Finding California Time [BROODWORK/ (SPAN)]

We submitted the grant proposal for the California Council for the Humanities and are happy to have a written description to share with you about our new collaboration between Jules Rochielle (Social Practices Art Network, (SPAN)) called Finding California Time: The focus of Finding California Time is to document the stories of cultural producers in California—including artists, architects, designers, writers, policy makers and historians—as they interweave their family life with their work. The project is a collaboration between BROODWORK: Creative Practice and Family Life and SPAN, both organizations that have been collecting personal histories of cultural producers and already have established web-archives of these narratives. By giving a voice to the under-acknowledged cultural producers in California who face the universal state of parenthood, we are able to interview a defined group of Californians that can speak to issues that engage all.

In this, we seek to reach our audience by: 1) provoking an active dialogue with our audience through BROODWORK and SPAN social media groups, online comment forms and surveys 2) working with Steve Coulter, Vice President of Integrated Media at Clear Channel at KTLK, who has committed to pursuing these stories for broadcast 3) expanding both of our organizations’ existing free and publicly available web archives in this specific direction 4) working closely with the Architecture and Design Museum to share these stories within their public platforms and educational programs. We also have a future commitment from Juan Devis, director of program development and production for KCET, to pursue this collection of stories for production and are in conversation with two museums to develop an eventual traveling exhibition of custom listening stations for these narratives. The most significant overall outcome of this project, however, is that through the process of sharing these stories we seek to recontextualize the larger paradigm of what constitutes work, how it is compensated, and how it can be integrated into the rest of our lives.

We will be announcing our collaboration with SPAN and Finding California Time on KTLK’s LA360, this Saturday at 10am.  The BROODWORK curated broadcast will include interviews of Dan Goods (www.http://directedplay.com/ ), Heidi Duckler (http://heididuckler.org/), and Renee Dake Wilson (http://www.dakewilson.com/, and Rebecca Niederlander.

El Puente Lab Interviews/ Archive: About a month ago (SPAN) approached El Puente Lab to begin co- creating a community archive dealing with the work of El Puente Lab and community. El Puente Lab: is a platform for artistic and cultural production, active in Medellín – Colombia, which aims to develop cultural projects on a local level, building bridges of communication with artists and experts through a strategy of international cooperation. The projects developed by el puente lab meet the specific needs of the social context where they are carried out, using artistic creativity as a tool of activation of cultural projects that initiate, facilitate and / or accompany processes of education, communication and urban and social transformation. Stay Tuned for more information and details on the interviews gathered from this location. Here is a Mind Map of the work El Puente and (SPAN) will be doing together. we are hoping to be able to produce these interview before the new year.

 Shifting Communities: Bronx River Art Center (BRAC) is proud to announce Shifting Communities: Action Club; Hatuey Ramos-Fermín & Elizabeth Hamby, featuring Jules Rochielle’s SPAN network. This is the third of four exhibitions and continuation of the roundtable dialogue series from our 2011-2012 gallery program. Shifting Communities highlights dynamic initiatives in culture and the arts currently at work in the margins of the art world and American society. The goal of this project is to create a paradigm where community-centric contemporary art and artist think-tanks can be a tool for public service; a language for the exploration and investigation of the broader aspects of culture and society; and a magnet that can bring different cultures and ideologies together in order to strengthen a more inclusive definition of community.

In the third exhibition of the series, Bronx based artists Hatuey Ramos-Fermín & Elizabeth Hamby, and collective Action Club use the South Bronx record shop, Casa Amadeo, as a launch pad to explore ideas of community, collaboration and culture.   

The artists in this exhibition have chosen to work together to address challenges they find individually in their work and their collectively shared concerns of socially engaged art. Action Club, Hatuey Ramos-Fermín, and Elizabeth Hamby have given each other assignments that speak to Casa Amadeo’s presence as a cultural treasure trove preserving the history and vitality of Latin music in the South Bronx. These assignments will formalize themselves as a collaborative installation inspired by the record shop’s visual and audio styling and its place as a physical hub for a global community. This exhibition will also feature Los Angeles based artist, Jules Rochielle, and her Social Practices Art Network (SPAN). SPAN is a site created to be an online resource and archive for individuals, organizations, community groups and institutions that are interested in new genre arts forms and practices. As an extension of this online archive, Jules will install and moderate “Listening Station a Digital Community Archive.” She will offer a series of site-specific “Listening Sessions” allowing her to tune the archive into the rich cultural community/history of the Bronx by creating of a set of interviews with socially engaged Bronx artists. These Bronx “Listening Sessions” will allow the audience to look deeply in on the history and creative happenings of the South Bronx, a neighborhood that has a deep roots and history in collective artistic practice and socially engaged artwork.

Urban Layers Mapping Project: (SPAN) has been working with Urban Layers to slowly map the archive that is being created through various methodologies. UrbanLayers is an experimental collaborative platform for urban writing, mapping and media. Its goal is to foster creative combinations of old and new media techniques for describing and understanding cities including tours, essays, photography, maps and video. UrbanLayers is intended to span platforms and settings, for example linking location-based augmented reality using mobile devices with the emerging possibilities for long-form reading offered by tablets and ebooks.

Outreach is being conducted to artists, art communities and colleagues around the globe. If you would like to submit any type of content please visit Contribute Content and fill in the form. Thank you for taking an interest in this exciting new project. We are looking forward to cultivating this site with information that is relevant to you.