A Conversation with Sandy Grande, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Jasbir Puar, and Dylan Rodriguez

all right um welcome everyone to this conversation um this conversation is part of the 10 weeks of art conversation and action of strike moma um and uh just to echo this over here strike moma you know what we've been doing at strikeout is not just about negating moma as an institution but also thinking about what fosmoma futures look like in the process and i think this conversation is kind of part of uh for that you know what does you know what does you know our life actually and a community looks like outside of these institutions and so i think the first thing i want to say is uh i'm really happy that this conversation is actually happening uh where it's not mediated by any institution and it's much more movement generated um kind of a conversation and i say it especially now because um you know as we see that institutions are talking about decolonization and abolition it becomes really important to kind of think about it much more uh from movement context and see how we can further push the narrative and action around what abolition and decolonization means for our communities against these settler um systems so um i'm very excited to be part of this conversation um some of us over here are you know on unseated territory of the lenient uh who are joining this conversation i'm in uh amritsar punjab in india and uh dylan and others if you want to introduce where you're talking from i know threat and just beer are in new york um and then one last uh thing i would like to say is you know um we don't we don't need to give a lot of buyers for everybody who's gathered over here but you know what's amazing about this conversation is that everybody who's part of it is not just a radical thinker in terms of just institution and academia but it's actually part of movement-generated theory and action and it's been part of you know doing the movement for for a really long time and so this brings this makes you very excited because i think this is a conversation that i personally have been waiting for a long time to also think about what the solidarity mean between the different movements around decolonization abolition and specifically anti-imperialism as well um so i mean do you want to go over briefly what strike moma is and then we can just jump straight into the conversation yeah so in essence i think strike moma is is the work and product and thinking of in fact you know a lot of groups in the city and beyond the city of new york and generations of thinking but in essence you know many of us had been involved in kind of the work around the whitney museum and have been involved in movements from movements for black lives and black lives matter to occupy wall street early on to um you know solidarity work with standing rock and so forth and i think that we've always gone back and forth between seeing institutions as sites of struggle and working in the city and building capacity both in negation and afroman affirmation as training in the practice of freedom but the lessons that we learned from the whitney museum are salient to kind of highlight here because many of us came together around this idea of warren kander cells tear gas and the tear gases used was used in baltimore is used in prisons here in the united states was used in palestine in tahrir square the same company same owner warren canders who was also on the board of trustees of the whitney and at the time the the people inside the staff organized uh to call for the removal of warren candors and to question where philanthropic money comes to the wedding and at that time we began organizing and again it's the work and labor and thinking of a lot of different people and groups but the direct action that was taken for nine weeks began with kind of tear gas and tried to end with decolonization as a city-wide process and a process in which the museum as an institution can share uh control for us to figure out how to move forward that never led anywhere so when the situation with moma came up around leon black and their relationship to jeffrey epstein and human trafficking and all of these things we said it wasn't one board member it's not just the entire board member it's the regime of momo so how do we address that and that's when we put out a collaborative document over three months of thinking and working and writing and rewriting about framework and terms for struggle against moma but what we were interested in is not this idea of like moma as a museum of modern art is somehow salvageable or we care deeply about it being salvageable it's actually just thinking about rather than begin with the analysis that the world's better with a whitney and with a moma than without what does it mean to think of these sites as not neutral as part of systems in which we're both resisting from and trying to leave and that's really how we think of moma and it's telling who's on this call and who's tuning in all sorts of people from people that would consider themselves artists in the art world to people who would consider themselves involved in movements or people that are just generally interested with the topic and i think that this bringing of our friends together for this kind of conversation is to think deeper about the question of institutions like the museum and like the university in broader frameworks of seeking to get free um so that's that's kind of the point and i'll just leave you with something that is rarely talked about but we're in the midst of 10 weeks of art action and conversation and this conversation is one of those conversations that are not mediated by the institution that seeks to clarify and articulate ways forward and a multiplicity of ways in which we can do things but how we can also relate to these institutions in ways that further our our liberation um in thinking about the 10 weeks when they end which is june 11 we're also thinking about another process that was laid out which is enacting the just i mean the the the deoccupation across from moma is the effort to enact a just transition to post moma futures in the summer and beyond and so we imagine convening and continuing this conversation without the permission without the consent of moma as we move forward in thinking about how we're going to live and knit i'm going to send it back to you around the last two or three points to finish up sorry i didn't realize i wasn't um the one last thing i think we would say is like most recently you know uh with uh strike moma the work that we've been doing is also uh pointing out the kind of interlocking directorate that exists on the board of moma and then what does that mean for our interconnected struggles and so for the last two weeks you know as uh you know uh israel has been bombing uh gaza what we see is also that the one of the board members on the board of mumma is general dynamics who actually builds those bombs uh apart from that they're also somebody who's part of like military contracts in south america and uh also cisneros who's also on the board of uh uh they're part of you know mining operations dominican republic where they're also uh shooting straight at farmers and this is somebody who's part of you know majorly funding the latin american art world uh globally and so once again i think uh what we want to just emphasize is that it's not just about like one bad board member or or even in this case like the interlocking directorate of the board members our focus is not on like what these boards do and we don't think personally that uh you know it's just the changing of the board that's going to change you know what art looks like for us and what exiting these institutions looks like for us so for us i think this conversation is also to reorient to each other uh in the process right and then what do these museums universities and other institutions how can they become spaces of encounter for us and how can we assemble there and build solidarity and kind of think about the worlds that we want to enact today and not just negating the shittiness that exists outside uh with that uh i'm just gonna call out sandy grande so sandy could you get us started sure um thank you amin and natasha for getting us gathering us first of all um but i'll begin by introducing myself i am too queen is tardes futi sandy grande coming at you uh from the lands of the sakyong and wangan peoples otherwise known as hartford connecticut um you know it's it's kind of perfunctory in these events to sort of uh talk about what an honor it is to be here but it truly i mean along all of you that are assembled here it truly is an honor you've all been my dear intellectual friends in my mind for so long so it's nice nice to see you at least in the i guess it's the virtual flesh here um and i mean and natasha you know a shout out to you guys too i mean i feel like you've been some of my lifelines in these times of of um you know in quarantining across this year and um what a struggle it was to kind of not be in the streets or not being able to kind of join folks in the streets but your organizing and presence in the streets has really really gave me hope across this time and i've really learned from you and you push my thinking in terms of the kinds of connections and solidarities um that are possible or that we even raise up and think about so i'm very grateful you know for the time that we've been able to kind of think together and engage the struggle together um and i and i and i really appreciate this sort of call to think about the space of exit as you guys have articulated a refusal um which to quote roger simpson refusal is the is the revenge of consent so i think um you know that's a sort of a nice thought to put out there to kind of um you know set the tone in a sense um you know i work i'm a professor of political science at the university of connecticut in uh political science and native american studies um you know so i'm very much located in the university um and i'll you know being prompted by one of your questions i think i'll be made by saying i don't know that universities are relevant to movements of for abolition and decolonization only and so much as as i think they're complicit in undermining those efforts and so we need to take them seriously in that sense um having said that though i kind i mean that's sort of been the ground upon which i've operated for quite a long time but i say that with a little bit more hesitation now um maybe than ever um in the wake of the trump you know of trump's sort of occupation um because i think it's been a long time at least in my lifetime to be um confronted in that particular way with sort of the bigger bolder ball balder kind of um fascism and so in that time i i gave a lot of thought to the role of liberalism and liberal institutions and what their function was in what we imagine as a democratic society um which doesn't change the fact that that those institutions have been built upon and through the dispossession and enslavement of indigenous and black peoples and so i i theorize i think about them as as institutions that are predisposed to replicate those those violent relations relations of domination but in this time i think i've thought about if universities and other settler institutions actually became sort of the best iterations of themselves um meaning institutions that actually uphold liberal commitments um you know free speech civil rights human rights equality equity across the multiple advances is its role then to sort of maybe one and only role to serve as a federer against fascism um you know at the same time as an indigenous person i understand liberalism and the democratic path uh project as as among the biggest threats to indigenous people's sovereignty up primarily in the way that they've served out as handmaidens to capital um handmaidens to the project of making race and nation um you know i work at a land grant or a lab land grab institution as as uh to use robert lee and justin the tones if folks haven't seen the land grab institution um ling grab university issue of high country news definitely check that out um so being that being in but not of to kind of use stefano and fred's um you know off-repeated phrase has pretty much been the mode of indigenous life since 1492 but i think what we're adding here what you're asking us to think further about is not just in you know it's not sort of just in and not of but also the elsewhere otherwise of these institutions um and in life in a sense life beyond any kind of productivist or transactional logic extractive accumulative logic um and something i really appreciate about this work i've come to appreciate i remember lots of our early conversations i'm like well strike moma but it's not really a strike and it's not really about moma i'm not sure um but you know thinking it through thinking through that document being on the you know i want opportunity to be on the ground with you guys um and the various and the ways that you're sort of connecting these various actions of withdrawal and refusal that are present in a lot of abolitionist colonial anti-imperial movements which i think it's absolutely important to understand that uh this is global and it's nice to see a very global global audience out there um connecting that all of that to sort of imagining of this uh otherwise of the decolonial otherwise um and i think my involvement you know we came to sort of know each other through new york stands at standing rock and and your work with decal nice's place um and that was to some degree the beginning of that crosswalk for me for understanding you know was in that sort of moment of standing rock and understanding um you know you mentioned the work around uh you know pushing for the resignation of warren kander's from the whitney and that as millions came through the manufacturing of all those munitions you know the right gear the tear gas the pepper spray the body armor um deployed against freedom fighters from standing rock to ferguson to scientific all the places that you mentioned and fairly recently i think he gave a huge gift to brown university and we need to all be accountable to that um those of us in universities um and i think uh and then i was also recently in a conversation with uh melanie ozzy one of the co-founders of the red nation on indigenous peoples and climate justice um in which he painted a really vivid and compelling picture about how one of the greatest that's the climate justice right now um are police and other agents of the state of state sanctioned violence because they not only protect pipelines and other attractive technologies but they enact violence on the land they harass arrest and kill indigenous peoples land and water protectors um there was i think they killed nine indigenous uh land protectors in the philippines earlier this year so as for those that are on this call that that uh work and indigenous struggle that are indigenous peoples you know i think the work and the questions that you're posing should kind of animate people to understand that when you're if we don't already and i think we do but you know that when you're protecting land and water you can't afford to not be involved to not understand what's happening um you know in abolition other abolitionist movements anti-imperial movements anti-colonial movements across the across the globe whether it's colombia or palestine um and also the ways in which our institutions the university being among them uh institutions like moma um are have always were designed to be integral to that project so to continually be involved in this process of of reflecting and reckoning about that complicity you know i'll stop there and pass it to who's thank you dylan right on i i i just want to reiterate that um i'm situated in southern california and occupied kuwait tonga land and i'm not far from where riverside police department stole the life of taisha miller in 1998 um i remember her every time i drive by that shell gas station right off campus um anti-black police violence never went away and it's always been here um and i want to thank you all for the invitation i susp specifically thanks sandy for bringing me into the dialogue with amin natasha and others i'm i'm full full transparency i'm a student and a rank and file supporter of strike moma um i'm aspiring at best to be one of your guerrilla intellectuals and soldiers so to speak uh and i use that language really purposefully and intentionally i don't mean it as some kind of light-hearted abstraction i really do mean it that way because in response to your question um well first of all moma momma first of all that but but the reason i say that is places like this crystallize the violence of abstraction the violence of aesthetics the violence of rhetoric and the violence of conceptual regimes at multiple levels okay i'm talking about museums universities in particular so i think that y'all have have very quickly and easily pushed me to understand how museums and universities in that continuity of violence right of abstraction aesthetics rhetoric and concept thinking about violence in that way intervenes on some overly simplistic notions of how the violence of the things that sandy just invoked operate gender colonialism anti-blackness carceral chattel all the rest of that right um so so i'm not trying to push back against materialist understandings of of violence at all i'm saying we need to enrich how the materiality of violence is understood and and if we can do that we can clearly understand how it is that places like moma are a dense center of gravity for convening and authorizing that violence every where all right like like every where like that is that is what is so important about moment and the work that y'all are doing with mama so we also have to make no mistake that this violence of abstraction and everything else it's a form of low-intensity war this is not periodic it's not accidental it's not somehow a corruption or something that's corollary to the foundations of museums like moma in and of themselves that they are already they are already uh establishments that are not only testimonials and and tributes to warfare but they are actually part of the waging of warfare um you know it's a warfare that's normalized and vindicated through the sheen of prizes of expensive suits of oak tables of research budgets you know of high profile artists and scholars and residents whatever the hell that means um all you have to do is look at how the city how so-called philanthropists how administrators have responded to you all how they responded to the strike they responded through a militarized response that is premised on a utilization or at least an imitation of state terror you know what i mean this is the thing so we so like another again full transparency i had to have a whole pre-conversation with sandy natasha amin like a month ago seems like a month ago because i just had to get my head around what was happening right and i still by the way i still don't think i have i'm just i'm doing my best you all i'm doing my best but but when you all outlined to me what has happened in the city um but by which i'm talking about police psyops like there's there's like very clear and unapologetic mobilization of psychological warfare against you all right attempted infiltration disinformation campaigns targeted criminalization of individual people the they did to you i mean like that you that you kind of testified to not not long you know just days ago um it's clear these are clearly tactics of state terror so so when we think about what is happening there and we see the police presence how there's a phalanx of cops um and their supporters for that matter that are lined up in front of moma they're they're clearly engaged in counter insurgency right they know your names or they know they know enough of your names right to try to terrorize you they know your religious upbringing holy right and they're weaponizing that knowledge against you um and and what they're unapologetically doing is they're actually performing how it is that moma is the centralization of corporate white supremacist colonial anti-black power and wealth these are people who run moma these are these are um these are the old blue bloods and the new multiculturalist white supremacist class that crystallized at the site of the moma from darren walker at the ford foundation um who i have no love for because of what he did uh in reaction to the movement to try to close riker's island um and by the way i'm a former ford fellow i'm still in that ford email list right but darren walker darren walker like he gets he gets no sympathy for me he's he's only he's only an enemy to me because of the way he's treated movements and the way he's been so irresponsible um and reactionary uh to movements especially stripe moma and but it's not just darren walker it's also people like the rockefellers i mean this is this is how deep it is at the site of the museum i'll make one more point um we're blaming the university uh because this is where i think we can juxtapose in a productive way what's happening with strike moment the reaction to strike moment and what's happening in universities uh around the world really but especially around this particular continent um we also have to simultaneously observe what may well happen um in in in the aftermath of strife moment because i think it's already anticipated what's happening at a lot of universities and colleges now um at universities and colleges now we see peculiar forms of counter insurgency by way of grandstanding efforts to create public-facing ceremonies of campus police reform and another invigorated round of diversity mandates uh much of this that's happening at colleges and universities is a reaction again a reaction to the global insurgencies against anti-black police violence of the last year or so compounded by the movement that i'm very proud to be part of i'll put a link up in the chat if people want to join up with it but the continent-wide cops off-campus movement which is you know the purpose of which to is to abolish police presence at colleges universities and all educational and schooling institutions including k-12 um so so we have to make no mistake that when universities and colleges undertake these these rounds of constituting new task forces that they invite all you all into right they invite all the people like us into those task forces right because because the point is to create a certain kind of ritual and ceremony that will ultimately re-legitimate police power by by way of the task force simply existing right not to mention not to mention the rounds of reforms and diversity mandates that are eventually mobilized all those things are oriented around a vindication of the existence and presence of of police power and police themselves so we have to again we must make no make no mistake that these are this is this is all another another dimension of of of primary tactics and strategies of counter insurgency maybe in a low intensity form which is to say a form that solicits the most liberal respectable domesticated tendencies of people who work in and otherwise inhabit universities and colleges as faculty students and staff not to mention administrators but but it is all part of this continuity this totality of warfare and counter insurgency so that is what i see happening at moma and by the way the last thing i'll say i actually think it's important that we understand that the militarized policing reaction against you all this kind of state terror and state terror adjacent reaction to the strike is we have to um we have to resist framing it as an overreaction right just like i would say the same thing with the way administer the uc universe california administration reacted to uh the wildcat strike of grad students about a year ago a little over a year ago you see santa cruz um there's a constant you know kind of impulse to frame what the university did and kind of creating a kind of militarized riot control repression of the strike as an overreaction it's not an overreaction it's actually a completely um appropriate and i mean that in a morbid way a completely appropriate reaction to what y'all are doing to what the wildcat director is doing because this is war right so also i can't emphasize that enough i think we have to understand it that way and i and i'm grateful to y'all for bringing me into the conversation because it's forcing me in the best and most creative and challenging way to expand my own kind of understanding and practice around trying to find places of relative autonomy radical and revolutionary solidarity and ultimately liberation um within within this condition of war and i think that's that's where we're at and i'm with you i appreciate the space that you're giving me here just be here uh hi everyone i just um i want to begin by acknowledging that i'm a settler on unseated ancestral lenape homelands otherwise known as new york city and i also want to recognize uh the significance of these lands for lenape nations past and present and also um that i'm aware that new york city has the largest urban indigenous population in the united states um and the land acknowledgement as we know is a small gesture towards a decolonization of settler colonialism towards the land back movement i also want to offer an image description um i'm a middle-aged brown skinned punjabi woman with brown eyes long black hair and a ponytail wearing a gray short sleeve t-shirt which says worn in flames in red um and i'm wearing silver hoop earrings um so first of all i just want to say that i've it's such a pleasure to be here i've learned so much from all of you i want i do want to take a moment to honor um and recognize the kind of collective wisdom gathered here um i've been learning about abolition as an obligation um from dylan since i first met him in graduate school at uc berkeley um in the later 90s and more recently i was listening to a podcast interview where dylan calls for a kind of radical optimism and i think we just heard that from him um which was about not being naive but also what he said which is we have to keep pushing forward on the horizons of what we can imagine we can do politically and practically every single day um as per dylan um i've also really appreciated your fierce leadership at the american studies association this past year thank you um sandy your work on decolonial theory and red pedagogy has been formative for me it's one of the texts that i always teach in our required feminist knowledge production seminar it's so beautifully opens up the question of um of what is education uh and where is it and why and and how does it happen um and how does it happen beyond and outside of institutions um and then i met fred and stefano at the um beyond biopolitics uh conference at the cuny grad center i think it was 2006 i might be wrong about that it was it was quite a conference um and i think i heard the very early parts of the undercommons that the two of you presented at that conference and the thinking on on black fugitivity and then finally meeting natasha and amin um in 2014 has just been one of the best things that's ever happened to me um i was on a panel with the mean um on a discussion uh for a discussion on gaza at um temporary agency which is a gallery and event space in brooklyn um and i was putting together some notes this morning and i realized that so much of what i now understand about the how of political action outside of liberal frames i really learned um from being in struggle with the two of you um and with with decolonized um this place and i mean i don't know if you remember this but we wound up on this panel together because rasheed khalidi had to cancel and he recommended you in his stead which i find very very funny now um for many reasons um i i have you know i want i this is kind of hard because i want to respond so much to you know some of the brilliance coming from sandy and um and dylan and so i'm going to try to make a few points about uh strike moma and then and then try to return a little bit um to to what you each a few things that what you each said um but i'm i'm hoping here to kind of address what dylan was saying about um enriching how the materiality of that violence is understood um so i'm thinking about you know what is what is strike moment doing what is it doing both conceptually um and then and in praxis which are obviously not mutually exclusive from each other um so first of all i think strike moment is shifting the terms of this conversation um in several ways uh from who is represented in the museum so the artists the curators the art the artifacts and the relationship of the gays who's looking at what um to who's doing the work uh from administrative work service work custodial staff does send security and who is profiteering and how from that work so in other words there's a shift here around what the museum is from a kind of politics of consumption of the gays to the questions of of relations and labor and capitalist exploitation that structure the museum and museums in general and second i think a really important um kind of addition to what's been happening around the question of decolonization and and art museums is that there's the conversation about um colonial theft of cultures um in the quote-unquote past um uh that strike moment is kind of um adding to this by saying you know this this settler museums are not just built from colonial violence in the past would actually thrive on violence of the present um and also uh thrive on the anticipated violence of our futures right and and in this sense the theft is not over and there's a projection of the violence of the future and this anticipatory violence is really important and i'll come back to that in a moment in terms of the kind of temporal expansion that that we're talking about but also this kind of materiality of the violence that we need to understand um so i think of um i i am starting to understand both universities and and museums as what i would call necro politically adjacent um they're not necessarily uh particularly museums universities are of course technically state apparatuses even though we forget this um but museums are not necessarily perceived as state state apparatuses but they absolutely are they have liberal cover um art is understood as expressions of cultural resistance um but the necropolitically adjacent is is this kind of way of keeping necro politics at bay in order not to have to challenge network politics in order to not have to um kind of uh take on dismantling them and so this is not the same as having to challenge necropolitics because they are obey it's a deliberate relation to the necropolitical it's not a byproduct of some misfired benevolence that simply has to be auto-corrected um and so this is the reason why the bad apples thesis doesn't make sense it doesn't work it's not about shifting the actors um and changing out uh the you know the trustees and the directors when we say necro politically adjacent we mean necropolitically adjacent to police and prisons um so when we're talking about um abolition and decolonization in terms of police and prisons we're also talking about um museums and and um and universities as well the museum is a public good um or it's supposed to be a public good insofar as it generates cultural capital for cities and liberal subjects and it interpolate publics but it sanctions some violence towards dispossessed peoples for this greater good um and therefore there's a deliberate shrinking of the publics that benefit from this public good of the museum right um this temporal formulation of harm this anticipatory violence um you know this the violence of the past that museums have attempted to correct via diversity via reparations around around theft and again this reshuffling of actors i'm thinking about injury as a form of future violence a form of injury and injury and maiming as understood as the kind of future of violence that's being propagated and expanded um so the case of warren kander's is really interesting he's a problem not just because he owns a weapons manufacturing company but because of his liberal beliefs in maiming as less violent and less destructive than killing right um and so what he is part of is the massive expansion of the non-lethal weapons industry and you can read about this exponential growth that's happened in the last decade globally in paul rasher's work that's e r-o-c-h-e-r um so this is uh this kind of drive for the non-lethality um is driven in a sense in the it's in the name of liberalism and humanitarianism this belief that injuring is not as harmful as killing and i think there's um this way in which then museums are authorizing the expansion of violence um and also the expansion of its acceptance right um and so in this way i think we can think of moma as a form of community policing it's a mode of growing violence um you know the community really in community policing community relations and recognition are instrumentalized to perpetuate uh greater violence towards communities right especially a parent so this this kind of uh you know if we could think of uh moma as a as a form of community policing it's it's especially apparent in for example the case of um the theater of operations exhibition so moma uh ps1 exhibition on the gulf wars iraqi american artist michael rakowitz who i believe is here um you know there uh there was a protest um of the artists in this show um because uh leon black who's the chairman of moma at that time um also uh was involved in this private military contractor formerly known as blackwater right so this kind of imprecation functions in essence as an extension of the war on terror right we should keep again the war on terror in mind that it's uh that it's ongoing and that this is part of how the war on terror continues um so in that sense it's not hyperbolic to state um as is stated in the strike moma letter um that quote there's no denying that palestine is one of the crime scenes of moma's backyard right for all of the reasons that have already been laid out in terms of the implication how imprecated um the um the board of directors of moma are with these um economies of militarization and naming in relation to the war on terror in relation to what's happening in palestine in relation to multiple places um around the around the world um what strike moma is also doing is is helping us think differently about how and where we do our organizing so museums in particular are training grounds they're different from the streets um the police aren't always involved there's a way of using the stature of the museum against itself the kind of public space of the museum and a reminder again that strike moma is a result of more than a decade of organizing at museums right the guggenheim the american museum of natural history the metropolitan museum of art the brooklyn museum of art um and then and and most recently the whitney these are all sites that exemplify the contradictions of capitalism and the manipulation of um the public good for private gain and i wanted to quote um something that i mean um i think i mean you said this in a panel and a different conversation we were having but what amine said was what we did with the museums is getting to know the city by mapping sites of injustice moving away from isms trying to understand the complexity of how capitalism uh and labor and conflicting positions are held and building solidarity through knowing that there's tangible laws with an institution that are also just a reflection of society and this tangible loss within within institution is is really important because it speaks to all of the kind of contradictory um positionalities of people located in relation to these institutions working against the museum does two things one is obviously to build a base more importantly museums are ideal spaces to train unlike the streets museums create a buffer between the protesters and the police although as we've been talking not not always and increasingly less so once you go out on the street it's a whole different ball game variations of precarity risk vulnerability and access are exponentially amplified the protection of the public statue of the museum is useful in order to build a solid footing um so the last thing about what i think strike moma is doing and this has been um already um kind of pointed to is that there's a kind of post-moma abolitionist imaginary at work here holding open the creative demands of abolition you know what does it mean to say we do not need profit from war uh from economies of maiming and death from labor exploitation land grabs settler colonialism and the prison industrial conflict we do not need these profits in order to have sustainable nourishing representative and accessible artistic work that are grounded in community needs and desires and and just one last thing i wanted to say about um you know standing you said as something about um it was it's kind of hard not to be in the streets i wanted to flag that there's um a kind of conversation with disability justice that i think that we're trying to figure out a kind of deeper connection to because this question of life beyond extra and a kind of extractive cumulative capitalist logic is really being addressed by disability justice organizers um especially in in relation to um the the way in which uh abolition and decolonization are taken up jointly um and i'll talk i'll talk a little bit more about that later and then the second thing is just these forms of counter insurgency absolutely right um at the university and another form of this kind of counterinsurgency is how many universities have been hiring law firms that are union busting law firms in order to uh discipline faculty that are figuring out how to organize and this has been a big thing that's going on at rutgers university which i can also talk about more later and i'll pass that on to i think stefan are you next uh thanks um good evening everyone i'm i'm talking to you from london tonight um i'd like to thank amin and natasha it's been a while since i've seen you but of course i've uh i've kept up with what you've been doing and it's really a thrill to be with you here's my strategy i'm going to say as little as possible so that i can hear more from jazz beer and dylan and sandy tonight and and of course you guys are a really hard act to follow i get i'd probably just say just a couple of things which we we know but but given that we are all of us somewhat focused on what kind of autonomous movements we can build um i i lived for about 10 years in new york uh and it was my impression that um the vast majority of people in new york are already striking moma and they're striking the whitney um and they're striking the new york times and they're striking nyu and they're striking colombia which when you think about what jasper was hinting at given that these sites are probably best understood as precincts you can sort of imagine why most people stay away from them um but they're not just staying away from them they're not just striking the new york times not just striking uh moma uh as indeed uh i mean and natasha have have repeatedly since neither are we you know um they're not just striking him but they're they're they're involved in here you know it's this is a conversation between me and fred so fred excuse me if i say things that um you were getting uh ready to say but that's how it goes right um you know they most people in new york city have aesthetic lives and they don't need the moment for it and they never have and most of them study they have have lives that we could be just described as you know involvements in forms of education and they don't need to come to colombia for that um the main difference between what they do and what we do is that what we do is so impoverished uh what we do is is is so and it's so underprivileged this is the only area in which we are underprivileged of course but in the era of actually trying to lead an ascetic life or study you know we are the underprivileged we who were at colombia we were at nyu we were exhibited at moma or who curate at the whitney um [Music] we are the ones who need help um we're the ones who um need to find the strike that's already going on the general strike that amina natasha also spoke to us about in some notes that they sent us earlier we need them a hell of a lot more than they need us and they of course are reluctant in most instances for us to come to them because we come with the marks of these precincts you know where'd you come from you know the downtown precinct you know can i hang out with you um i don't think so you know so we have all kinds of work to do to catch up with the with the ongoing general strike against these precincts and and of course you can accuse me of hyperbole for calling them precincts you know i mean nyu doesn't have a bloody basement as far as i know you know it doesn't have cops on the take um but moma these universities these other museums they were deeply involved in the kind of community policing that jazz fair was just speaking about you know they make it their business to go out there and find the people who are trying to live autonomous collective ascetic lives who are trying to live autonomous study lives who are trying just just to keep away from these right but that's not going to happen because because what makes these princes precincts precincts is they send out patrol cars right in the form of curators you know in in the form of of of community outreach you know they won't leave these people alone and all these people want to do is be left alone and we try everything with them right we try oh strike the moma we try participate in the city elections everything we can think of right to track them down and to keep them from continuing their autonomous practices and to try to break their strike so so for me and then really i want to hear from all of you more than i want to hear from me the question is how do we avoid participating in brit in the breaking of the general strike how do we avoid participating in the breaking of the general strike which is ongoing against these institutions um so i don't i don't know but that that's uh that's the question on my mind thanks to your contributions and i'll i'll turn it over to fred thanks stephanie hey everybody um i don't know why you made me go last but but uh whatever i uh [Music] usually i say when i'm doing stuff with stefano that my my my tongue is in my friend's mouth you know echoing uh echoing zorn neal hurston and uh and in this case my tongue is especially uh promiscuous tonight because it's in everybody's mouth um i uh i really don't much to add um i'll try to pick up a little bit off of what stefano just said um that maybe you know we can even have some practical suggestions about how to avoid breaking the strike um you know uh which is to say you know how to avoid breaking the strike how to join the ongoing strike of of these you know these sort of brutal institutions of our uh of the modernity that has been imposed upon us um i guess i i everybody has said where they are um i kind of feel like i'm nowhere um and then at the same time i'm speaking from from summer everywhere um some of everywhere is some black southeastern arkansas vernacular um but i think it's a very precise term actually uh what it is to be nowhere and what it is to be from somewhere everywhere is to acknowledge you know how it is that the dislocation and dispossession that has been imposed upon most of the people in the world um you know can at a certain point become our diasporic choice um if we choose to work it right and if we uh choose to make it right um and and so speaking you know to you from nowhere from some of everywhere and in the general resistance and the general refusal of the the theft that manifests itself as property um and the theft it imposes upon itself upon us is territory um that's that's where i guess i would like to be coming from today um and and in that place or from that place really the the real question is just you know uh how can we get our together um and i feel like you know this is a lesson that a question that i've been you know that we've been really thinking hard about uh that i've been able you know been very lucky to be able to try to think through you know with with amin and natasha for for a few years now um and and we've had so many great discussions um and and pushed and challenged each other you know from from any from any kind of away from any kind of uh you know away from any kind of uh you know tendency to want to settle on a point okay which is maybe the worst kind of settling you can do you know um and and and i've learned from them that my general tendency which is so that when i say mumbai i really mean mumma like like i'm not going to murmur like i ain't thinking about mumbai like i don't care about moma i don't care what they do you know i'm not going to comport myself against moma in any way i'm not asking no questions about moma i'm not asking anything from moma all i really want for a moment is if they would just please manage to figure out a way to leave me alone um but you know that tendency is is maybe a luxury um that that everybody in our position can't quite accept it's it's interesting right because the implications of what stefano was saying is that you know um and i found this to be the case particularly with regard to what it means to express or to try and enact solidarity with the palestinian people particularly that that that what it becomes is a kind of rallying cry or a condition that that allows us maybe to see if we can figure out how to organize ourselves a little bit better like that's how it usually works that's that's how the benefit actually will will have accrued right um because because folks in gaza know how to fight and and and they know how to live which is why they're getting killed all the time okay and sometimes i think you know maybe specifically those of us who who have a kind of comportment towards the university or the or kind of a comportment towards towards the museum we they they know stuff that we don't know we have to figure this out okay and it might actually be the case even though i don't want this to be true that the way we can begin to figure out how to get our together at least requires some initial comportment against the institutions that we're embedded in but that initial comportment against the institution can only be momentary okay we can't sustain ourselves on being against these all the time okay we can't we can't live like that we can't we can't do anything like that we can't be of any use to ourselves or to anybody else like that right what that initial moment has to lead to all but immediately is some real serious questions about how it is that we comport ourselves in relation to ourselves in these institutions all the way through these these institutions okay um how do we actually practice the interplay of abolition and exodus right how we become the depth charges right that we were sent to the university to be okay so i didn't go to the university i got sent to the university by the folks in my neighborhood by by my mom by you know and and it was sent with a with a kind of mission so you know sometimes it's easy to lose that mission and i think the easiest way to lose that mission is not because you're venal not because you're an not because you're sort of morally impure in the ways that we usually seem to mean when we accuse someone else of complicity it's not about this or that person being bad or shitty or anything right the way that we lose that mission is that we allow the university to extract our attention right that's the thing moma is a massive machine for the extraction of aesthetic attention right if what stefano is saying is true and i believe that it is that there is all this aesthetic sociality going on in the city of new york all the time right then what moma does is it operates on a double level it extracts the aesthetic attention that folks pay to one another or share with one another right and it extra and it also extracts aesthetic resources okay i mean it's so goddamn clear now if you think about it with regards to black artists i remember the whitney had a show called blackmail maybe 20 years ago famous show and one of the first pieces in black mail i forget the artists who did it one of the first pieces you would walk into the gallery this was the old whitney up on you know 79th street and park madison whatever it was and in the first the uh installation in the show when you walked in was this sort of famous piece uh that that had mannequins okay black mannequins dressed as you know as security guards right like the security people who you see guarding the exhibits at museums and of course it was a perfectly clear and and and and and emphatic you know sort of sort of assertion of this very real fact that that in a lot of ways the museums museums like the whitney and like moma had were engaged in the practice of excluding black folks that the place for for being in the museum if you were black was a security guard certainly not an artist right certainly not represented in the work of artists there right so and it was an important it was a very very important piece but we live in a different historical moment now okay because the exclusionary structures of the of the institutions that that we all fought against 20 years ago now what we're fighting against is their constant extractive right incorporative modalities okay it's not that they are no longer exclusionary it's that their modes the practices of exclusion are extraction and incorporation okay and even that's not new but it's an update an update of new technologies right an update of old technologies so so part of what's at stake is is that sometimes when we fight against the institution and when we try to understand and know something about how the institution operates we we're still fighting against its old models of exclusion right even though it now operates by way of new models of extraction and incorporation and we're trying to get into some that we should be trying to get the up out of right okay um now one way it seems to me that we can begin to to work through this problem is to really tend as carefully as we can to how we deal with one another um i don't even like to use the phrase one another because that implies a kind of additive individuated metaphysics that that we want to not believe in okay but it's just shorthand right but but i'm kind of interested in the fact that at least with regard to the university maybe this is not true of the museum we'll we'll have to see but at least with regard to the university we still operate within this weird-ass condition in which when i'm in a classroom with my students and we'll be back in that condition in person in the fall you know and but even on zoom when we were when i was in the classroom with my students the police were never coming to mess with me in my classroom okay um [Music] now that could just be because the institution is turns out to really be the benevolent liberal institution that we think it is on the other hand it could be the case that the reason that they never sent the police into the classroom was because they knew that somehow i had incorporated the status and the project of the police into my own pedagogical you know activities when we say we want cops off campus we can't say that without acknowledging that the vast majority of policing that's done on the campus is done by faculty right in the classroom okay and so what i guess i'm trying to say is maybe what we need to do is to begin to consider you know how we can reconfigure our relations internally so for me the the strike strike moment is important because as stefano says it it it it allows us to begin to join the ongoing strike that has already been existing against moma and in joining that already existing strike against moma maybe it will allow us to relearn to to what what our friends manolo callahan calls to relearn and to renew our habits of assembly um and and i don't mean to just make that an abstract call we still got time and we're going to do a whole nother go around so maybe we can make some practical you know talk in a practical way about how to how to begin doing that right um what will be our not when we're going to go back to school now right we're going to go back to to some of our own collaborative and collective aesthetic practices now you know now that the pandemic is lessening in some way at least in this country um so if that's true we need to start planning right now for how we're going to go back and do some differently than we have been doing it before and that's on us right so for me moment yes absolutely now what are we gonna do nick do you wanna share a couple of thoughts it's been kind of crazy to kind of see i mean i feel like it's an accumulation of so many years of learning and thought that is just kind of coming out through everyone so it's also a very emotional moment for me because i feel like you know one of the things that i've personally learned about decolonization and abolition is it's a process and it happens in action for me right it's not a blueprint or a goal and we're trying to kind of figure it out all together so i think you know so far everything that everybody said really i feel like that's just part of this conversation thinking about land grabs counter insurgency injury and naming being something that is you know now more on and then you can see that with all these institutions like look at the board of moma and i think you know just one thing i wanted to bring out was also the whitney one of the things that was said was like oh it's okay to have warren candice because he follows the law right he's working with law of control and we as an institution follow the law so as long as you are within the law it's fine it's the same thing that's happening at moma as well right over here you have like oh you were violent and therefore will put you out right it's a complete shutting down of the door and like they can you know the counter insurgency kind of state practices we're talking about are right there um and then uh you know that's why i think it's really important to kind of talk about the museums with prisons and universities and to think about and i think uh you know uh uh you guys have said it before federen stefano which is you know um that we're talking about abolition of a society that requires prisons right so we're talking also about abolition of a society that requires universities or museums or these institutions to kind of think about pedagogy and its aesthetics and so some of the questions and thoughts that i have were also just you know thinking about what what can we do one of the things that's been most difficult for us is how the weaponization of identity and people's desire to kind of heal from the colonial past uh you know is often used in the kind of project with assimilation into the same system and that becomes like really difficult again and actually it works as counter insurgency on its own like you don't even need state of paris to come and say that oh this is kind of like it's literally it can be done by artist curators organizers people in general you know which is to assimilate within the same system that has been killing us and and also at the same time we have been on strike you know for all this time so just something you know i would want to hear more about that uh a little bit about like how this weaponization how can we kind of work towards in our communities around against this weaponization of identity desire but also what has been the role of aesthetics to kind of bring us in you know uh and like how much we have had to push back constantly over and over again um because you know this also relates to you know just in terms of um some of the things that we struggle with is there's also this kind of awkward silence you know when things like strike mum happen and uh we often and and i and i just want to echo you know one last thing i want to say is you know the work has been many people uh and i just want to say you actually said in the big name it's not just me and i mean you know there's mtl plus which is larger crew uh you know there's uh you know is here sheldon rodriguez here michael wrapped with so many of the people who are part of this conversation are here too so please drop stuff in you know uh the questions if you have anything because we're kind of thinking about this together um so yeah i just so i said a lot i'll just stop there i mean if you want to add anything i just want to hear more about like um weaponization of identity our desires reveal and the aesthetics in this project and and how we can kind of i think just one thing i can add i think in in working you know working through this idea of the strike is ongoing um you know let's look at moma i think what we're also what we're also trying to do is think about modernity these larger things around modernity in nation-state formation and thinking about autonomous spaces and and thinking about how can we come together when we're always under assault and attack that even if we try to stay away from anything they come after us which is you know stefano that's kind of they seek us out they come after us and that even as an individual if i don't want to with moma they're with other people in which i want to be in solidarity or be you know so so it's hard to avoid the things that we're entangled with especially if we're trying to leave but leaving requires other people to leave too so so one of the ways in which focusing on moma is like our approach collectively has been very different than the whitney in a way it's kind of inspired by these last words like what can we do and say with responsibility or being responsible around these institutions as a way of pedagogy and learning how power functions how we're divided and segregated and how we can communicate with each other even though we don't have control over social media and not everyone's on social media or we don't see each other because it's a pandemic so then this this this thing that's called moma is a thing that you can kind of ricochet things off of and be in a different kind of conversation around synergies and affect and feeling where where the conversation can happen in its own temporality as we continue to try to test things out so i think like that's that's another way to think about moma yesterday for example it's not some it's not something else i'm repeating kind of what has been said but in relation to moma and then yesterday you know we were asked it was just like at a different conversation it's like well why do you gotta with momma just leave moma just leave it alone it's not even relevant who cares about mum and the thing is is like i don't care about mama but moma is part of our lives moma's you know moma harbors people that drop bombs on gaza so when you ask me to march in the street i say i'll march but tell me something else i can do that's a little bit more meaningful that's important now i don't know what the answer to what more meaningful is but i know there's closer proximity to the that's making money off of dropping bombs off and that's just and that's just talking about not talking about the ammunition not talking about the maiming not talking about all of these things and the third thing is this like we have done this in relation to movements but we trying to figure it out in new york city there's a dual responsibility of you're part of a you know you're part of a collective or a group that's being oppressed and is oppressing but in addition to that all the movement kind of conversations tend to they're not strong on anti-imperialism they don't connect to the reality that you're in new york city so close to the nerve center of capital that there's a way by which we can build solidarity across geographies uh and that responsibility what responsibility do we have to the palestinians but also what responsibility do we have the colombians to the chileans to the whatever and i'm not talking about nation states talking about people and i think that there's something about working through moma to not get stuck at moma and i think that that's why we never entered mo right this is very different than the whitney we never entered mo in fact we found a publicly held privately owned pops they call them and there's many of them in new york city where they give you that where you kind of in return for building larger uh taller buildings you say you're going to leave your space open for the public that's that exchange they're called pops that's where we are across the street from that so you know these are some just thoughts to kind of put in the mix and then go back to you sandy just as a continuing conversation wow i have so many so many thoughts about everything thanks so much to everybody for uh you know lighting some fires um i don't even know where to begin other than you know momma in some ways resonates more because i think it aligns with the kind of politics or refusal more than strike because strike feel like you're centering something you know in a way because you know it's kind of driving a particular action but but it's like thinking beyond or just kind of again you know the politics of visa comes from indigenous um theorizing is you know it's so out it's so outside you know it's just de-centering i guess in a sense um so i'm thinking about that i'm thinking um jasper you you are so gracious and i and like all of your work um but but certainly around meming um pushed my thinking in so many ways and i think is relevant to this conversation and that part of me wants to argue for a kind of specificity at the same time i'm wondering about what are these connections and conflations so in other words um there's there's sort of the kind of um violence of you know of killing and then there's the violence of naming that are distinctive and and i think just where you really sort of map that out in terms of if if in no other way than their sort of purpose and function maybe um and so i'm thinking about like as we're sort of talking about universities and and museums as precincts and um you know do i wanna fascist sticking a gun in my face and how is that different from like you know dylan you talked about darren walker president of arm twice named for ford fellow myself um you know who has divided the world into system reformers and system destroyers and um you know those are very different kinds of violences and i on on one hand i want to make sure that we keep that distinction on the other hand i want you know i i i don't know we i mean we've had this conversation like what's the greatest enemy that we fight you know is it the pillars of liberalism or is that you know the we encounter you know enacting violence on our bodies i don't know i get confused about it all the time so i'm thinking about that i'm thinking about um stefano this notion of like these autonomous communities and the kind of general are always already striking um and and and kind of fred's notion of being here there and everywhere um and the ways in which that makes me think about um you know uh if patrick wolf talks about indigenous people the only thing induced people have to do to be in the way of like the colonial capitalist machine is to stay home like um you're not you're not trying and just be also kind of i really appreciate kind of the ways in which you brought disability justice organizers into this into this conversation and in my end and i thought about them when i think about this notion of staying home um and and you don't have to go anywhere to to you know they come looking for you so that sense of like folks coming looking for you um and policing uh and not just you know not just policing but sort of again and not killing you for trying to stay home for trying to just not be part of that they're still killing you uh so you know um i'm not sure where this is all bringing me but i'm wondering about that tension between kind of the specificity of things and kind of the ways in which we're completing things all of which brings me to you know um in ketchup there's this notion of kame which is like you cannot it's a it's a sort of a multi-different completely different kind of organization of a cosmology and ontology i think in quechua and the language reflects that but uh command is sort of this overarching principle where you can't where at the same time um you can't have you can't have processes of creation that don't always already include processes of destruction and you hold those things in tension all the time as a way of ordering kind of the world and so in some ways like i think it helps me to make sense of things um and natasha i want to think about kind of i don't know i'm so over kind of liberal discourses of ideas i mean it's it's so i mean the weaponization is really the right word about desire about kind of the ways aesthetic is even taken up um you know i don't even know how to think about desire outside of a sort of a capitalist extractive accumulative discourse um but i think obviously a lot about kind of what is the pedagogical project in this how do we think differently um in ways about i don't know that i even want to call it art i think here about emily johnson's work uh many beat choreographer whose most recently is organizing around the east river um she's a dancer and a choreographer but like what she choreo choreographs and how she imagines choreography is kind of just how we're moving through space uh in a broader project of of liberation and sovereignty and how do we bring people together how do we bring people together in experiences um to reconnect not just to land but to each other to kind of think beyond and not just about ourselves but you know other than humankind in which we're also deeply um you know our deep relations are also being violently upended on the daily by the same forces um so i think in that sense i think about maybe our sense of what we didn't think about art as not being encased or imprisoned in these institutions like wilma um but are but are elsewhere you know and and how um our attention to those it's not that they're they aren't there we just don't um aren't being attentive maybe in the right way or being you know don't have access the kind of teachings that allow us to see um what's there but um maybe that's part of the pedagogical project is to kind of enable um folks to even see what they can't see right now and and i think the last thing i'll say that is also a part of all this is i keep thinking about um it can't really be a here and there like it's not at moma here or whatever because there aren't just like um these satellites of being it's that some ways of being as we've all been talking about um are enabled by the destruction of other ways of being and so we have to intervene in there some way shape or form beyond that i don't really have any answers tossing it to you dylan yeah i appreciate that um i don't know that i have any answers i like to try to pretend i do so let me let me engage in that pretend play with you all um knowing i'm probably wrong but that's okay because we can work through this together right so um i want to echo and amplify what sandy just said about about the importance of the pedagogical and this is something i think i've i think i've been saying this for like 15 years now right which is um i think i think we remain we have been and still remain in a historical moment where the primary modality of abolitionist praxis is probably probably needs to be pedagogical and that's to say that's not a permanent privileging there are other moments i should say not necessarily moments but there might be other geographies or places in which the primary form that abolitionist practice takes is not necessarily pedagogical it might actually be um um i don't know it could be it could be paramilitary you know i mean it could be in some bizarre world policy making right who knows all right so i'm saying that when when we think about the importance of pedagogical practice that's not necessarily a permanent state of affairs but i think that is the current state of affairs so so just to say that when we think abolition we think about um what what the work entails the pedagogical realm is is absolutely central to it at this particular moment in most geographies um um and and this is i think part of how we can try to address what natasha raised as the weaponization of identity right which is this kind of i don't know neoliberal neocolonial you know appropriation of oppressed colonized channelized incarcerated people's positions as a way to you know repress thought to repress being to repress insurgent and and liberatory and autonomous formations of community and being i mean that's that's what that's what i take it to me right so i think i think one way to get at um disarticulating the premises through which such identities get weaponized as forms of counter insurgency and repression is actually address how the the political and cultural identities that circulate in periods of accelerated revolt and movement are subject to that very process of of perhaps weaponization perhaps commodification okay perhaps perhaps forms of opportunism and grift okay and and and i started talking about by talking about abolition for a reason which is that we're in that moment with abolition as a political cultural identity right now um we're in a moment where the notion or the kind of the identity abolition is being actively claimed as an active as an activist and academic brand or individual identity so so so the most recent thing i've been repeating obsessively is the idea that there's no such thing as an individual abolitionist you don't get to do that all right like that's not how that works um abolition is an insurgent attempt at counter community against identity that's what it really is right and i and you know and i'm saying identity in the way natasha was saying it right i'm all for identity in like the good ways um but but i think there has to be an understanding that this is part of the way i've always as soon as people brought me into abolitionist community which is which is how i think about it right like i think about as abolitionist community it's always changing it's a complex your internal struggle is all part of this but ever since i've i've been able to identify myself as being in an abolitionist community it's about what um one of the co-founders of this incredible organization incredible movement really called ujima medics in chicago and i'll put something in the chat i went to the chat in a second but amica amika tandahi who's one of the co-founders of it uh medics i was talking to her a couple weeks ago and she intervened on my thinking around this because because she challenged the ways that i and many other people have until now been using the notion of accountability um within movements and and even within and even within communities that don't necessarily identify themselves as movement communities but notions of of accountability she challenged that she said you know what like we don't use that term indojima medic by the way genome medics is this incredible grassroots um you know black black feminist black women led organization in south side chicago that does emergency response to treat um gunshot wounds and asthma attacks for black people in south side chicago because that is what they identified as two of the primary forms of preventable death among black people and the state was completely complicit if not actively encouraging those forms of premature preventable black death um so they're abolished organizations they draw from like black feminist black womenist healing practices that go centuries back all right so that's who gema medics is just in case you all didn't know but when amica started talking about about challenging the notion of accountability the term that that she and others use in genea medics is shared responsibility which is way deeper right like that that may that made my mind that made my mind explode all right and what it meant was that the way she articulated to me what it meant was that part of this melting away part of this challenging part of this incense the kind of momentary abolition of identity in the way that that nasa talked about it it means that you are sharing in a responsibility that that obligates you um to intervene on somebody else's mode of being because you give a about them because you care about them so so conclude what this means i mean is that is that a natasha is that i would be in a community shared responsibility with you and i would tell you to back off of this or that action because you look like you're sick right you seem unwell so i'm because i care about you and i'm in a position of shared responsibility with you then i'm gonna say let let me or let so and so do that in your place and you stay home today right i mean i'm trying to be as practical as possible right but i'm saying we're looking for practical responses that's part of what this means thinking about what i think i think it was fred that raised it um in relation to universities right we never do that in universities we don't have a sense of shared responsibility with each other in universities in that way right if anything is the opposite we push each other to work harder by talking about how hard we work and and that and that's the grind that's the grind that slowly sometimes quickly kills some of us um and i don't say that lightly you know i i was i was at uc berkeley when as a grad student when um when june jordan passed when barbara christian passed um you know when albert johnson i mean all these all these senior black intellectuals passed within a couple years of each other and it was deep and i was like i understood it and i felt it as being the institution that ground ground away at their being so so so that's part of this in in trying to challenge how it is that identity gets weaponized i mean abolition abolishes practice for me is is an attempt to counter community against those forms of identity so there's that piece i'll also say that another aspect of this that we have to understand is that is that is that warfare this domestic war is a totality yes but it's also marked by asymmetrical casualties so that's another point at which identity categories necessarily kind of fall apart a little bit because once you recognize the asymmetrical casualties for that matter asymmetrical targeting that domestic war engages in all the time um and the different spatial geographies the different temporalities of it then then part of part of the the move toward abolitionist community or liberatory community whatever it might be is to try to generate forms of autonomous relatively autonomous or insurgent being maybe alter being in relation to these same institutions that are waging these wars that create asymmetrical casualties um i say this because institutions like museums and universities they're skilled they plan they're prepared to deal with resistance right and way too often the resistance that they are already skillfully planning and preparing for is premised on these kind of liberal neoliberal notions of identity okay that's part of the problem that's that actually um plays into these institutions counter insurgency skill sets um uh i'll give you an example that is both amusing and kind of horrific you know speaking of strikes right the may third was the first day of abolition made from cops off campus we we just we stay we we called for a day of refusal um um again invoking invoking our colleague and friend audra simpson right we said everyone just it was basically it was basically a strike right everyone walk off don't don't be on email don't go to class etc um so we get engaged in a small in a small in-person action at the at the campus where i work university of california riverside and what's interesting is that the vice chancellor in charge of planning and budget whom the police basically report to right so this is somebody who basically works as the chief of the chief of police um he came by to check us out um you know in this friendly older white guy way and so i started talking with him and and i jokingly not jokingly said you know jerry you know what i really want to do is i i don't think ucrpd should be around and i want to burn i want to burn the building down and here's and here's the here's the funny thing that that's not funny it's actually kind of weird and horrific he responded by saying you know what go ahead because we just got a new insurance policy for that place so in in a nutshell this is what i mean when i say that places like universities they are skilled they are planning and they are prepared to deal with resistance all right so another point that i'll make and i'll shut up so i want to hear what all you all got to say maybe another way to start to work through a different relation to a genocidal anti-black colonial totality is one that does not require the implied and actual circuit of resistance right maybe we need to push back and challenge how we we seem to consistently fall back on that idea which is more than idea because it actually grounds our practical actions right we think about resistance it's always a circuit um i think about other examples in which people are basically not basically they are they are deeply um complexly in a permanent state of revolt that's not to say i don't see that as the same as resistance you know i just don't um i think about the the multiple generations of carceral revolt revolt by incarcerated people particularly by incarcerated black people that is all about the kind of transgenerational memory and inhabitation of the plantation of the slave plantation and you see this in castle revolts in in throughout north america throughout this hemisphere throughout the world in which folks including non-black incarcerated people will will cite slavery they will cite hemispheric you know so-called american slavery as the touch point for grounding what they are doing and in the in the relation they have is not one of resistance right it's it's a complex one i can't really simplify into a phrase but it's some combination of abolitionist creative destruction of of of um of flight or what what what stefano fred would call fugitivity of martinage i mean it's all these things right for especially for indigenous and puerto rican incarcerated people it's anti-colonial not decolonial now anti-colonial right in the destructive sense you are destroying the colonial apparatus that's something different than resistance so there's that piece i also think about if i can draw from my own you know genealogy i think about the half millennium of indigenous revolt throughout the philippine archipelago um that's never stopped right in which the opposition was as now or or like in these times it's as much to the philippine nation state as it was to spanish colonizers u.s colonial occupation attempted japanese colonial you know encourage and whatnot that that's a different relation to the civilizational project than one of resistance so so maybe one working method um that can challenge the way we rely on the resistance paradigm all the time is is something like a gorilla pair something like a guerrilla paradigm something like that i'm not sure you know i mean like i gotta work through that with you all but i think that maybe something like that could help ground a different relation to these institutions um as well as the ideological work that's part of the constant grind of being forced to inhabit these institutions i'm feeling what fred said you know you can oppose those institutions and that is like it's not sustainable because you're in them and you depend on all these depend on them in all these up ways right so so yeah so i think a guerrilla relation i don't know something like that you all um i'm struggling i'ma shut up thanks dylan thank you so much uh just here okay so i have no idea where to start um i guess i wanted this is going to be completely kind of responding to different things that people have said but i i wanted to go to something that fred said which is a vast majority of policing happens by faculty um which is really so true and i was listening to this great conversation a couple weeks ago between jennifer doyle and nick mitchell about how about how um our participation and grading and reporting plagiarism and um all of the kind of institutional mechanisms gatekeeping uh you know um exam protocol et cetera et cetera all of these things are the ways in which we are the kind of vast majority of policing um i think this also goes to the weaponization of identity as well um particularly in so far as the identity of the tenured faculty is probably that identity formation is the most policing identity formation that exists at the university um so you know this past couple weeks we've all been involved uh those of us who are involved in palestine solidarity um activism we've all been involved in this um you know process of writing statements um which in other times would be considered i think mostly performative sign a statement sign a petition we've all talked about the futility of of these kinds of activities but in these past weeks it was really um a way in which institution the institutional spaces had to kind of contend with the paucity of their of their politics and and their resistance the intractable kind of spaces that faculty uh tenured faculty take up you know so the problem in terms of standing up for palestine is not that you're waiting for tenure um because tenured faculty are disciplined into uh a kind of relationship of alliance and fidelity with with the academy right so the people who are really standing up um against the the figure of the tenured faculty member were um precarious adjuncts precarious faculty grad students um signing these statements because um there this is a profession where job security is something that they no longer they no longer look towards this profession um and they no longer look towards the university for job security so you know just one one thing is to kind of wrench away this fantasy of academic freedom and the tenure from each other right it's giving us absolutely nothing and in fact um getting tenure means that you're inc inculcated into an understanding of the kind of hierarchy around political action and speech and who is going to be allowed to do what and who's going to be punished for doing for doing what so that's one one kind of weaponization of identity we've seen this too uh at in terms of the rutgers union there's a coalition um of 16 unions that represent different labor categories um across uh rutgers university um that that formed in order to um uh develop a work share program which allowed faculty to furlough and access unemployment in exchange for freezing of layoffs of um of adjunct faculty as well as of other labor uh other laborers and the biggest issue there were again the tenured faculty not wanting to identify as laborers right and not wanting to identify with other um uh kind of outstanding solidarity especially with kind of bypass precarious laborers and to go to kind of what dylan was talking about this uh equity diversity um inclusion rubric is a way of kind of constantly peeling off um faculty from what could be a more sustainable more more worthy project of um alliance across across different labor categories um this is the the rutgers union is one of the the few things the few kind of positive things that i see happening at the university at this at this moment um it's committed to looking at how universities are handling their money um and um and looking at the ways in which universities have made huge amounts of money off of the pandemic right so it's not just um ruling class it's not just um you know uh jeff bezos it's not just that all of these people who have money made money it's universities who have made an unbelievable amount of money during the pandemic as well and in fact have misused stimulus funds and reinvested those funds into um the stock market um because it's free money that they don't have to pay interest on and they might not even have to pay back so um so these you know to me these are the places of the weaponization of identity that are kind of inescapable for those of us who are still laboring within these institutions right um i wanted to i wanted to mention well mention one thing which is that it's the six month anniversary of the start of the farmers protests and and you know despite all of the complexities of that congregation uh i think that there's a lot to be learned about the ways in which that congregation and that strike has sustained itself over six months um which include kind of theological practices of care um and um community like you know building of communal spaces um the kinds of um theological spiritual practices that aren't normally associated with um certain kinds of uh strike activities or gatherings so i'm still really interested in you know what's happened what's going to happen what's happening and going to happen with the farmers protests and i don't i don't want to lose sight of of that of the magnitude of the of the farmers protests right it's it's still understood as the kind of some of the largest protests we've ever seen some of the largest mass gatherings we've ever seen and and really something that complicates what we think of as the street because it really is a process of a kind of constant renewal of assembling that's going on um in in punjab in on the outskirts of new delhi and a kind of complicated social fabric that's being that's being both deployed and developed as that as that protest continues right um understood as a kind of sustainable revolt in some ways right um if we move away from resistance as dylan's talking to us about um the the the other thing i wanted to the last thing i'll say is just and and this is in terms of palestine and also dylan what you're talking about um that abolition has become a kind of commodifiable um identity formation right and we see this also with decolonization we've known we've known this for a while right we've heard um that the kind of commodification of the notion of decolonization as a kind of um pedagogical reform as a way of addressing syllabi as a way of um diversifying our curriculum all of these things um you know you know they kind of domesticate decolonization within the university and of course we keep kind of asking questions like where else are we learning where else do we want to learn where else can we can we move knowledge production outside of these spaces um and decolonization decolonization um does not happen in the university it's a pedagogical reform right um i was listening to mezna keto um talk about this in terms of palestine um it you know and she said well it turns out decolonize is a metaphor when it comes to palestine um because you can see the limits of decolonization when it's tethered primarily to these institutional processes you know within the academy within the settler museum um and despite the kind of swelling of solidarity networks that we're seeing right now um progressive except for palestine is still well and alive um in the academy um and and sustained through the kind of tenured uh faculty uh identity uh configuration as well um so i wanted to um yeah i just wanted to kind of highlight that decolonization um is a kind of empty promise if it's not understood in relation to anti-colonial um you know insurgency that's happening you know right now in palestine that's been happening um and to go just to go to disability justice for a moment um you know what's what's happening in disability justice is so interesting because it is and this this goes to i mean your point about the difficulty of thinking about anti-imperialist um organizing formations right um the the way in which abolition has been taken out by disability justice formations is really through an internationalist um a kind of anti-imperialist internationalist um uh framework right so um for example since invalid uh which is a one of the most interesting disability justice organizations they made connections between incarceration and the united states incarceration in palestine um as sites where both disproportionate numbers of disabled people are institutionalized but also mass disablement is being uh produced during the 2014 war on gaza so they already have a kind of inter internationalist anti-imperialist abolition and abolitionist frame that is whether that is committed to decolonization and it's committed to that decolonization because it understands defund the police um defund the military defund ice defund the occupation right um it's all a kind of continuum around what's a carceral space right what's a carceral infrastructure um and this is why it's so important to think about you know sandy what you're saying too about you know who's not in the streets and why and what's happening um when they're not in the streets what are they doing so the pandemic showed this to us too that so many of us couldn't be out last summer in the streets i couldn't be out last summer in the streets and we had to rethink and the and these are things you know when when we talk about um you know the the demands for productivity the extractive economies in in the academy um disability justice folks are teaching us about how to challenge that stuff they've been teaching us that for a long long time and they've also been teaching us about what protest looks like from home or from the car or from a bed that's placed next to a prison right um you know where people are are you know not just at home uh in bed at home but in bed you know next to a site of struggle um so these are i think these are really important ways that we um we can make connections to work that's already being done uh um and and figure out um how how we think differently about where protest happens um how we think differently about what an action is um how we think different and again some of those issues have been forced already this year during the pandemic right when people are trying to figure out how we congregate how we congregate we've been trying to figure that out all year i wanted to i want i guess i wanted to read something that natasha wrote because i'm assuming this probably we're probably coming to a close but um this is something that natasha wrote for an issue of october on decolonization that came out last year so i'm going to read this because i thought it was really incredible as cultural and educational institutions enact further cuts and attempt to justify a new normal of austerity they will undoubtedly be sites of intensifying struggle but these struggles will also be porous with educational artistic and organizing activities occurring outside formal institutions in the streets and in autonomous movement spaces think of de-colonial schools for all ages media labs and garden beds carpenter carpentry classes and community energy systems art history classes and poetry workshops film screenings and self-defense trainings no cop zones and sanctuary spaces all disarticulated from the time of the of commodity of work and of professional specialization these are forms of life that are already practiced as a matter of resistance and survival around the world but physical spaces provide them with localized base camps and hubs of power where the uprisings of the future can germinate and blossom forth in a thousand ways such spaces can embody the shifting of relations and rearrangement of desires required for decolonization cultivating of politics of life land and liberation amongst the ruins of empire thank you jasper um i just want to kind of acknowledge that we may run a little bit over but um sandy you have to leave it too so if you have any last uh sorry i mean you have to leave in five so if you have any last thoughts before we go to steph no no and it's just uh you know just really nice to bask in all these words and thoughts so i just want to thank everybody for uh inviting me into the space and i'm going to listen for as long as i can i mean i'm going to hang in there sounds good thanks sandy stefan thanks i guess i'll pick up a little bit with what where fred ended talking about how we might think about going back into the classroom if we're teachers and we have that opportunity in in certain spaces in in the world right now um but but the way i wanted to say to think about that was to say is just to remind ourselves why why they keep pieces of art in museums um now of course one reason they do it is that they're they're securitizing it they're they're keeping it safe from from the people who would have it back another reason is that they're renting it every time you pay to go to the museum essentially you're just renting that artwork while you walk through um and of course there as you know the most obvious example always is they're keeping it because um they they want to commoditize it and speculate on it but there's another reason and it's really the main reason that they keep art in museums and not so they can pretend there's such a thing as a work of art that is that there is some individualized thing that you can go and see and that this thing is a work of art and and that's something that you know needs to be subjected to to to a thorough anti-colonial attack um that there is such a thing as a work of art why would we want to do that well in the first instance if we can dispose of the idea that there is such a thing as a work of art we have the added benefit of disposing of such a person as the artist and the benefit of that of course is that coming back uh to what dylan was saying we we we're starting to move away from any kind of notion that could be anything like an individual abolitionist because another way to think of these universities and and these and schools and the museums is as these vast shredding machines you feed communities into them you feed collectivities into them if you feed the the indistinct into them and it comes out individuated and that's what the museum does it's a it's a shredding machine of of social aesthetics into things like works of art and artists now i don't work in a museum um but i do work in a university when they'll have me and in a university we would have to think about what the parallel to that would be well certainly the idea that there's such a thing as an exam the idea that there's such a thing as an assignment the idea that there's such a thing as a piece of scholarship you know these are there's a reason these are also trapped in the university is because otherwise they would just simply escape into their collective origins so they're kept in there as individuating tools and as long as they're there then we're not allowed to say the thing we need to say most of all which is there's no such thing as a student and and and that's where i think some practical possibilities lie in addition to all the great ones that have been laid out um by jasper and dylan and sandy so far um and and i think i feel like this is where fred was wanted wanted to go in a sense you know we we can take some practical steps and as usual the truly revolutionary practical steps are characterized by being revolutionary dispensing with the notion of a work of art dispensing with the notion of a student dispensing with the notion that you produced a piece of scholarship or a book or a book that won a prize or any of those things is a step towards fighting the individuation that that shredding machine is constantly producing um and and there are we all have practical ways of of working on that right now those practical ways are absolutely revolutionary and will be met with the sternest uh of violence try getting rid of your assignments try giving everybody an a seems like an innocent practice but it will be met with the most severe consequences which is why maybe we should do it maybe there's something in attacking this this this these shredding machines so long as we are to some extent uh attached to them on the other hand um what we what we really want is is is to is is for to create the conditions for collective flight there's no point in going by yourself um there's no point going by yourself we have to create the conditions for collective flight and the only way to do that is to just to restore the collectivity that these shredding machines uh are constantly destroying uh so where we are in our disadvantages you know in everything but economic condition um we we have some practical work that we can do if we're going back into our institutions in a few months [Music] thank you everybody for all the great conversations so far thanks stefano um fred yeah it's been a it's been a great time and i know everybody's getting tired down so too so i'm gonna try not and i'm gonna try my best not to go on too long just to pick up with you know really echoing everybody in the sense that uh yeah we should be giving a's out like judges give time you know um and and and and you know i i do i guess wanna you know it's a comment you know in the chat uh from from uh connor tomas reed saying that nobody's talking about how to take over and collectively reshape these institutions and i'm like yeah i know i'm not i know i'm not doing that and uh because i don't want to take over the institution um i think i'm a descendant of slaves who didn't want to take over the plantation they just wanted to burn the down and part of it is because you could say oh well but there could have been a collective takeover of the of the of the plantation and turn it into a into a agricultural workers collective but i think maybe my folks understood that the plantation wasn't just about who owned it that it was an apparatus of of social and ecological disaster right in addition to the violence that was done to people on the plantation the plantation was a violence that was done to the earth okay um and the university similarly is is not about who owns knowledge or who owns knowledge production or who owns the resources for thought the university was always designed to regulate knowledge always right to regulate it and to incarcerate it now the history that we live in is a history that pushes us into the unenviable position that for some of us who love certain kinds of knowledge the university ends up being the only place we can go to get it because the hoard it there i like to read certain kinds of books and so i had to go to the university okay and maybe my parents had certain kinds of dreams of of my upward mobility and so that's part of the reason that they sent me there but they also sent me there with like a whole range of ideas and a whole range of moral and ethical and social and aesthetic commitments that were absolutely antithetical to that place which is to say they sent me there not only within the context of a contradiction but it seems to me that they sent me to the university to constantly be deepening and at the same time also heightening that contradiction and and and i know stephanie and i love to say both every time we say deep in the contradiction we also love to say heightened the contradiction because that up disorientation that up spatial disorientation with regard to contradiction was one that our mentor cedric robinson loved to activate all the time he never saw a contradiction that he didn't want to both heighten and deepen you know and and it means that you know there's a certain notion of purity you know that that uh they were constantly constantly trying to disrupt constantly trying to pee on to be perfectly honest and and and and you know i mean i guess the last thing i'll say is is that you know a confession you know my my partner laura harris is laughing at me for the last three weeks because i got on this binge that i get on every once in a while where i have to watch all the reruns of the west wing i just i'm fascinated by that i'm fascinated by how virulent neo-liberalism deludes itself into thinking of itself as benevolent benevolent i'm interested in that like i'm interested in in in in the ways that that that they seem so so clear about that it's it's real it's funny to me but it's no more funny to me than artists thinking that art must be good because they do it right it's it's no more up than that and you got to understand i'm not saying that from the position of somebody who hates art i'm saying that from the position of somebody who loves art and who i'm pretty convinced that i can't live without it right is is is this an impurity that that i that requires me to flagellate myself or is it a contradiction that i must join with my friends to heighten and deepen i think it's the latter you know and um you know the i guess the last story i'll tell is when i came to nyu some friends who i had known here before they asked me to be a part of the aaup executive committee and i was totally ambivalent about the because to be perfectly honest when i saw the letters aaup i thought of kerry nelson okay and i just never wanted to be a member of any club that that fascist you know was was a member of okay so basically but but it was my friends who asked me and when my friends asked me to do something with them or go somewhere with them i feel like i'm supposed to go and and my friends on the aaup i'm constantly feeling like i'm always on the verge of offending them you know because they always want to i mean i hate to put it like not because i don't go to the meetings and talk a lot of i just don't say that much you know because he because me and stefano invariably just wrote some that goes against the grain of everything that they're saying you know and it's just like you know university governance university governors we i don't i don't want to engage no faculty governance i don't want to govern a thing you know i don't want to do that you know and and i'm you know i don't i don't transparency i i don't know if i'm for transparency i come from people who get looked at and looked through all the damn time i don't know about all that you know i gotta think about that but what i'm but but the thing is what's gonna be my ethical comportment towards my friends who who who are at that place in the way that they think about things do you y'all i i want to say do y'all see what i'm saying but i can't see nobody but what i'm i you know i'm i'm just like i think i probably you know strenuously disagree with conor thomas reid about certain but you know on the other hand man you know i'm with you you know i'm with you i don't want to be fighting you and what i guess i'm concerned with is that this constant comportment of ourselves against our enemies almost invariably produces a set of conditions in which we turned out to project all of the brutality that we can't visit upon them upon one another and we need to work through that you know we need to have some some structures and some and some and some places some some places of refuge where we can work through that you know i'm i'm not i'm running but i i'm not running away from anything any more than i'm running towards something too you know and i want to be running with my friends you know and i'm going to work and try to be in some kind of convivial solidarity with my friends you know um and and and obviously today was like uh you know for me at least a beautiful example of that so um so i'm glad to be hanging and running with y'all so thank you and everybody out there yeah thank you fred and thanks everyone i'll just say a few words to close us out and then pass it on to net uh for a few words but i mean you know this is an example of strike moma the thing that we talked about that people worked on for three months and it's it's thanks to everyone on this call and beyond in terms of the work and the engagement that you've been doing and i think that if people read it online there's links to stuff um but just to give you an example it's just you know heightened the contradictions you know that's something that we talked about with fred i mean everyone's you know print hat is on this and we've tried to kind of think through some of these challenges so we can have a different set of conversations because we're tired of these old conversations that are just about this or that and we have to convince everyone in order to move and one of the interesting things about moma and it's around again this idea of identity and sometimes it's you know accomplished mentality you know and it's it's very harmful because it seems like people are uncomfortable when someone does something that's a little bit unsettling and they feel like in order for their identity to stay intact they need to attack the thing that's being done when people are not doing anything else and and there's this hard tension between trying to say look you know there's a diversity of tactics we can move separately in together we there's ways in which we can figure out together but we refuse moma setting the terms and we refuse meeting on the terms of moma and in this sense moma is just a metaphor it doesn't matter all these people and fred you know in conversations you know stephanie i think we talked about this and it's related to what dylan said and what oh just fear and sandy are bringing up we're not we don't you know in fact the first statement we put out when we found out about liam black is because people asked us to say something about it and we said less than 500 words and the title was mom but somehow that became an issue somehow that became an issue of your don't care and then there's respectability politics of like you're on other people's dreams right and i think like these things get conflated in such a way and you know you know i never want to make someone else feel bad that's not why i i do any of this and no one's paying me to do it you know and we're failing in the process as we learn and we try to figure it out you know and i think that something about moma is just like it's touching people in a way that um even to me is kind of surprising because you want to have certain set of arguments and conversa conversations that are necessary in order to figure out but it's just like why does it have to begin with moma must exist and then we start having the conversation you know and i think like that's something that it's it's you know it's it's it's confusing to me that we're here for it and then the final point i'll make in in terms of the logic of counter insurgency that the moma regime has deployed so what dylan has mentioned is that they knew my name they knew my religion they brought people out that spoke my language right it was speaking to me in arabic and when i asked the person hey oh you're arab he's like no but like in this sense i'm like well i'm palestinian he's like i'm definitely not palestinian right so so there's these kind of knowledge there's this kind of that's being weaponized against you but then there's these emails internally that are going to staff into workers saying we are violent we don't care about their livelihood we want to destroy the museum we don't care about the art and and and you're and you know if people had read this they would know that we actually care deeply about people's positionalities and we understand what it's what the colonial condition puts us and pits us against and there's no way in this that we we feel like other people should withdraw or should boycott we didn't say any of that we said that people can act in the ways that make sense but one thing is certain the walls of the museum need to become more and more porous right and that's the important part so when we have a space outside of moma it's it's it's kind of welcoming to everyone that's inside of moma to join us and there has been some people that joined us but i think the issue around class in the art world or art system isn't discussed enough people are happy to have the role of the artist as an identity but they refuse to acknowledge their class position in relation to it then you have people structurally top of the museum or like what they call the back end of the museum and and these are people that are maybe well educated that have mfa's and then the front end are just like racialized bodies black brown whatever and and there's a class dimension so now all of a sudden the solidarity of the white people up top right this is like why are you making the the guards lives more difficult what are you supposed to do with that and and then this becomes the point of contention so i i bring this up to just kind of say that like these are some of the ways in which we're also learning about contour insurgency and soft power and you know i'm grateful for these thoughts and we shared the questions for people to think about in groups and circles um and this is just a starting point of these kind of set of questions yeah um i just want to thank everyone because i feel like we just started the conversation so i hope we can have another one because i'm i want to begin from also like how do we uphold the strike and not break it because i think this this question of upward mobility uh indian artist has identity all of these things we've just i think we need to continue to break that kind of logic of living because you know um i'm thinking also like you know we haven't talked about enough about abolition of private property as a thing right private technologies private property land as private property uh artist private property with stefano you mentioned but i mean it's so much of it is about how we relate to the world around us and things and we we just started to begin to talk about it and i think uh for me personally a lot of ways i've learnt myself is just being engaged and struggle and i think i just want to echo back uh what dylan said that you know these that abolition and decolonization does not happen outside of the community it's not an individual project and i think what we're seeing is like you know even with counter insurgency and everything so much of it is around taking it back to the individual and removing any kind of collective space to even kind of flourish or sustain itself and so uh for that i also wanted to thank this beard to bring in the farmers uh you know specifically from punjab because it's like literally the way i mean there's a lot of i mean you know there's a lot of inherent problems in our imagine communities you know whatever you know if you're talking about that but at least what we see is that we can care and we can take care of each other as we are also refusing and exiting and i think that's the the exit is really you know and then and uh fred something that you always mentioned is what is the relationship of this abolition and exodus and i think that's where i want to begin hopefully next time when we kind of come together we can talk more about that i think this conversation was important to kind of lay the groundwork of even getting there and thinking there and getting there and taking our friends with us because i don't want to do it with just a bunch of people i think what happened to us you know around working with movements you know for the last 10 years especially after the george floyd moment and the counter insurgency that kind of happened everywhere we realized is how many of us just a few of us are standing together and like a lot of times you know the relations that we had built were actually not at all what we thought they were you know and so the kind of problems of you know um you know patriarchy and sexual harassment or like you know all of these different uh you know ngos uh class mobility and upward mobility into institutions museums uh you know ownership as an idea ownership of thoughts and you know like even who you know calls themselves as abolitionists or deep romeo you know knowledge is all of these things there's so much that we have to undo and learn and practice together and rehearse together and kind of learn to assemble together that i feel like this is a very generative conversation for that and hopefully yeah i just want another one that's it i'm going to stop talking i think we should have another conversation where we can actually begin from the point of like keep how to keep up holding the general strength yeah thank you all so much and uh appreciate everyone tuning in and free palestine and free all the places that we care about and come from oh i forgot to mention one thing um i i'm just gonna drop the link um in the oh i was just saying tomorrow it's week eight of the occupation at moma uh we're going to be talking about uh uh free mumia there's going to be teaching about mumia and move and also a solidarity with uh colombia and palestine and a dominican republic in puerto rico just in connection to what's happening in muma and then simultaneously we also hold a virtual space which is um you know it's usually got me michael acquits nelson mandela taurus so you can come hang out with us um and also just going to the strike momo website there's many resources there that can kind of you know as we think together about exiting this so how do we continue thank you all thank you all you