Local Autonomy Networks :: Los Angeles with Gender Justice LA
March 8, 2013
USC School of Cinematic Arts Gallery, SCA 120
6:30-9:30pm
6:30-8:30pm Workshop using Theater of the Oppressed
8:30-9pm Opening reception
9-9:30pm Performance
Exhibition hours
Sat-sun 3/9-3/10, 12-4pm
Mon-Thurs, 3/11-3/14, 11am-7pm
“The colonial world is a compartmentalized world… The colonized world is divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations… In capitalist societies, education… those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of agents of law and order.”
“The [government] agent does not alleviate oppression or mask domination. He displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcer, and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subject.”
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
On March 8, 2013, Local Autonomy Networks, a project started by Micha Cárdenas, will be joining with Gender Justice LA’s Theater of the Oppressed Group to host a workshop and performance about the militarization of college campuses and community-based responses to violence. Starting with the question, “Does this look like safety to you?”, the two-hour workshop will respond to the recent policy at the University of Southern California to set up mini borders, complete with metal expanding fences and computer-aided checkpoints, at all of the school’s entrances at night. These checkpoints, reminiscent of both the US/Mexico border and the Israel/Palestine border, reinforce a militarized mindset that contradicts USC’s image of integration with the surrounding community. ID checks such as these only serve to make transgender people and undocumented people unsafe, effectively excluding them from the community. Join us for a two-hour workshop that will culminate in a performance just outside one of the checkpoints where we will use Theater of the Oppressed to embody what safety looks like to our community of genderqueer and transgender people of color and allies.
More about Local Autonomy Networks / Autonets:
Local Autonomy Networks (Autonets) is an artivist project focused on creating networks of communication to increase community autonomy and reduce violence against women, LGBTQI people, people of color and other groups who continue to survive violence on a daily basis. The networks are both online and offline, including handmade wearable electronic fashion and face to face agreements between people. The networks are being established through a series of workshops, performances, presentations and discussions at art, activist and academic venues in the Americas and Europe. The project was started by Micha Cárdenas but is rapidly expanding into an ecology of networks involving many artists, hackers and activists.Autonets includes a line of mesh networked electronic clothing with the goal of building autonomous local networks that don’t rely on corporate infrastructure to function, inspired by community based, anti-racist, prison abolitionist responses to gendered violence. The Autonets garments, when activated, will alert everyone in range of the the local mesh network who is wearing another autonet garment that someone needs help and will indicate that person’s direction and distance.
These technologies are being developed through workshops and collective design processes, inspired by existing networks of horizontal knowledge production in queer, transgender, survivors of gender violence and diasporic communities. We are currently in collaboration with groups wanting to use Autonets to reduce violence against genderqueer and trans people of color in LA, prevent disappearances in Bogotá, Colombia, help provide safety for sex workers in Toronto and facilitate queer youth of color to avoid violence in Detroit. Autonets is fashion hacking for social reorganization, recoding the meaning of fashion symbols such as hoodies that have associations ranging from Trayvon Martin to the Black Bloc, or femme fashion elements like dresses and bracelets, into symbols of connectivity and autonomy.
More about GJLA:
Gender Justice LA is building a strong grassroots multi-racial coalition of transgender people and allies to advocate for our rights, win concrete improvements in our lives, and challenge oppression.
Are you ready to help us transform Los Angeles?
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PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
Provost Fellow, University of Southern California
New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research
MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
Co-Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, http://amzn.to/x8iJcY
blog: http://transreal.org