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Confluence:

An East Lake Studio

for Community Design

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Sat, Sep. 25, 2021 ⁄ 5:30–8:00pm

An Introduction to: Reconstruction – Area – Memory

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Join us at our cargo-container studio, the AMMU (Autonomous Mobile Media Unit), in the courtyard of 3032 Minnehaha Ave at 5:30pm this Saturday, Sept. 25th for the launch of our newest social tool, R-A-M: Reconstruction-Area – Memory. 

 

R-A-M is a toolkit for recognizing others committed to constructing neighborhoods of care so that people may engage in conversations on street corners or host community forums to rebuild their neighborhoods, in our case, the 9th Ward enclaves of Powderhorn, Central, East Phillips, and Near Bryant. We’re gathering as creative folks, artists, organizers, and local troublemakers to experiment and collaboratively imagine with our neighbors to plan a different future for East Lake Street, one where a multitude of voices and visions lead.

East Lake Street is being rebuilt in ways that will continue to push out our neighbors, local businesses, and the communities we’ve formed here. Political Representatives, Property Developers, and other PIGs (Private Interest Groups) are hoarding the power to decide on what the future of our neighborhoods and city systems will be rather than creating forums and processes for us all to collectively decide through cooperation, care, and creativity. Our formation, Confluence, is an anarchic Community Design Studio for people to come together and redevelop Minneapolis’ 9th Ward from the grassroots. R-A-M, along with the AMMU, and other mechanisms in the works, are simple, open sourced tools for recognition and cooperative creation. They are free and available for all to use as they see fit.

We’re reaching out to invite you to be a co-inventor of tools that amplify our power as the people who give life to East Lake Street and the surrounding neighborhoods so that we might reimagine and rebuild this place we call home.

Please join us at the AMMU (in the courtyard adjacent to the 3rd Precinct at 3032 Minnehaha Ave.) at 5:30pm this Saturday, Sept. 25th. Duaba, Sam, and Vic will give a brief overview of R-A-M, it’s design and use. From there we’ll test out the tool with your help.

Snacks and good cheer on site!

Sep. 21, 2021 · 4:08pm· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Fri, Feb. 19, 2021 ⁄ 11:00am–12:15pm

Tomorrow is the Question: Listening as Action

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Workshop #3 – Tomorrow is the Question: Listening as Action – Discussion begins @  11am / Friday, February 19th

https://carleton.zoom.us/j/96423561102?pwd=cG16VUtLT0ZwMk1taUIwUHdXK25sQT09

Looking towards aspects of the African diasporic tradition and its tools, such as cooperative creation, improvisation, and deep listening, we are provided both inside and outside of the context of musicianship, guides that can play significant and important roles in our lives as active neighbors in community. These are social tools to carry with us day-to-day.

For this third workshop for the class Fate is Kind, we will be joined by artist, musician, and 9th Ward elder Douglas Ewart. Centering our focus on the techniques and histories of so-called jazz, “social music” as it was described by Miles Davis, or simply, as described by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Great Black Music we will, in general, think through how this traditions qualities play a role for non-musicians to be more attentive neighbors. And in specific, we’ll listen to how these attitudes and qualities have played out in Douglas’ life and work, and what his experiences in cooperative creation can teach us moving forward in common.

Feb. 18, 2021 · 7:21pm· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Social Tools and Collective Imagining

For the early stages, and just as much moving forward, the work at Roberts Annex: Past, Present, & Future aimed towards illustrating the “desires of the neighborhood” as opposed to its current needs. Why did we find this necessary in creating a framework towards determining the future use of the Roberts site? We were afforded two perfect examples of why in a matter of weeks, following the start of this process. With the onset of the Corona Virus and the murder of George Floyd, the uprising and its aftermath, the “needs” of the neighborhood turned on a dime. Each pressing need competing with the next for its due focus. So, does this mean that at all times we ignore present needs? Of course not. But needs, while telling and often trenchant, don’t tell the whole story. They are an element of an unfolding narrative. Desire moves at a slower, more organic pace and allows for a deeper understanding of what makes life “livable,” or at least could, if made expressible and within reach. And so, when afforded, such as in the case of the Roberts site, working on the clock of “People’s Time,” by focusing on the desires of those who show up, and by providing means to express those desires in ways most applicable to their nature, the rooted, long standing needs of the neighborhood will begin to more clearly reveal themselves. And in this fashion, we’ll find that those rooted needs will be stronger, and if supported, more resilient and responsive to future crisis and / or friction. It’s in this way that our process aimed to look towards both the material AND immaterial future of the site. By doing so, the work helps to cultivate a resilient form, the energizing of a space between peoples.

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The most salient asset at our disposal to help illustrate desire and cultivate rooted need was the construction of Social Tools, by which we mean forms that have a low barrier of entry, are inviting but necessarily abstract in some way, ask for involvement and assistance, and are always in a process of transformation based on use. Social Tools are the result of Social Craft. Craft, at its core, is about refining something to its simplest, surest form to provide the greatest amount of use with ease. In the Old English Cræft meant strength or skill. In this sense a “small craft” references a boat, well-made, easy to use, perfectly understandable and accessible at its core, ready to take you someplace. Social Tools invite you to go somewhere with others. 

We began, as previously explained, with the lot itself, inviting neighbors to transform the land through cooperation and shared labor, experience, and knowledge. In collaboration with Moon Palace Books – prior to Covid and the Uprising, a vital space for communing around the social and political desires of the Ward – we decided to site a “pay-what-you-wish” newsstand on the lot. A “design build” project, the construction of the newsstand itself illustrated that the work on the lot was: communal, cooperative, open, and amateurish in its best sense, as in created through care and affection over profit. We began to construct the newsstand over time and in tandem with cultivation of the land itself. The newsstand acted as an information kiosk so that, multiple days per week, an ambassador to the ethos of the work could be on-site to speak with curious neighbors. A broadside newspaper, in an edition of 5000, was designed, printed, and distributed from the newsstand (as well as hand-to-hand and to neighbors homes) that explained the goals of the work at Roberts. Books were made available that could be purchased for whatever price you wished to give. A purchase could be made with money or a simple “thanks, I’m so excited to read this.” Books of all sorts were donated by Moon Palace, neighbors and far-away Roberts enthusiasts, and international publishers like Penguin Random House and Verso Books.

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Neighbors walked by and asked questions. Often they would ask if they could help, literally dropping what they were doing, picking up a hammer or a shovel, carting wood chips in a wheelbarrow across the lot. Many dug up plants in their own yards, transplanting them to the Roberts lot. Western Container Company donated a shipping container which was slowly transformed to house printing and binding equipment for a community printshop. This transformation involved, just as much, sawing and fastening as it did sitting on the lot with neighbors with a barbacoa taco from across the street at Los Ocampo, discussing ideas about what fashioning our own print media to discuss the re-building of our neighborhood could look like.

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Sam Babatunde Ero-Phillips (architect and urban planner), Christie Owens (grade school educator and healer), and “Mack the Barber,” whose barbershop is located just a few blocks down the road from the site of George Floyd’s murder on 38th St. collaborated on a pop-up barbershop and altar. Mack provided free haircuts for a week’s time on the lot. In collaboration with artist and professor John Kim, Chair of Media Studies at Macalester College, we staged an ongoing series of dialogues titled From Emergency to Emergence: Shaping the Future with Mutual Aid and Solidarity that focused a macro-to-micro lens on issues of mutual aid and cooperation in light of the present state of the neighborhood and its geographical and historical analogs. A collaboration with our neighbors, CLUES – Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio, took place wherein for a day the lot was turned into a much needed resource distribution site for fresh food, school supplies, and more. Art installations appeared and disappeared, musicians such as Davu Seru and Mankwe Ndosi performed, puppet shows and improvisations took place, benches were built, and most importantly, conversations unfolded over time and over shared labor.

Jan. 12, 2021 · 12:32pm· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Fri, Jan. 13, 2017 ⁄ 7:00–9:00pm

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Beyond Repair & Eastlake Craft Brewery are collaborating towards an on-going platform to democratically fund neighbor devised and implemented projects for the 9th Ward that energize creative strategies supporting well-being and personal freedom against racism, xenophobia, misogyny and all that other pile of crap that seems to be, increasingly, a-okay nowadays.

Join us on Jan. 13th at the brewery. Tell your friends. Drink some delicious beer. Propose a project. Win some money. Do some good with it. Come back next time and tell us what’s what.

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Get Brewing! : A Micro Funding/Brewing Platform Supporting Neighborhood Creative Engagement for Defense and Wellness in South Minneapolis
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Beyond Repair and Eastlake Craft Brewing have devised a micro-grant presentation platform – Get Brewing! – established to promote and support creative social engagement around defense and wellness in the 9th Ward neighborhoods of Powderhorn, Central, and Phillips. Modeled after FEAST (“a recurring public dinner designed to use community-driven financial support to democratically” fund project proposals) Get Brewing! invites 9th Ward neighbors to individually or collaboratively propose projects that imaginatively address how we, as neighbors, can care for, assist, and protect one another within this moment of unease.

Every other Friday at 7pm, starting January 13th, drop by Eastlake for a beer. Propose a project, or simply listen in on the great ideas of your fellow neighbors. Proposals will be voted on by all in attendance. With $2 from every full-size beer sold to participants that evening going into the Get Brewing! fund, the winner walks away with that night’s profits to help support the realization of their idea. Winners return at the next gathering of Get Brewing! to share what they’ve done.

Within a moment where distrust and fear, hate crimes, and general unease are at a fever pitch, models and actions that address how we care for one another, as well as ourselves, are not simply a good idea, but vital social tools for mental health and personal freedom in advance of crisis. Get Brewing! creates a social space to critically address these concerns and highlight methods of support for one another from the ground up. With communal intent we, as neighbors, can energize ideas that benefit us all, starting with our neighbors most at risk within a climate of heightened aggression and intolerance.

Have a beer!
Come up with an idea!
Commit to one another!
Repeat as necessary!!

Dec. 28, 2016 · 4:21pm· Resident Weirdo· ∞

"It was Broken When You Bought it"

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