Resistant Repertoires

Location

We’ll meet with ABC No Rio’s Director, Gavin Marcus, (and perhaps some librarians!) at their library-in-exile at the Clemente Soto Vélez Center, at 107 Suffolk St., at 4pm. Please try to arrive a few minutes early, since we’ll need to sign in at the front desk, then head up to the third floor, to room 305 (“three rooms down the corridor [from the elevator], on the right side”).

Agenda

This week we’ll consider how activist and radical communities embody their principles through the making and collecting of media — and how they document their existence through the creation of archives that often demand bespoke protocols and spaces. As ABC No Rio prepares to occupy its new headquarters, we’ll also think about how misfit communities inhabit misfit spaces (echoing our discussion from last week), and how the meaning of “misfit” evolves as the city — in this case, the Lower East Side — evolves around it.

To Prepare for Today

• First, please familiarize yourself with our meeting space (and ABC No Rio’s temporary host), the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, and its history.
• Now, read about ABC No Rio, scan the collective’s historical documents, and browse the website for the “ABC No Rio 45 Years” exhibition from this past summer (for a review of the recent show, see Petrossaints in the Supplemental Resources below).
• To learn more about the historical and urban contexts in which ABC No Rio was born, and to see historical photos and documents, let’s consult a work published in 1985 by some of the collective’s founders: read about “The Neighborhood” and “The Real Estate Show” in Alan Moore and Marc Miller, eds., ABC No Rio Dinero: Story of a Lower East Side Gallery (ABC No Rio with Collaborative Projects, 1985).
  • In case you’re interested, Moore and Miller’s book also includes chapters on Colab, the artists’ collective that organized the “Real Estate Show,” as well as documentation of exhibitions and other creative programming from the early 1980s. For more on Colab, I highly recommend Schumann, in the Supplemental Resources below!
• Let’s think more about the squat as a “misfit” space or mode of inhabitation: please read / watch / listen to Amy Starcheski, “The Story of Squats,” Urban Omnibus (February 15, 2017). If you’d like to learn more about squats, check out Starcheski’s, Bagchee’s, and Thayer’s books, listed in the Supplemental Resources!
• Now, let’s think about how these organizations, their media collections, and their spatial manifestations evolve through time. Read what ABC No Rio has to say about their new building; as well as Maya Pontone’s take: “Iconic NYC Art Squat-Turned-Nonprofit Is Getting a New Home,” Hyperallergic (September 9, 2024).
• For more on archiving social movements and radical communities, see the Interference Archive and NYU’s Downtown Collection. For another recent design that aimed to materialize the values of a ethically-rooted community, check out BlackSpace’s Brownsville Heritage House Reading Room.

Fieldwork Documentation