Urgentcraft (2020)
In 2019 I was invited to deliver back-to-back talks at both the Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis and The Conference in Malmö, Sweden for which I wrote “Urgentcraft” [watch the video here]. I spoke about mutual aid publishing during crisis, urgent artifacts, and how art and design can loosen power. This is the text where I first introduce a set of tactics that I titled urgentcraft, with an open call encouraging others to adopt, adapt, question, and incorporate these principles. A zine version was distributed as part of Queer.Archive.Work #3, along with the risograph print on yellow stock, which was also distributed to the audience at the Eyeo talk.
During the initial COVID-19 lockdown I was regularly getting invited to give talks, and I reworked the Urgentcraft talk repeatedly to account for the changing conditions. This version was written for Otis College of Art and Design on April 27, 2020, and this version was written for a talk hosted by Wendy’s Subway on the occasion of their online residency with the Libby Leshgold Gallery and READ Books, at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. In each case I delivered the talk using a hand-coded web page that contained the entire text, images, and links, which was then available to circulate as a URL to the attendees for reference later.
Urgentcraft
- Do what you can
- Use modest tools and materials
- Understand the politics of your platforms
- Practice media fluidity
- Work in public (self-publish!)
- Practice a slow approach to fast making
- Acknowledge complexity and contradiction in making
- Work towards the then and there of queer futurity (while acknowledging past struggles and privileges)
- Agitate/interfere (“make good trouble”)
- Dismantle white supremacy
- Resist, loosen, and dismantle ableism, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism
- Resist capitalist strategies
- Resist design perfection / stay with the mess
- Question linearity and other hierarchical structures
- Commit to maintenance and self-care as a form of urgency
- Fail to provide the perfect read (resist legibility)
- Use (steal from) the institution when you can (while resisting its values)
- Prioritize communal care as a never-ending practice.
Read “Urgentcraft” (zine version) →
