Author Description

"What are our supports, amidst current conditions of environmental, social and political precarity? How do artists draw attention to the underrecognized supports--material and relational, temporary and foundational--that sustain contexts for artistic communities, gift economy, and incidental encounters in our commons, amidst the increased privatization of public life? Are there ways to re-inhabit seemingly outdated support structures to embody different futures? What is the role of practice in relation to ongoing struggle? This anthology, based on a series of artist's projects in a downtown Vancouver park curated by Joni Low in 2018, reflects on the urgency of these questions now intensified by a global pandemic and human-induced climate crisis. Situated in Germaine Koh's HMH: Boothy--a telephone booth-like platform and imaginative time-space portal--these projects approach art as quest and friendship as medium, manifesting a critically-engaged pleasure activism. Responding on an intimate register, they made perceptible the embodied support structures and sensorial agency that will continue to guide us through precarity: sensing otherwise, restoring Indigenous worldviews and reciprocity, habituating communal interpersonal rhythms and care, and revealing multiple dimensions of space and time towards incorporeal transformation."--