im showing, Apocalypse Kit

Survival Postures (A Dinner & Exhibition)
Sunday, March 20, 5:30 PM
SPACES
2220 Superior Viaduct
$10 admission. Please reserve tickets at www.SPACESgallery.org/shop/tickets

On March 20, SPACES will host Survival Postures, a dinner and exhibition of what happened when twenty people took artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s idea that “Art begins at the same level as basic survival systems,” as inspiration for a one-month social experiment. They had one simple assignment: choose a task essential to your survival or well-being that you don’t know how to do, and within the month of February, learn how to do it.

Cleveland puppeteer Diana Sette worked with a master weaver to learn how to process and spin wool, and built a large-scale “human loom” made out of people. Emelio DiSabato and Joel Solow shoveled snow on the Abbey Bridge, in order to clear a path on one of the few walkways into Tremont that becomes unpassable to pedestrians and cyclists after snow. Maria Miranda, of Cleveland’s performance art collective Whisper to a Scream, spent the month being “beauty-compliant,” wearing makeup and fashionable clothes, processing her hair, and consuming the media and products marketed to her to craft a “successful look”. Carmen Tracey learned how to sew for the first time, making homemade menstrual pads after researching the toxicity of feminine hygiene products. Daniel Bellinger built a homemade water filter. Simon and Giulia, members of a New York state farm collective, began the process of brewing a cup tea from scratch and spent the month learning how to decide what trees in a healthy woodland can be harvested for firewood and how to use chainsaws.

Their resulting survival postures will serve as the centerpiece for SPACES’ first community dinner fundraiser in the style of Chicago’s alternative arts-funding collective, InCUBATE. The meal will be locally sourced from City Fresh, Green Corps and Erie’s Edge Farm. Funds will be split among the participating artists.

Organizer Kate Sopko explains the inspiration for Survival Postures. “We’ve seen a huge growth in interest lately in Cleveland in growing our own food, and generally re-localizing work that provides for our city’s basic needs. That means that a lot of us are confronting head-on how disconnected the work we do to raise income is from the work it takes to produce what we need to live. It’s become pretty clear that as a culture, we are very much in infancy when it comes to being actors in our own survival. Survival Postures is about practicing a culture that can take care of itself.”