Rehearsing for the Real Thing: Infrastructure Practice

​Introductions built on trust can become infrastructure.

​Most liberation movements that we respect and study today had an artistic wing that was foundational to their successes. Imagination was the MVP tool for strategy, recruitment, education, archive, and making sure people wanted to keep holding the line. When a political system wanted a movement dead, it defunded its artists, because the system knows that creativity is the fuel for collective power.

​Keeping us in survival mode is by design: keep the people holding the line too busy to dream, and keep the dreamers too far from the line to matter. Friday at EastSide Arts Alliance, we break that design and follow a different one. We kickoff NET's national matchmaking initiative: pairing frontline workers and community organizers with artist facilitators rooted in place through collective cultural formations. Imagination and Dreaming as divination for strategy making. We begin right here, with our first matchmaking session in Huichin and Yelamu, small on purpose, because what a few bodies practice in one room can become the pattern for the new design. We play first, because the body is where every strategy lives or dies through trust building. Then we work in tools that give specificity and shape to strategy.

​We are building this new matchmaking intitative for the long haul, through relationships that leave the room committed to carrying the experiment forward. Isolation is the weapon, this room can be the medicine.