On nearly every front, the current occupant sows disorder as executive policy. The stock liberal counter argument for a return to normal is a complete shambles. At this point in the devolution of empire, we can only suffer one kind of disorder versus another; all but the political elites admit it. That said, the way forward is hardly clear. Resistance can 

 be experimental. Thus, with a shuddering energy, kimi malka hanauer delivers for us a text that formally exemplifies the very “ungovernability” they advocate as a tenet of intellectual and political engagement, from detached scholarly research to the particulars of managing one’s physical functionality.

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“You cannot build an order on the basis of that which is unstable.”

Detail of a recent iteration of the Ungovernable Study print library, presented at Printed Matter’s bookstore project space in spring 2025.

The other day, Kameelah Janan Rasheed opened a workshop

 with a quote from Clarice Lispector: “I want to write to you like someone learning.”

 I’ve learned so much from Kameelah, and the insistence on writing and making from the purview of a 

 is one such example. Following those words, I write to you today as a learner, but also as someone who has not slept. Every few months, I experience a cycle of insomnia that usually lasts for about two months. That’s about half of the year, every year, for the past several.

It’s often from this state that I do my best to get through the demands of my day as a teacher, maker, family and community member. Over the past few years, alongside my abiding sleeplessness, I have found reprieve in an embrace of the 

and by extension, in uncovering with loved ones, mentors, and friends what it might mean to be ungovernable 

 This ongoing process has manifested, in part,

through the ground of the nomadic education project Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry’s (CLPP)

 aggregating print and digital resource library.

It feels ironic writing about ungovernability while my soulbodymind refuses to cooperate, but maybe that is the state of being that is needed. In a society structured and perpetually reproduced by repeated episodes of original violence,

 to seem unstable—in this case, chronically without enough sleep—is a sound and just response. If, as scholar Nikita Shepard puts it, “the ungovernable cannot be appropriated back into state logics of control,”

 what might this bodily refusal—ungovernability internalized—make possible through its persistent defiance?

Ungovernability is an embrace of divergent and embodied modes of being and relating within the inherently unassimilable edges, cracks, and borderlands of imperial and colonial rule. Ungovernability is where imperial and colonial technologies of so-called law and order—partition, extraction, dispossession, and genocide—break down, leak out, or crack open, even if only temporarily.

 Ungovernability is not only the deterioration of dominating imperial orders, but the lifeworlds that persist within their perpetual rupture: the 

, and so much more. On a much smaller scale, ungovernability is a refusal of the continued order of the day, and in this state, my mindbodysoul too finds itself consistently unable to satisfy its extractive demands.

 kimi malka hanauer’s exhibition at Printed Matter’s bookstore project space in Spring 2025.

While “ungovernable study” has operated as a loose pedagogical frame for CLPP’s work, we have not yet given language to the various principles it emerges through.

 In part, this is because the pull toward ungovernability elicits another kind of approach—one intentionally grounded in instability, tension, movement, and, thus, a commitment to continuous enactments, rather than static definitions: How might we persistently reach toward ungovernability as relational and tactile forms of study that evade capture and co-optation? And how might our study be interwoven with the seemingly unproductive, unreasonable, and unassimilable actions and inactions that touch the impulse of revolution?

In foregrounding study as a relational and everyday practice, the CLPP digital and print resource library

 has been a fruitful ground for sharpening these questions in concert with other projects and practitioners. In concrete terms, it exists in a sometimes elusive and discreet print-based form, as well as a publicly accessible digital format designed by Jayce Nguyen for smartphones and other interfaces.

 These iterations are meant to embolden library users to decentralize and adapt the figurative stacks across disparate contexts. The digital library’s mutual aid “paywall” requires library users to contribute to and share mutual aid initiatives in support of those enduring the ongoing U.S.-funded Zionist genocide in Palestine. The paywall acts as a humble reminder that our persistent reaches toward shared study, especially as practiced from within the imperial core, cannot be separated from the violent forces that shape our worlds. Rather, they must be actively interwoven with pragmatic action and material redistribution.

The Ungovernable Study library is spread out on sunset moving blankets in the afternoon light. The moving blankets were fabricated by Bokeum Jeon and offer a nomadic ground for CLPP workshops and Ungovernable Study library pop ups.

The library aggregates resources through a combination of open calls, invitations, and projects that shift its stacks, often responding to current events and community inquiries in real time. These changes produce an unstable collection, where one must browse through seemingly disorganized materials to arrive at any desired text. Across the various library themes, ungovernability has surfaced through the intentional gathering of materials that ground and potentialize pre-partition and pre-bordered lifeworlds, as well as those that persist, negate, and seep through the cracks of the imperial present. This intention—to look to the 

—has been limited by the predominant use of the English language, itself a vehicle of partition and rulership, which scholar Ella Habiba Shohat has referred to as the “alphabet of dispossession.”

 Through this paradoxical ground, in looking backward and forward together with materials typically divided into separate systems of knowledge—the cultural, the sacred, the scientific, the historic—the library aims to negate myths of so-called progress that structure imperial and colonial education.

Scholars Nour Joudah, Randa M. Wahbe, Tareq Radi, and Dina Omar, the primary coauthors of the “Palestine and Praxis: Scholars for Palestinian Freedom” pledge that circulated in May 2021, offer a potent reflection on the “progressive narrative of linear time” and the intellectual and embodied tradition from which their statement draws:

Against the progressive narrative of linear time, spectacles of terror rupture past as present to return us to our inaugural moment of loss and reinscribe the terms of our alienation from each other, our land, and ourselves. Where dispossession is ongoing, linear narratives elide our elders’ legacy and our children’s potential.

I write these words as the U.S.-backed Zionist state continues its genocidal campaign in Palestine—the latest reenactment of the original violence of the Nakba—which has persisted through a settler-colonial regime of everyday theft, expulsion, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, brutal occupation, siege, starvation, torture, sexual violence, humiliation, and manufactured famine.

 As many scholars and organizations have intricately asserted, this campaign of mass destruction cannot be separated from the epistemicide

 of Palestinian culture, history, and knowledge waged by the Zionist state and its allies since its very conception.

While supposedly operating in the name of a highly mythologized and exceptional “Jewish nation,” Zionism depends on constant and destructive erasure in order to sustain its ideology. The Zionist epistemicide of Palestine also coincides with the erasure, dislocation, and weaponization of the “intricate landscape of belonging” of Jewish lifeways that precede Zionist destruction.

 This landscape includes the pre-partition commons shared by Palestinian Muslims, Christians, and Jews, as well as of diverse traditions that manifested during various periods around the globe.

  For me, this, in part, is also where ungovernability is intimately rooted: in my ongoing attempts at tracing generations of familial lifeworlds that manifested in the historic commons of Jerusalem, Palestine, I found the cultural practices of my Sephardic elders imperially dislocated and generationally ruptured precisely because of their unassimilability into prevailing colonial orders. What were once normative cultural entanglements, in this case, of Sephardic and Palestinian lifeways, are reproduced as imperial impossibilities, threats to apartheid’s law and order. Here, ungovernability emerges as a disavowed relational and cultural inheritance, made palpable in fragments through the rehearsal of shared study.

Time and time again, we witness institutions rehearsing their adherence to genocidal orders as they silence demands for even merely acknowledging, and much less rightfully mourning Palestinian martyrs assassinated by the Zionist state and its allies. Despite empire’s repeated attempts to erase and upend acts of refusal, divestment, and remembrance, the global masses hear Palestine’s reverberations, gathering in ungovernable relations that unsettle colonial and imperial claims of domination over an otherwise shared earth. Here, ungovernability should not be mistaken for a superficial vision of tolerance or plurality, but rather, as unresolved attempts at coalitional practices that disorder imperial and colonial impositions of where we each belong and thereby under what conditions we live and die. These are the logics that violently subjugate the majority for the seeming safety of the few. But, that so-called safety is dwindling

  and Zionism marches toward its inevitable collapse.

A friend opens their laptop to explore the Ungovernable Study online library on a sunny afternoon in the park.

The CLPP library collection is meant to be a facilitative tool for the provisional practice of ungovernable relations. This past May, when artist Lizania Cruz

 invited me to facilitate a session of A.I.R. Gallery’s Unforgettables Reading / Working Group,

 I gathered a new library section around the theme, “on threats to order.” We began our discussion with the 2018 text “The idea of a borderless world,” where scholar Achille Mbembe critically applies conceptions of a borderless world toward the “redistribution of the earth.” In the modern state, Mbembe explains, the modes of capture on which sovereignty depends—capture of a people and a territory, the imposition of borders, and the violent enforcement entailed—must be reconciled with versions of so-called freedom and security that are claimed as its basis.

“The carceral landscapes of our world,” Mbembe writes, are “the antithesis of movement, of freedom of movement.” Thus, a main function of the state is to craft and maintain conceptions of order and stability that reconcile the inherent contradiction between so-called freedom and security on the one hand, and mass irreparable multimodal violence on the other. As enemies of the state and of so-called freedom, the 

 amounts to all those (peoples, histories, practices, lifeways, languages, etc.) that destabilize statist myths of order and stability.

an attempt at transgressing imperially- and colonially-prescribed borders. Rather, ungovernability is a call toward inhabiting the structural and disavowed transgressions that already form the imperial grounds on which we dwell and the fragmented interior worlds which we carry. It's here—in the tenacity of unchosen embodiments of instability, movement in perpetual excess, speech implausibly out of bounds, ruptured lifeways in perpetual denial—where we might denaturalize empire’s vision of totalizing control. It’s here

where we might prepare a ground for other worlds to grow.

Inherent and not always by choice, ungovernability emerges as bodily defiance.

 It manifests against the day’s order. An irreconcilable grief. An absence of all that cannot be stolen back. The demand to make ourselves imaginable, thinkable, speakable. Ungovernability is not a tragic tale. It is a story of what we allow to be possible. It is a question of what we are willing to leave behind. 

This is where ungovernability in and as study begins.

 It is in our bodies’ unwillingness to forget. It is in writing like a learner. It is in the unworkable vacuum of a good night’s rest.

Thank you to Dan S. Wang, Anna Cho-Son, Rebekah Kirkman, and Allie Linn for your editorial stewardship of this text.

kimi malka hanauer is an artist, writer, and publisher. kimi is a founding collective member of publishing initiative, Press Press (est. 2014); steward of nomadic education initiative, Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry (est. 2021); and an assistant professor at Pratt Institute. Their presently unfolding body of work, 

, rehearses practices of noncooperation and collectivization that look to undermine imperial modes of order, time, and history across various sites and responsive forms.

Website

Instagram

kimi malka hanauer

Inherent and not always by choice, ungovernability emerges as bodily defiance. It manifests against the day’s order. An irreconcilable grief. An absence of all that cannot be stolen back. The demand to make ourselves imaginable, thinkable, speakable.

No Privacy, No Public

toward an ungovernable study: disordering the stacks

 is A Blade of Grass’s outlet to collaborate with practitioners and learn through their perspectives. While we understand that our communities have long been in a state of crisis, the inauguration of the current political administration accelerated these crises with a strategy to overwhelm constituents. With the ground shifting rapidly throughout the first half of 2025, our conversation with artist and writer Dan S. Wang reminded us that moments like this are not new to communities and elders who have long engaged political struggle.

As guest editor of this year’s issue of 

, Dan brings a rich history of organizing with artist collaborators and collectives and contributing to social movements throughout the Midwest and beyond. Dan has produced work with artist groups Compass, Madison Mutual Drift, and Red76, and he was a founding member of Chicago experimental space Mess Hall. Dan’s recent residency and exhibition 

 at Dartmouth College explored political memory, revolutionary strategy, and leftist failure. In 2022, Dan co-edited with Anthony Romero and Daniel Tucker the book 

Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic

, a collection of interviews, critical essays, and artist portfolios that—in their words—“offers a framework to help us make sense of the interlocked crises of the unfolding present and asks with critical optimism what can happen in this time of transition.”

 contributions that will continue to unfold throughout the rest of the year.

At the quarter mark of the 21st century, more than two decades after the Patriot Act and now at the dawn of ubiquitous AI, privacy is nothing but a bad joke and our encrypted browsers won’t save us.

Which is not to say that the public sphere is healthy. In the United States, between Clintonian neoliberalism and Trump’s crony capitalism, everything “public” has been heavily degraded, disfigured, shut down, or shut out. Most public services are on life support. Public sector workers are the go-to punching bag for conservatives. Public education has one defender for every hundred critics. Public lands will be sold to real estate vultures for a song if the Republicans get their way. And public expression? Forget it. Circulation is so uneven and attention so fleeting that any given public gesture, message, or display might as well be private—in which case, refer to the bad joke above.

Over a three-part rolling release, this year’s edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. By addressing this condition directly and obliquely, the hope is that the conversations, essays, process notes, and other contributions amount to a genealogy of “private” and “public” while grappling with a world in which it is no longer possible to hide, and yet in which the spaces of mutual visibility and common communication continue to fracture and shrink.

The wish is to create forms of social engagement untethered to the outdated dichotomy, but that can realistically contend with inherited systems and distributions of power that were built on those presumptions of public versus private. If this edition of 

makes strides toward that end it will have been a success, all the more so as a project completed under a totalitarian regime on the ascent. It must be said, the events of 2025 and beyond—today, yesterday, any day you are reading this—temper our plans and expectations. Whatever adjustments we make as the year unfolds will stand as a record of this time. Progress is the hope, survival the goal.

This editorial platform was created in collaboration with curator and writer Risa Puleo, who served as an advisor and thought partner to A Blade of Grass in 2024. 

 is guest edited by Dan S. Wang with support from ABoG Program Directors Allie Linn and Lee Heinemann with Executive Director Lu Zhang. ABoG’s board is ashley sparks, Elissa Blount Moorhead, Diya Vij, Gregory Sale, Michael Premo, and Michael Quattrone. Rebekah Kirkman copyedited these contributions and Team designed the identity and interface for 

Dan S. Wang

Over a three-part rolling release, this edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. 

No Privacy, No Public 

Clintonian disinvestment in the public sector resulted in the worst of all worlds: degraded public services, unaccountable private contracting, and further erosion of trust in government. Thirty years of neoliberalism paved the way for the outright defunding unleashed under the Trump 2.0 administration. Despite all, there remains a public sector, especially in the large urban centers where thousands of workers on the government payroll perform the tasks required of a functioning city. How can art workers, who typically operate outside the world of public administration, humanize those who serve the public in an era of unprecedented hostility?

Emilio Martínez Poppe and Jameson Paige tell their Philadelphia story in the following conversation. Martínez Poppe and Paige have been working together since 2022 to bring 

 to the Philadelphia City Hall Courtyard. The project began as a series of photographs and evolved into a large-scale public art installation with a robust series of programs this summer, a second long-term installation in the Municipal Services Building opening this fall, and a forthcoming book expected to release next summer. 


in the City Hall Courtyard of Philadelphia earlier this summer, a public art project invested in the social, aesthetic, and political dimensions of the public sector. Your project critically engages the lived perspectives of city government employees in Philadelphia by creating a conversation around their office window views, the scaffolding that erects and maintains the city’s built environment, and how employees consider and contend with their positions as civil servants. After being delayed for nearly a year, the project became public in the immediate aftermath of the Trump administration’s fervent dismantling of large swaths of the federal government. Though we didn’t anticipate this gut-wrenching backdrop to be the context for 

, it nevertheless animated every conversation, program, and conceptual framing of the project. It was the elephant in the room at every juncture. The federal government under the president’s administration continues to exert unprecedented control and disruption in the lives of Americans, so while that has only become more sinister, I’m increasingly thankful that 

 felt like a substantial moment to pause and raise a flag against what is happening in the country. To do this from the courtyard of Philadelphia City Hall was a powerful moment of site-specific amplification, to speak as a chorus in complex opposition to the dismantlement thrust upon us.

The timing made the concerns of the work readily palpable and urgent. The courtyard wasn’t the first site we had considered. We found our way there through a series of conversations across city agencies as the project evolved into its final form. Ultimately, the courtyard was where it was meant to be: the geographic and legislative center of Philadelphia, where the voices and views of city workers could be seen by thousands in one of the busiest parts of the city. This became the motivating narrative force of the project in the aftermath of the election. But this wasn’t a novel context for the work. Around when I first started thinking about this project at the end of 2020, Trump issued an 

 that aimed to reclassify tens of thousands of top-level federal employees making them eligible for political dismissal. Biden 

 that order at the very beginning of his presidency, but when Trump was reelected, he 

 it with the help of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. I ended up taking all the photographs for 

 during the Biden years, from first capturing traces of pandemic-era hybrid work to the very last taken only weeks before the 2025 inauguration. What began as an analysis of a type of position I would go on to fill as an employee of New York City Department of Cultural Affairs became an evolving conversation about the stakes of public sector work in general.

I was able to get extremely close to your project through my own curatorial process, and for me, 

 opened up rich, complicated space for wrestling with what we value at a real human level, through the lenses of labor, history, and spatial politics. It’s a project that has changed me, how I view the city, and how I understand the magnitude of the United States in crisis right now. I’m curious, now on the other side of the biggest parts of the project, what are the gifts 

 has given you for seeing this unprecedented moment in American history more clearly?

 and I am moved to know you feel this way as well. Developing this project in the time I did, and through the intellectual context of the Whitney Independent Study Program—where we had our first studio visit—provided me with a focused direction for my own artistic practice. What became clear to me is that my role as an artist is to champion workers’ lived experiences, to humanize organizations that are being vilified by revealing their complexity and nuance, and to host conversations across fields of cultural, political, and historical analysis to better understand the present moment. It is here, in fact, that aesthetic innovation is forged, in revealing the state of the people and embracing artistic production as a system of transformation rather than an assertion of taste. Central to this is the human need for dignity and recognition in regards to our labor. How has this project changed your approach to working on public projects?

It’s probably obvious, but doing a project like this that’s so invested and integrated into the social realm requires flexibility. Your decisions as an artist are in some ways up for discussion and the same is true for me as the curator, though to a lesser degree. Across the making of 

, the scope of the project was quite elastic while maintaining its anchor components of photographic views. We changed the architecture of the installation, the arrangement of components, and even added elements like the interviews and questions well into the project. All of these decisions felt collaborative. From moving as a team across the more than twenty municipal agencies we visited, to shaping and moderating public programs. There are times when curating feels entirely like a project of interpretation and padding, and then there are less frequent opportunities like 

 where I really felt invited into your practice in a deeper way. I learned so much regarding the nuances of holistically supporting an artist. I’m not sure the project could have manifested itself with the depth it had without that trust between us.

Absolutely. I felt that when you received my ideas you would elaborate on them as a way to think through their materialization, making a dynamic space for developing the work conversationally. This was the case with the decision to use scaffolding as the installation armature—a major pivot that came out of a production issue we just couldn’t resolve with the previous approach. In the end this form held so much symbolic force, its oscillation between being visible and invisible—an apt representation of public sector labor—and its evocation of the urban changes afoot in Philadelphia, inspiring hopefulness and flagging latent anxiety all at once. You saw this potential and we ran with it. Our conversations around this developed into a logistical choreography, applying my numerous 3D renderings alongside your work securing vendors, permits, and plans. But it was not only in this realm that our fluid dialogue made the process so dynamic. It was also, as you mention, in our arrivals and outreach.

Throughout the run of the show, we would keep getting comments about how captivating our friendship was through our co-hosting and banter. But it was not only during the presentation of the work that our complementary ways of working showed off. You could say it was in each visit to an agency, where my art-making took place. The experience of taking the photographs and conducting the interviews were rich because of the tone we set. Our trust was the platform and it welcomed others with open arms. I believe this played a huge role in the honesty of the testimonies and the success of the programming, where our guests truly took ownership of the platform. I’m thinking here of the Municipal Employee Choral Ensemble members showcasing their talents in song, poetry, and performance, as well as Public Sector Office’s workshop applying their own 

 within the public sector to the installation.

Art is a system of relationships—this is something I always teach my students. It is a way to make life together, to find poetry in the way we imagine ourselves. Art-making is also work. It relies on historical, institutional, and social conventions that we follow in its production. Therefore, it also provides opportunities to create new meaning out of our work as we reflect on the work taking place around us. What are the ways in which your curatorial practice has encompassed tasks beyond what is considered “curatorial” as such? Have there been moments where you were surprised by the scope?

You’re bringing up something that I think we often take for granted in socially engaged practices, which is simply that the social is really the center of making. This is something that I think is certainly “curatorial” but I don’t think is typically emphasized to the degree that we endeavored with 

. I’m really happy with the pace we built that led to a serious momentum, followed by slower contemplation. In my experience, many temporary public artworks announce themselves in public space and then just as quickly disappear. From a curatorial and artistic standpoint, we structured 

 as a cresting wave that continues to ripple, having a more gradual dissipation after its initial impact. Now, after the courtyard, we are still one foot in the door of city government with an amended version of 

 on long-term exhibition in Philadelphia’s Municipal Services Building. There’s also the forthcoming book project that will function as a reader for the project’s conceptual arcs—photography, the city, labor, artistic intervention, etc. These lasting afterlives provide anchors for us to come back to, a foreground to reignite these ongoing conversations without needing to start from scratch.

One element of 

 that I’ve been yearning for in work I’ve seen since, whether publicly sited or institutionally bound, is the kind of porosity that certain sites not only allow for but actually encourage. It’s one of the pleasures and challenges of curating projects in public space. The City Hall Courtyard is one of those sites in Philly because it is the literal geographic center of the city and the symbolic center of the city’s power. For there to be a public space—historically a commons—at the center is significant. We were able to leverage this by keeping our public programs open to the courtyard’s wills. The space is for everyone, and we leaned into this condition. While a public talk was delivered, young people passing through got on stage and danced at a transitional moment in the program; in another instance the wireless microphone picked up a far-off street performance of Adele’s “Someone Like You.” These pepperings were met with kindness, understanding, and laughs, both from the speakers and the audience. Intervention became a logic of the installation, an invitation for people to engage the work who otherwise might shrug it off. It further emphasized the “public-ness” of not only the project’s material presence, but how it comes to life.

Those moments were incredible. They were amplified by the scale of and contrast with the work. That courtyard is already bubbling over with the energy from its history, the subways that run underneath it, the grand enclosing walls of City Hall. By adding to the already charged waters of the site, we contributed to even heftier swelling tides of the courtyard’s pulsing public persona. We had to learn the rhythm and ecology of the courtyard and its characters—we too became courtyard characters during that month since we were there almost every day. This was in part due to the amount of events we programmed, but also to the amount of upkeep the installation required. We often ran into colleagues and friends who worked in City Hall while holding a screwdriver and pliers. 

 was living and breathing, much like the courtyard itself. Another notable intervention was during educator and organizer Paul Prescod’s lecture in “The Labor of the City,” when someone he knew was passing through the courtyard and shouted out, “PAUL PRESCOD IS A MAN OF THE WORKING CLASS” during his talk, clearly thrilled to see him on stage. An incredible moment that also reflected how remarkable that panel was in that space, as tensions were growing in the lead-up to Municipal Union contract renegotiations. Paul raised the debate against municipal unionization during the 1930s Garbage Riots: How could public sector employees be so selfish to unionize when they are doing the essential work of society? Well, if the work they do is essential to reproducing society, shouldn’t they have dignified wages, dignified retirement, good benefits, just like all workers should?

I think for me, a lingering question from the project is around the way work is organized, how labor is delineated, and Philadelphia city government’s perplexing treatment of its own employees, who are also its citizens. This becomes clear in the city’s unionization of public labor through AFSCME (American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees) and the separation of kinds of work by what’s historically been called white-collar and blue-collar. Blue-collar workers, often frontline and public-facing, are a part of District Council 33, while white-collar workers, usually office positions insulated by a layer of bureaucracy, are a part of District Council 47. In “The Labor of the City,” Julie Zaebst and Prescod addressed this bifurcation as a problematic starting place for organizing. For example, Julie, a public librarian in South Philly, is a member of DC 47 and yet works mainly with members of DC 33. Her interests as an employee are represented differently than her immediate colleagues, despite them working in the same building. There’s a dissonance between what the unions were set up to do and the form that they actually take.

It was an incredible low after closing 

 to witness District Council 33’s strike in July, where sanitation workers, 911 dispatchers, water department, among over 9,000 workers saw no other means to negotiate a contract with the city other than by striking. Despite their absence being widely felt and their efforts supported by a majority of Philadelphia residents, DC 33 ended their strike after eight days with little to show for it. The mayor’s administration refused to meet anywhere close to the union’s demands, and barely budged on their initial offer of a minimal wage increase. All the while, office workers in DC 47 went to work and were discouraged by their union leadership from striking in solidarity at the risk of jeopardizing their own contract. And on the heels of all this, there’s a funding crisis for SEPTA, the city’s public transit system, that’s threatened elimination of many transit routes and been confusingly volleyed back and forth between the municipal and state governments. 

 tapped into these impending crises and engineered space to discuss them with a sharp criticality. I’m glad we were able to respond so urgently, but I’m discouraged by the larger direction the city seems to be going in. How do you make sense of municipal labor’s contradictions and the events that have shaken Philadelphia’s civic infrastructure this summer?

It was the day after we finished the installation in the Municipal Services Building that DC 33 went on strike. I’m glad we could give Julie and Paul a microphone to directly address the disparities Philadelphia city workers experience. 

 not only spanned a presidential election but also a mayoral election that marked the sharp return to fully in-person work for city workers. On the other hand, you had sanitation workers who never had the choice of hybrid work during COVID, who stood behind Mayor Cherelle Parker’s new in-person requirements. It was so disheartening to see this trust in her directly undermined when she refused to meet their demands. Last year also saw the 

termination of PAFA’s degree-granting programs

. The massive economic blows Philadelphia has faced have been substantial, and the city’s largest employer has yet to commit to PILOTS, i.e. payments in lieu of taxes, a fact Paul reminded us of in his lecture. To see an institution which is supposed to fulfill a public purpose operate as a capital-accumulating corporation in the poorest large city in the U.S. is deeply disappointing. If the institution refuses to assume its responsibility, it may be time to apply pressure on its tax-exempt status, as Mayor Ed Rendell did in the 1990s, causing UPenn to commit to PILOTS for the decade.

To know our history is to know the tools at our disposal to understand the myriad contradictions we face in the present. Government is our technology to shape life and to live through. While it may appear to us as a fortress or an obtuse system, it is in fact fluid and shifting. It is made up by us—for better and worse. It is something to shape and that more of us should get to participate in. This is something I heard repeatedly in conversation with the city workers I interviewed, the commitment to empowering more people to use city services, to having more voices heard. As a NYC city worker, I am inspired to see the 

 movement to divest our pensions from Israeli securities as an example of this active participation in the civic infrastructure of our own working conditions. To be a civil servant is to stand in resistance to the terms of domination, of austerity, of American authoritarianism. We call for a government that looks after the interests of working people, not the profits of billionaires.

Labor is the glue for holding the project together, while at the same time it considers the implications of that very labor on how we construe and construct the city in our imaginations. For me, this notion presents an opportunity to make known our own institutional conditions and abilities to tend to this kind of work. Though I’m not a civil servant, I often work proximate to municipal employees. My curatorial work through Mural Arts is often in dialogue with public institutions and infrastructures. This is a unique curatorial vantage point in that the site for my work is often relationships rather than a defined space. While of course site, history, spatial politics are all on the table and come into view, a necessary and equally significant factor is the ongoing work of tending to the social and political implications of making public projects. I wonder, as you move into a new phase of this project and also into other bodies of work, how you would frame your practice and its concerns. What is the material you’re tending to?

Over the course of the installation, I continued to hear from visitors how important it was to read the perspectives included in this installation, to feel reflected in them, to find oneself in a view. It is a privilege to be able to produce such encounters, to be a bridge between municipal and non-municipal workers in the same city, and in the case of 

, to aid in humanizing a sector which is too often abstracted. It should be no surprise that the diverse experiences of residents across the city are shared by those working in its municipal government. A city’s public sector is its community. As Sandra Lindsay from the Municipal Employee Choral Ensemble writes in her poem performed during the choral performance of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”:

WE’RE A VAST ARRAY, A KALEIDOSCOPE OF PEOPLE
GOD’S UNIQUE CREATION
WE SHINE AS MULTI-FACETED RAYS
A WOVEN FABRIC COMPRISING THIS NATION

A government is for the people and by the people. A truth that must continually be insisted upon. That is our duty, especially in moments like this, where our public sector is being gutted, torn apart, attacked, and mobilized against the very people it is meant to serve. Will we let the impunity, violence, and hatred toward working people define what a government of the people and for the people is going to be? What actions will we take to wrest back the power to define what is ours? The questions are similar for cultural workers like ourselves. We must always demand that our institutions uphold the values they espouse, but especially in moments when the governing regime is doing everything to the contrary. Cultural workers, like civil servants, stand in resistance to the terms of American authoritarianism and domination. As we look to the years ahead, the market-based system of artistic production is completely inadequate to address the challenges we will be facing. In fact, as we have seen, the traders in these systems are complicit in the extraction and genocide of people, from Philadelphia to Palestine. Art belongs to the people. As public practitioners we must continually work to mobilize art’s capacities to unite, and to see a future out of this moment.

Emilio Martínez Poppe

Jameson Paige

A conversation between artist Emilio Martínez Poppe and curator Jameson Paige reflecting on their process, friendship, and the resonance of 