAK. Yet interestingly, you also brought in this image of, or yearning for, becoming a community centre, and it reminded me of a conversation I have had many times with Jeanne, when I queried what it is that we are doing; are we turning BAK into a community centre…? Back then Jeanne reminded me, when discussing the notion of “instituting otherwise,” that falling back upon what already exists, what we already know, an institutional format that is already there, with its own problems and challenges… is not the way to go. And, boy, have we experienced this first hand. Working on this exhibition was such a demanding process! I wonder what institution, what knowledges, what team, what skillset is capable to hold and sustain these kind of practices that unfold through cocreating with thousands of people at once, welcoming thousands of people not for viewing an exhibition but for contributing to a training for making a better world. In all honesty… and I do not even know how to name this… but for months, if not years, on end⎯that’s what it feels like in hindsight⎯we at BAK were on the brink of a nervous breakdown. 24/7, in extreme speed! Wiggling the frame, indeed.

JH: …Damon?!

DR: I remember! [laughing]

MW: This is an interesting question about the dynamic that these operations set up. It is one that becomes pretty much all-consuming for certain players in the situation. It becomes something that eats into the whole of your time, your morning, your evening, all your energies. In a way, this is also an important part of the vibe within the process. There is an intensity about operating an imaginary that becomes passionately lived. However, this disrupts the kind of logics of nine-to-five work and puts into play powerful affective economies. I know these are issues that are already considered within the work—considerations about affect, about care, about hosting, about sustainability, about mutuality—but then the dynamic of the projects themselves seems to solicit from people, especially in both of these cases, a huge commitment of emotional and physical labor.

DR: Yes. I mean I think it’s just required. I don’t know. I’m also a couple of years out of it now [laughs] you know. If you had talked to me immediately after the project, I might have said it was a problem, but now I don’t think it is Yes, there is an extra emotional weight, because you are caring for so many relationships, people coming from radically different places and thought patterns, meant that there were continual pockets of conflict. You know, among collaborators, between collaborators and the institution, within the institution, in all sorts of spots, so you are constantly holding all of those things. However, I think you are rewarded for the time and commitment that you put into it. Obviously, I think, it is not humanly possible for one individual to carry all this continuously. You need your breaks. You need separation. But the positive moments that come out of this collectivity and this connectedness are so meaningful. There were specific events and times and days within “Philadelphia Assembled” that I think really were just so rewarding.

I also want to go back to when it comes to thinking about the traditional audience. We did some audience research with “Philadelphia Assembled.” While I have questions about the data collection methodology, one could say, based on the numbers, that PHLA didn’t attract a large “new” audience. There was a larger portion of our traditional audience that turned out. While the take away for some colleagues might be to say “this didn’t really move the needle on getting a diverse audience,” I believe that a better takeaway would be to realize how interested our members were in this other kind of conversation. I believe that we need to stop assuming who our membership base is, what they like, and what they do because we have only ever offered them the one thing. The fact was that they were interested in Philadelphia Assembled. They came back time and time again to this other way of engaging in art. Sadly, this is one of the lessons that I don’t think we learned institutionally. At least not completely. There is a pocket of those conversations that has continued. The pandemic has forced us to rethink our programs. The calls for social justice are forcing us to examine our role in the world. But how much further could we be in the process if we had fully embraced the learnings of “Philadelphia Assembled”? There was an expectation that this project would expand our audience. We didn’t fully embrace the expectation that it should change us.

JH: We kept the people out of the old masters [laughs]

DR: Right! Exactly.

JH: Thank you for bringing this to the fore. There is quite often the misunderstanding with this kind of practice that it is a kind of new audience thing, or that socially engaged practice is about audience development. No! It’s about extending the conversation.

DR: That misunderstanding also feeds into the problematic way that we code. This is something I have been dealing with recently. I can only speak to my American experience here. The way we use the word “community,” as code for “poor people of colour.” In an American museum context, that means that social practice is often meant to expand our connection with lower income people of colour, who will then, because we did this, fall in love with the museum and engage in all the other things that we do. We won’t any of the ways we operate, but this will be single effort will be enough.

MH:. I think this is really important. At BAK we’ve done quite some research on “future publics,” on the question of how your institutional practices necessarily change if you are not primarily focused on the “regular” exhibition visitor⎯be it the subject-position of a viewer, observer, perceiver, spectator-consumer, or even participant⎯but rather want to build an ecological-qualitative relation, on a sustained, long-term basis, with the “class of the disenchanted” from across the society (and I am aware of the difficulty with this terminology, but will take a risk to use this as a placeholder, for the lack of a better expression). It is not the formulation that you just used, Damon, although it is very much emerging also in the Netherlands that the term “community” is used to indicate a neighbourhood comprising mostly people of colour with, as the Dutch euphemistically name it, “lower socio-economic” status. Mainly through the work with Jeanne, we are trying to articulate another sort of collectivity for the idea of the art institution as a community portal. We have been thinking about this collectivity as consisting in shared commitment to one another, fostering relationships rooted in freedom as well as social, cultural, and ecological justice. A collectivity that is formed not through shared ideological, religious, or other views⎯that is a kind of identity politics that we do not want to reproduce⎯but through this idea of commitment. In this sense, I wonder whether instead of communities, one could think it terms of collective struggles we engage in through multitude intersectional entwinements. To be sure, I am aware that the art institution can merely speak “nearby,”^[13] so that it can solidarize with the struggle without colonizing it. This is hugely important I think, as communities survive only as long as they consist of a set of relations decisively distinct from the institutional infrastructure. I see the institutional, patronizing, colonial-acquisitive relation toward communities all around, and it is disheartening to see the forceful appropriation of struggles and communities as museum audiences.

Thinking of BAK as community portal involves this notion of the shared commitment to one another, as well as the practice of being nearby… to make itself and its resources available, as and if needed, for unforeseen forms of encounters to take place. The portal is meant to disrupt the (spatio-temporal-agential) politics of business-as-usual of the world and offer a space to practice “being together otherwise.” Offering itself as a space where the pathways toward another future can be co-envisioned and co-actualized, in thought, imaginary, and, to be sure, collective and embodied practice. A training ground for the not-yet, if you will. Seen this way, the exhibition “Trainings for the Not-Yet” was less an operation of the institution than an operation on the institution, with the long-lasting, significant imprint and consequences for BAK’s ethos of “instituting otherwise.”

MW: We have covered a great deal of material in our conversation so far, but if I could be allowed to raise one last issue, it is to return to this theme that Jeanne introduced at the very start. This reluctance to inhabit other worlds. I think you described the Sanctuary Atmosphere working group and how they developed a practice when reaching a point of radical disagreement, when they just could not agree at the level of key values, that rather than struggle with each other to persuade, they sought to inhabit each other’s practices, taking on each other’s tools. I’m thinking about this in terms of processes of really radical disagreement, profoundly being at odds with each other. Power struggles, conflicts. Damon you mentioned that there were conflicts between the collaborators, conflicts between collaborators and the museum, and within the museum. These processes would seem to always produce moments of contestation, conflict, and struggle. I’ve understood it to be an intrinsic element of Jeanne’s practice that these agonistic moments are not problems to be solved, but that they are intrinsic social values. I am wondering about how this is actualized or operative in the process of exhibition too. How might the exhibition site be understood and operated as a site that is in some way structured by contestation, conflict, struggle—not big, grand, dramatic struggles—just tensions, forces pulling in different directions? If you have any thoughts on this question of disagreement, conflict, the competing agencies within the space of exhibition perhaps these could serve as a way to bring our coneversation to a close.

JH: I can speak about “Philadelphia Assembled” around these things. There were so many moments, but [laughs] there were daily, hourly [laughs]…

DR: Yes! [laughs]

JH: One of the moments that I immediately think about, is the conversations with the Alumni Ex-Offenders Association, when they said that they wanted to inhabit the Framework for an Affordable House in the exhibition and to do their normal “deep check-in” meetings, publicly within the museum. The “house” structure was made as a wooden skeleton, a box-like structure, with repeating wooden bars. So I said “OK, let’s stop here together and let’s just talk through what it means to have you perform your meetings, or have your meetings here in this reconstruction of an affordable house in the Museum. Are you performing yourself? What does this do? Are you on display?” This was a very intense question: “Are you aware it might look like you put yourself on display, or that I put you on display, or that we put you on display?” We had a tremendously interesting conversation about that. I was totally scared about what would happen there, but they didn’t feel it like that. They saw it as an opportunity to practice in public, and that also by performing themselves in public they were using it as a learning opportunity. In the end, none of the meetings were perceived as a display. Still, that was for me one of those moments that I was concerned about how this is preceived. Then there is another moment I remember, when the MOVE Family wanted to display a painting from Sophia Dawson, a picture of Delbert Africa arrested by the police based on the very famous photograph. They are very fond of the painting, it has great importance for them. But in the painting Delbert has a halo, and for some people in the museum this was seen as problemetic, the portrayal of Delbert Africa as a Saint. The history of MOVE is a contested story in Philadelphia. There was an interesting negotiation about the picture and MOVE’s participation.

MW: Can I just check, it was not so much that this was an ideological disagreement, rather it was that the image for some was problematic, in seeming to attach an idea of saintliness or holiness to something that is secular…

JH: …Yes. This is just one of these conflict moments. I don’t want to go through all the conflicts, some of which were more intense than others. But these were interesting moments at which you discuss values. As Damon says, within the museum and the institution there are also value sets at work, about what we uphold together, about what we think makes a good image ; all of us have ideas of how things should be presented, and what presents well or not. This discussion is I think much more complicated. In that space of collective imaginary and collectively presenting different forms of value sets that one wants to uphold, you see the constant conflict of different value sets at work. That can potentially unpack really difficult histories. But there is also the way that people feel they should then present themselves, or question whether they are under-presented or over-presented. These were for me some of the very important conflict moments which I think were productive in one way or another. At least for me they were productive to think through “How does this unfold?”

Katrina Baxter,^[14] part of the artistic team and editor for the Sovereignty Atmosphere working group, when asked in a interwiew with Elisabeth Perez-Luna if she joined the project because of trusting it, responded: “I actually joined the project because I didn’t trust it. I still don’t trust it. But I thought it will happen anyway so I will make sure to be a part of it so I can hold the project accountable.” This is also about these power dynamics that we spoke about previously: “OK, we can participate within the frame that is offered, but we are never invited to actually set the frame…” I think this is what the biggest conflict of “Philadelphia Assembled” was, that constant wiggling of the frame from all sides, not with one particularly well- or not well-articulated counter proposal, but a permanent wiggling. This is perhaps what is meant by commitment. This is why these processes are so intense. It is because these projects need that intensity, they needs that constant wiggling of the frame. My feeling throughout the work with “Philadelphia Assembled,” with the PMA, was that I was dancing on quicksand with an elephant.

[All laugh]

Trying to dance with an elephant on quicksand, that is constantly moving around, and this constant wiggling of the frame, speaks to who actually has the right, the capacity or who should frame. It is the constant wiggling of the frame to create imaginaries for a future in common.

DR: Perhaps, just to add to that, what is perhaps especially complicated is when you have two underrepresented and oppressed groups that are in direct conflict with each other. That happened more than once. This requires a lot more care and compassion, particularly if you are coming from a position of power relative to the dynamic of the situation. When you are in those kind of conversations, I think you have to shift your understanding to realize that conflict doesn’t have to a bad thing. Conflict can help create better understanding or clarify boundaries. Not everything has to be resolved in the moment. Holding space for conflict, accepting conflict, using conflict productively, becomes really important. To take this all back to the question of the exhibition, I think it is when you embrace the shared authority and the complications that come with the possibilities of what an exhibition could be, that you get these beautiful moments like “Trainings for the Not-Yet” and “Philadelphia Assembled.”