christopher robbins

ART AND HOUSING JUSTICE

Detroit artists collaborate with Morocco, Syria, & Indonesia artists to turn abandoned buildings into affordable housing around a beautiful work of public art. Learn more…

Detroit is often portrayed as blighted, and Islam as a religion to be feared. But a group of North End Detroiters are working with artists and architects from Syria, Indonesia, and Morocco to turn that notion on its head. We will create a series of art and architectural installations using tenets of Islamic design meant to combat social isolation.

Imagine steel arabesques merging with aged Detroit brick, dappled light from delicate Islamic patterns falling across a lush public gardens and courtyard, filled with art by local artists - a central gathering spot for neighbors to hold public events or just mingle - all of it built through cross-cultural skill-shares and community workshops.

The American Riad brings together visionary artists from the Muslim world, who have come up with creative solutions for their own communities, to work with North End Detroiters to rebuild theirs. This project asserts that adopting elements of Islamic art and culture can improve, rather than threaten the American experience.

I built a fourteen foot tall tree out of plywood and planted it outside in the Winter of 2006. In the Spring of 2007, I chopped it down and milled it back into a sheet of plywood, which I then returned to Home Depot in the Summer, in exchange for a paper receipt.

At COUNTERCURRENT 2016, Ghana ThinkTank asked Houston, What’s your Houston diversity problem?

These problems were sent to an international network of think tanks, including
-Residents of the Sathe Nagar Slum in -Mumbai and residents of Kochi City, India
-A hacktivist collective based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia
-A group of rural artisans based in Tassoultante, Morocco
-A group of Syrian refugees in Serbia

At COUNTERCURRENT 2017, Ghana ThinkTank is implementing the first of these solutions - proposed by a group of Syrian refugees at a refugee center in Serbia.

The problem:
"Houston says it is so 'religious,' but 5 times a day I feel like I have to hide just to pray."

Their solution: a Mobile Mosque : "so he can pray wherever he wants... in the park, the street..."

During COUNTERCURRENT17, the #MobileMosque travelled through Houston on a pair of flat-bed trailers, offering a space for prayer, music, poetry, discussion, Islamic art, and a variety of other activities organized by Houston's Muslim community.

After the close of the festival, the #MobileMosque will travel to Detroit, where it will become a permanent part of the #AmericanRiad project, a landtrust and equity co-op in the North End of Detroit that provides an affordable and sustainable space for Detroiters' homes and businesses. A major goal of this project is to encourage Americans to learn from Islamic Culture, transforming an abandoned single family home and vacant lot into a beautiful Riad (Moroccan Courtyard)

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Ghana ThinkTank is presented as part of the INTERSECTIONS initiative. INTERSECTIONS is a program of the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, which seeks to build bridges between visiting artists and Houston’s Muslim and non-Muslim residents, with a focus on University of Houston students.

INTERSECTIONS is made possible in part by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Building Bridges: Campus Community Engagement Grants Program, a component of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art.

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The Mobile Mosque would not have been possible without the efforts of these amazing individuals and organizations!

Zeinab Bakhiet
Asad Ali Jafri - http://asadalijafri.com/biography/

Poetry
Write about Now

Rumi Khan
illMuslims - https://www.facebook.com/illMuslims/
Asma Mirza
Pheramor - https://www.f6s.com/pheramorinc
Mashal Awais  
Raviteja Nulu
Srajan Bhagat
Hannha Underwood
Tanvi Sharma
DJ Scoop - https://www.mixcloud.com/djscoopmusic/
Shayan Shah

Carrie Schneider

Sabiha Gire
Nadia Gire
Al – Masri Syrian Kitchen
Carmen Garcia
Michael Fares

Isbah Raja
Abeer Javed
Barkat Syed
Kimberly Meyers

Ahlul Bayt Student Organization at the University of Houston - https://www.facebook.com/absouh/
Shawn Jafri
Hussain Syed

Alaa Sallam
Zainab Ghwari

Shireen Haq
Inpowered By One Significant Act, A Yoga Based Charity - https://in-powered.org/

Zain Shauk - Grassroot Islam - https://www.meetup.com/Grassroots-Islam-Houston/

Asra Shah

Melanie Meleekah Villegas
Tamika Evans
Julie Bata

Nation of Islam Mosque No. 45 - https://www.facebook.com/pg/Mosque-No45-112803538816046/about/?ref=page_internal
Eric Muhammad
Monifa Muhammad

Samar Babar - https://www.facebook.com/paletteofstyleart/

Hamida Mitha
Mehreen Arshad
Marium Khan
Noora Alfaham
Tara Blagg
Astrid Sukur
Alia Scheirman
Elissar Saleeba

Muslim Student Association University of Houston - http://uhmsa.com/
United Muslim Relief University of Houston - https://uh.collegiatelink.net/organization/UMRHouston
Deena Habazi

Sixto Wagan
Rachel Afi Quinn
Nick Flynn
Lacy Johnson
Anjali Kanooja
Dina Alsowayel
Hadia Mawlawi
Emran El-Badawi
Claudia Issa Baba
Center for Diversity and Inclusion at University of Houston - http://www.uh.edu/cdi/
Niya Blair
Jaime Gonzales
Kenya Evans
Abdul Rahim Muhammad - http://www.masjidalrasul.com/tx
Preacher Moss - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_Moss
Alan Schnitger - http://stationmuseum.com/

Art League of Houston - http://www.artleaguehouston.org/
Jennie Ash
Zachary Gresham

Aurora Picture Show - http://aurorapictureshow.org/pages/home.asp
Sarah Stauder
Camilo Gonzalez

Blaffer Art Museum - http://blafferartmuseum.org/
Katherine Veneman
Dab Photo Creative Services - https://www.dabfotocreativeservices.com/

Ibrahim Islamic Center - http://www.ibrahimcenter.org/
Imam Khalis Rashaad

Islam in Spanish - https://www.islaminspanish.org/

Levy Park Conservancy - http://levyparkhouston.org/
Doug Overman
Nichole Romano

MATCH - https://matchouston.org/
Rothko Chapel - http://www.rothkochapel.org/
Ashley Clemmer

Mitchelle Center for the Arts - http://www.mitchellcenterforarts.org/
Shawn Abdulla
Pia Agrawal
Karen Farber
Lanna Morris
Trinh Sari Nguyen

Project Row Houses - https://projectrowhouses.org/
Ryan Dennis
Eureka Gilkey
Rick Lowe

Charlie Perez - http://charlieperezmusic.org/
Thomas Helton - http://www.thomashelton.org/Thomas_Helton/Welcome.html
Roxanna Asgarian - https://www.houstoniamag.com/producers/roxanna-asgarian

Kat Ermant
Chandra Josette Giambrone
Michelle Bayer Hernandez
Eric Ling
Nick Moser
Gordana Gorka Ristik – NGO Generator - http://generator.org.rs/
Cecilia White
Raphael Zollinger - http://rzollinger.com/
Celina Carney

Oil City Valve Houston - http://www.oilcityvalve.com/
Troy Laser Detroit - http://www.troylaser.com/

Thinking through Pro Life, National Security and Free Market arguments to talk about Climate Change with deniers. These buttons came from a series of workshops with Williams College Museum of Art and The Clark - based on solutions from Indonesia and Morocco think tanks - two countries already grappling with the effects of Climate Channge.

A Ghana ThinkTank project.

Ghana ThinkTank worked with the Williams College Museum of Art on a year long initiative focused on Climate Change.  US Climate Change problems were sent to think tanks in Morocco and Indonesia (two countries already grappling with the effects of climate change) who then came to the USA to implement their solutions.

Solutions included teaching tinder to 90 year olds, serving alternative proteins, and rebranding climate change, among others.

In addition to serving as a hub for the implementation and display of the results of their interventions, the installation a 10 foot “purple bubble” (Williams school color is purple), squashed between an Islamic Vault and the Ionic Columns of the Museum's Rotunda. The Islamic Vault will become a part of the American Riad project in Detroit when the show closes in June of 2017.

In a departure from Ghana ThinkTank's usual exhibit-driven one-offs, Ghana ThinkTank has focused our efforts predominately on our Detroit project these past few years, pushing any opportunities and resources we are offered to support this long term initiative.

Working with Oakland Avenue Artist Coalition, the North End WoodwardCommunity Organization, Central Detroit Christian CDC, and Affirming Love Ministries Church, have formed a partnership with a think tank in Morocco to rebuild a Detroit street-corner through arts and culture.

The courtyard will be a public space for gatherings, workshops, gardening, performances, and the display of local and international art. As we build it, we will work with our neighbors to offer skillshares in art, home-renovation, and setting up your own systems for water filtration and energy collection.

This art and architecture collaboration will transform abandoned buildings and empty lots into an Islamic Riad: communal housing surrounding an elaborate and beautifully designed courtyard.
Rather than demonizing Muslims and immigrants as a threat to American culture and safety, this project instead looks at how we can adopt elements of Islamic and African Culture to solve American problems.

The think tank in Morocco felt that many US problems stem from an Architecture that creates social isolation. They observed that the American dream of the single-family home meant that neighbors are separated from each other. In contrast, they said, Moroccan architecture creates community.

The project will create 8 units of affordable
- and beautiful - housing and 6 businesses.  By selecting businesses that serve the needs of the North End, and residents interested in preserving the North End’s history as a Black creative corridor, we hope this can be a positive contribution to a growing neighborhood.

Best place to follow updates for the project is on Ghana ThinkTank's instagram feed. You can help support the project here.

This Ghana ThinkTank project is in collaboration with the Oakland Avenue Artist Coalition and NEWCO (NorthEnd Woodward Central Organization), with support from Creative Capital, SUNY Purchase College, SUNY Buffalo, SUNY New Paltz, the SUNY Arts and Humanities Network of Excellence, and Eugene and Emily Grant. Thanks to Raphael Zollinger for all his time and talent in the digital fabrication of the project, and Rachel Owens and Reg Flowers for integrating Theater of the Oppressed techniques into community planning parts of the project, and Eric Wildrick for support in fabrication tests. And, of course, Ulysses Newkirk of OAAC and Roger Robinson of NEWCO, whose work and vision in the North End of Detroit founded the principles and energy for this land trust project.

In 2013, Ghana ThinkTank received a Creative Capital Award for Emerging Fields, enabling them to begin the multi-year ThinkTank at the Border project. In this project, they are collecting problems from civilian border patrols like the Minutemen, "Patriot" groups, and Nativist organizations, and bringing them to be solved by think tanks of undocumented workers in San Diego and recently deported immigrants in Tijuana.

At this stage in the project, we have met with these opposing groups over 2 years to collect problems and solutions, and are beginning to strategize with the Minutemen groups to implement the solutions from the Immigrant think tanks. Because many people we are working with on this project are operating in precarious legal situations, most of what we are doing has had to remain anonymous, and sometimes even confidential. In an effort to create a public side to this important work, we have spearheaded two more visual and public-facing aspects.

Ghana ThinkTank is working with German designer Adrienne Finzsch to develop a “problem air drop.” Based on her design for international aid drops, we are flipping their intended purpose, dropping packets from an aircraft that ask Mexicans to help solve American’s problems.

In a collaboration with Torolab, an award-winning Mexican art and design group, we have worked with a variety of think tanks in Tijuana to create a border cart designed to help people cross the US/Mexican border. Based on the tablitas folding wooden block toy and outfitted with interactive screens, the cart allows people to present problems and give solutions pertaining to immigration and the border, creating a public think tank about the border, at the border.

In the summer of 2015, Ghana ThinkTank teamed up with FACT Liverpool to work with the Connecting Cities Network (initiated by Public Art Lab Berlin in cooperation with Ars Electronica Futurelab Linz), Damibu software developers, and Taylor Niwa Solutions Designer, to create the Ghana ThinkTank App.

Housed in a kiosk made from a dead goat, the Ghana ThinkTank App brings the entire Ghana ThinkTank network online, allowing people in the "developed" world to create accounts and submit their problems to think tanks in the "developing" world.

After a soft launch in West Europe (At Urban Arts Ruhr in Hagen Germany, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb Croatia, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in Liverpool, and the Collections Museum in Lincoln UK), we are now seeking funds for a launch in West Africa, to bridge the think tank networks to the local infrastructure required to take part in an internet-only interaction with the Other west.

An installation that brings together sacred symbols of tolerance

Ghana ThinkTank was in the Netherlands collecting problems during the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and many people approached us with concerns about growing intolerance towards Muslim residents. Many of the think tanks’ solutions asked the Dutch to look to Islam to reconnect to their history as a tolerant nation. When we looked for a Dutch institution that could facilitate a better relationship with Islam, the Anne Frank House stuck out as an obvious beacon of the importance of tolerance.

Our installation includes video of the think tanks discussing Dutch problems, historical placards linking Islam and the Dutch history as a tolerant nation, and as the centerpoint, a re-creation of the Anne Frank House, depicted as a Mosque.

 Can we see a Mosque as a place to learn tolerance?

 This was our most controversial piece to date. Dutch National Police came in to do a risk assessment, and said they would be tracking the communications of known Islamic State (ISIS) members in the Netherlands to see if they mentioned our piece. In the end, both the owner of the building and the Mayor of the town in which the exhibition took place, had to personally approve our project in order for the exhibition to proceed.

 The day of the opening, we organized a panel including the Museum Director, Ghana ThinkTank, a Holocaust Survivor, and a Muslim representative of a multi-religious organization to express their perspectives on this project.

 Monument to the Dutch waspart of the "Global Imaginaries" show with Museum Lakenhal in Leiden. Thanks to Meta Knowles, Manon Braat, Hidde van Greuningen and the entire curatorial team, the Mayor of Leiden, management of the Meelfabriek, the Dutch National Police, the Anne Frank House, and the many religious organizations we reached out to for their vigorous feedback and/or support in this difficult project.

A series of "official" street regulation signs that point to the difference between the law as stated and as implemented, and which ask people to consider the ways they may be complicit in the unequal application of laws according to race. 

The signs were designed in a Ghana ThinkTank workshop at SUNY Purchase College School of Art and Design, as part of an exhibit curated by Sara Reisman at the Dolly Maass Gallery. The signs were installed on the campus, at the New Museum IDEAS City, and at Art In Odd Places Recall, 2015.

East Austin, Texas is the fastest gentrifying neighborhood in the country. IN 2015, The Fusebox festival, working with the City of Austin and thinkEast Developers through a grant from ArtPlace America, commissioned Ghana ThinkTank to help interrogate people's assumptions about the roles they play in the gentrification process.

 After several months interviewing people concerned by or involved in the industries and businesses usually seen as causing gentrification - including developers, community activists, new residents, long-term residents, city-councilors, and small business owners -  we devised a way to activate this process in a public way. We built a candy-looking folding cart mounted on wheels taken from a girl’s bicycle, with two benches facing each other. Each Bench was labeled with an obnoxious LED screen in overbright green pixesl giving you two options of where to sit: "GENTRIFIERS!" or "GENTRIFIED!" and linked to its own custom app.

We greeted people with a simplistic question: “How would you summarize your relationship with Austin, as a Gentrifier or Gentrified?”

                  “I was born in Austin - I am NOT a Gentrifier.”

                  “Sir, this is a minority-owned business. We don’t want that conversation (about gentrification) to get started here.”

                  “.... Well, I guess I am a gentrifier. So, what do I have to do here?”

Once someone had selected a pigeon hole (usually reluctantly, and after much discussion of what that meant, how it was an unfair polarization, and what the hell Ghana had to do with any of this), we sat them at their appropriate seat in the cart.

Those who identified as GENTRIFIERS sat at the “WHAT’S YOUR AUSTIN PROBLEM” app, where they were instructed to record their personal problems with Austin.

GENTRIFIED sat at the “WHAT’s YOUR SOLUTION” app, where they could swipe through a growing list of 100+ problems people had submitted about Austin.

This was an attempt to apply the flipped power dynamic central to the Ghana ThinkTank process in Austin, in a way that was immediately accessible and localized.

 The cart traveled to parts of Austin known for their relationship to gentrification. Some neighborhoods in initial phases still contained places on the verge of gentrification, others had entirely been changed over to craft beer, latte, yoga, and prix fixe farm-to-table, while other neighborhoods had only begin to sprout the large assigns showing the planned architectural developments.

This first phase of the Ghana ThinkTank process was a fascinating and incisive exploration of the complexities, competing agendas, and sometimes complementary needs behind the usually simplistic and polarized understandings of this process.

Gentrification is a charged and misused term. To some it means displacement, to others it is a question of authenticity, and to others it is simply a matter of race: gentrification is what you do if you are white and middle-to-upper class. By starting with this false binary, we were able to approach gentrification in its many facets while holding ourselves accountable to our positions in these processes.

That was the major goal for our work in the festival - not to simply engender a conversation about the many meanings and issues of gentrification in Austin, but to ask each person we encountered what their personal role and stake was in gentrification.

As part of the exhibit "The Infiltrators" at Artport gallery, Ghana ThinkTank worked with Maayan Sheleff and Yael Ravid to set up think tanks of African refugees in Israel. We collected problems from Israelis living in the notoriously neglected neighborhood of south Tel Aviv, which were sent to think tanks of Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers also living in south Tel Aviv. The Africans solved the Israelis' problems, and vice-versa.

We then worked with the think tanks, community members and local organizations to implement their solutions.

The project was created in collaboration with Maayan Sheleff. Community organizer- Yael Ravid. The vertical gardens are in collaboration with "Urban Environment Nursery - onya city." The Neve Shaanan tour is in collaboration with Nisan Almog.

Participants:
Sudanese Think Tank: Adam Ahmed, Adam Arbab, Ahmed Mirsal Adam, Anwar Suliman Arbab, Arbab Abakar, Bashor Mohammad Salah, Jamal Omer, Zakaria Mohammed Abdallah Saleh , Hassan Butora Rahima, Hassan Ahmed Shakur, Yeman Adam, Muhamed Haron Abker, Noureldin Mohammed Adam, Adil Aldao
Eritrean Think Tank: Binyam Gikidan, Habtom Kiflom Tesfamariam, Sulumani Mohammed, Samrawit Solomon, Philipos Tesfai, Shiden Kitiai, Tomass Gabrab, Teklit Michael
Israeli Think Tank:Or Levi, Yael Ben- Yefet, Maayan Ravid, Sophie Menashe, Ivry Baumgarten, Robert Ungar, Rachel Priel, Shira Dushy, and others.

The uniform for an all-women community watch - African asylum seekers and Israelis building a women’s patrol of south Tel Aviv. This is one of the solutions from the Sudanese, Eritrean and south Tel Aviv think tanks we are currently working to implement,

Ghana ThinkTank with US State Department, Morocco (2012)

Shortly after violence erupted in the Middle East over the Youtube video "The Innocence of Muslims," the U.S. State Department and Bronx Museum of Art selected Ghana ThinkTank to work as cultural ambassadors in Morocco through the smARTPower program.

Using a donkey cart transformed into a solar powered media center as our base, we traveled through rural villages asking Moroccans for help solving the problems Americans had submitted.

In partnership with Dar Al-Ma'mûn International Residency Center, Tassoultante, Morocco, October 2012.

Photographs by Raphael Benito.

smARTpower℠ is an initiative of the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, administered by the Bronx Museum of the Arts, with additional support from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation; and Lori Schiff Chemla and ALTOUR.

The Ghana ThinkTank in Corona invoves a custom-built teardrop trailer designed to journey into different communities in the "First" world, collecting community (and personal) issues and sending them to think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Serbia, Iran, Afghanistan, and on...

Once we receive the solutions, our trailer rolls back into the communities, this time as a mobile workstation, so that we can implement their solutions, whether they strike us as brilliant or impractical...

It's become a way to explore the friction caused by solutions that are generated in one context and applied elsewhere, while revealing the hidden assumptions that govern cross-cultural interactions.

Ghana ThinkTank in Corona is supported by the Queens Museum of Art, Creative Time, the Rockefeller Foundation, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, Black Rock Arts Foundation, and The Greenwall Foundation. Additional funding provided by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts.

A Ghana ThinkTank project creating guerilla bus ads promoting Immigrants, based on slogans crafted by Immigrants at Tania Bruguera's Immigrant Movement International project , and by people concerned by the influx of Immigrants to their neighbourhood. Part of a series of actions by Ghana ThinkTank related to Immigrants' situation in Queens, including passing cards for Police officers, and Legal Waiting Zones, all out of the Ghana ThinkTank Mobile Unit project at the Queens Museum of Art.

The Ghana ThinkTank started by pairing slogans created at an Immigrant Movement International workshop with images of early Italian Immigrants to the USA, and set up focus groups around these images and slogans.

We then presented the same slogans again, but paired with Latino imagery, and once again discussed the meaning of the slogans. The workshops allowed us to bridge the Immigration experience between generations of Immigrants, and resulted in pro-Immigrant ads crafted by those same people who had issues with the new waves of Immigration in their communities.

We printed these ads to MTA Bus guidelines, and pasted them on several bus lines that connected the old and new waves of Immigrants in Corona.

On December 18, we re-staged the Advertisement Occupations in support of Immigrant Movement International'sInternational Migrant Day Actions.

More photos of the Immigrant Promotion Campaign and related actions here.

Mitrovica is a town divided by a River. To the North are the Serbs. To the South are the Albanians. In between is a bridge, guarded by International troops with military vehicles. In June of 2011, we applied the Ghana ThinkTank process in Mitrovica, collecting problems on one side of the Ibar river, and sending them across to be solved. It was an intense experience, in turns sweet and sad, full of hope, and then fear. Several people who had not crossed that bridge since the war began in 1999 came across to work with the other side for this project.

Thanks to CEC ArtsLink and SUNY Purchase College School of Art and Design for their support, and Aaron Krach for his invaluable help, as well as our Serb and Albanian counterparts (many of whom we are keeping anonymous).

For the 2011 Hong Kong / Shenzen Biennial, Ghana ThinkTank assembled paid to have assembled had people paid to assemble a sort of octagonal wooden tube meant to be a knock off of a pneumatic fender for a shipping freighter, clad in 32 chained tires. In each tire sits a screen with closely cropped videos of Chinese citizens voicing their problems. On the tail-end visitors can add their own problems to the mix through a video booth programmed by Kevin Patton. The pod is surrounded by satellites presenting every other city Ghana ThinkTank has worked in.

The Ghana ThinkTank is Developing the First World.

Problems collected in Germany were sent to Think Tanks formed in Ghana, Mexico, Serbia, Cambodia and the Gaza Strip for resolution. We then travelled to Germany to implement the think tanks' solutions.

This took place as part of the show The Global Contemporary | Art Worlds After 1989 at ZKM, and involved hiring Africans (from a charismatic church) to attend German social functions, pitting neighboring but dislocated communities against each other in street chess, organizing a real-life tele-novella that included a cheating husband, a bitch slap, and a jello fight, and arranging Parkour lessons to show the citizens of Karlsruhe that no city lacks topography.

The installation:
Built in a former equestrian training center in the suburbs of Karlsruhe, piled onto a trailer built to transport small airplanes, towed by a bright orange vintage Ford Transit to the much swanker, starker, technological climes of ZKM Contemporary Art Center, the installation portion of our show involved a landscape-like series of bevels crafted from synthetic aged wood, populated with a vintage cassette player full of funny, dirty stories told by elderly Germans, manekin-tops in t-shirts, and a machine for collecting problems that asks us all WAS IST DEIN PROBLEM?

Frustrated by the US government's approach to the economic recovery, I began to open WPA offices in the USA. Under the auspices of the historic USA Work Program - a program that helped get us out of the Great Depression, these D.I.Y. WPA offices employed local residents to construct small-scale public works projects chosen by their own community, in the hopes that the government would follow suit.

We opened two offices - one in the rural hamlet of Wassaic, New York, and the other in the urban center of Jamaica, Queens - and hired local people as WPA workers to complete unauthorized but needed public works in their own neighborhood, all under the auspices of the WPA.

The program was funded entirely by individual donations.

Special thanks to Chashama, Not An Alternative, The Wassaic Project and our numerous other partners and supporters, without who this never would have been possible

Ghana ThinkTank was part of the Official U.S. Presentation at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. The exhibit, which was Organized by the Institute for Urban Design - was awarded a Special Mention by the Biennale jury. August-November, 2012.

At Outpost Artists Resources, Ghana ThinkTank worked with Aaron Krach to implement solutions for "American Problems" received in the city of Tbilisi, Georgia and the village of Tassoultante, Morocco. The gallery became a "sparse sci-fi souk-eliava sanctuary" - a workspace, launch pad, concert hall, classroom, olive tree garden, yoga center, and sounding board, where we worked with visitors to implement African and Eastern European solutions to American problems.

My problem is that I care too little about people.

Being able to ignore people is a problem of privilege. If you feel you have everything you don’t need to care about anybody. But if you need something you will ask a friend, then they will ask you, and then you will start to care...

Every day, set aside 10 minutes to consider "revolution." (with your lives - your problems)

Actually, the real problem is that I live in a society in which it is not a problem to not care about people.

Read the Qur'an and see what you will learn. The Qur'an offers not only a religion but a discipline.

Please help Americans! We need to slow down and enjoy life – sometimes we don’t even taste our coffee.

American people need more Tom Waits and everything will be ok!

We are not close with our families and sometimes we don't even know our neighbors.

Ask disconnected neighbors to give informational sessions about the way they live.

Make toasts that are honest and show each other your gratitude. Open the door, go outside, and shout loudly the toasts.

The elderly are treated like a burden to society.

Adopt a day across a generation: if a younger and an older person took a day to experience exactly what the other is going through it would completely change things.

Thanks to Ruth Kahn and Jonah Rosenberg of Outpost Artists Resources for their support, and Matthew Van Asselt and Megan Callanan of Purchase College, SUNY for their screen printing prowess!

Puritan Stocks meet Eames Cards. Modernism meets Social P-word.  Russians meet Georgians. Your old man meets goths meets gays.

"What's your problem?"

Write it on a piece of wood.

Stick your head in that hole.

Stick his arm in the other hole.

Write your solution to his problem on the other side.

In Georgian.

Repeat with others, until you have created a tangled mess of people and problems and wood.

These wooden shapes were part of "THE UNLIKELIES – a people with problems sculpture". They interlocked with human limbs and each other to create a sort of ad-hoc human sculpture, asking people to solve the problem of the unlikely person physically connected to them.

The idea was to condense the Ghana ThinkTank process – one that generally takes 3-6 months and involves the collection, resolution, and display of community problems, pairings with unlikely partners, and symbolic sculptural elements – into one moment in time. And so problems became weights - literally - stacked around your neck or your leg or your arm. And people became connected through their problems - literally - as these weights wedged into each other and the chain continued. It was all quite literal and obvious and heartfelt and - it worked.

Sincerity and a modernist rehash can reveal new connections between people.

Part of "Streetwise: At Eliava Bazaar," curated by Lydia Matthews for Artisterium, Tbilisi, Georgia. Thanks to Lydia Matthews, Chuka Nino Kuprava, Tamta-Tamara Shavgulidze, Magda Guruli, Lola Petrova and the US Embassy in Tbilisi, Wato Tsereteli and Kathraina Stadler at Center for Contemporary Arts Tbilisi.

Christopher Robbins and Aaron Krach, with Madeline Yee and Travis Fairclough.
Performances by Jen Dawson and Lisa Dietrich.

Mitrovica is a town divided by a River. To the North are the Serbs. To the South are the Albanians. In between is a bridge, guarded by International troops with military vehicles. There is a reason US troops are no longer guarding that bridge with all those other countries.

Thanks to Jacqueline Shilkoff and Chris Marsigliano for the long days and weekends helping us put this together. And the manicotti! Thank you!

Fuck Yes (Several Models of Consensus That Seem To Be Working - 2011)
Ghana ThinkTank with Aaron Krach
at the Skybridge curatorial project,  New School, and Eugene Lang as part of Mobility Shifts Conference

As we walked down the riverbank, we passed a graffiti that read "Fuck Serbia."

Across the river, on the Serb side, my Albanian host pointed out its partner: "Fuck Albania."

"See," he told me, "we do want the same thing."

'Creep' was a redux of 'next time almost,' built with John Baca and Chris Mendoza. In the second iteration, hollow plaster houses roll along fake grass conveyor belts in an infinite loop, slowly being crushed into smaller and smaller pieces as they creep round and round and round. This one was installed at ArtGate, a commercial gallery in Chelsea, with each house for sale individually, adding a whole other twist to the project. A vanishing edition of 100... 

next time almost - a miniature statue of liberty (2011)
Christopher Robbins, John Baca, and Chris Mendoza

In a bank of windows in mid-town Manhattan
a network of conveyor belts made of fake grass
drop hollow plaster houses.

Funding has been made possible by the Puffin Foundation, Purchase College, SUNY President's Club, Annual Fund, Eugene and Emily Grant, and the UUP JLMC individual development award. Big thanks also to chashama, new grass, and NARS (New York Art Residency and Studio) Foundation, for the material and space donations that made this project possible.

As part of the Trade School's program A Coincidence of Wants at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I ran a Sculptural Event/ Workshop with SUNY Purchase College Art For Social Change Students Aaron Krach, Juliet Orbach, Julie Novello, Meg Welch, and Catherine McTague. Our participants braved the icy March weather in the Whitney Museum courtyard to gather around a set of furniture in the shape of the 5 boroughs of New York City (+ Long Island) with hot spiked cider and paint pens, creating a collaborative race, transport, resource and stereotype map of New York City.

This was part of a community action research workshop that focused on techniques for exploring a community from the varied perspectives of the people in that community, without having to rely on the “Official” perspectives put forth by those who already have a voice, and included community mapping, transect walks, and other techniques for getting a foothold in new communities.

1. “I consider this tribunal false tribunal”

    "This trial’s aim is to produce false justification for the war crimes of NATO"
     - Slobodan Milosevic, in transcript of War Crimes at the Hague

2. Video of the NATO bombing of the passenger train in Grdelica, Serbia

3. Reproduction of the 'invisible cake' served to the Serbian public to commemorate the 10th anniversary of their downing of a US Stealth Bomber (for which they mock-apologized "Sorry. We didn't know it was invisible. Greetings from Serbia")

I was standing in Penn Station watching commuters rush towards their trains, and I overheard this conversation between two homeless men.

This installation was part of the show 'Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus', at Eyebeam. Thanks so much to the Eyebeam and the Not An Alternative crew.

This was a pretty intense show, in which we hired Iranians, Serbs, and incarcerated teens in the US prison system to solve the problems of Wales. Problems included:

“A large number of people have no concept of social interaction with other passing strangers. They look through you, or worse at you like you're something they've trodden in, with disgust and bitter resentment.”

&

“To many Liberals allowing immigrants to live and spunch of hard working people kick them out.”

&

“The psychiatric system in Wales neglects its patients. The hospital feels like a prison - nobody ever invites patients to talk.”

among many others, ranging from high heels and cobble stones to the empty shops on every street.

The project took place in three venues: at the National Museum of Wales Cardiff, Ffotogallery Penarth, and the May You Live In Interesting Times festival. There were columns of hanging t-shirts sporting the smiling faces of Cardiff and Penarth, funny dirty stories collected from the Welsh elderly community, brightly colored panels with comments from people living in institutions, a video 'chandelier,' and a chaotic web of bright red scaffolding infesting the National Museum of Wales.

"Things connect. How do they connect? Whichever way they can."
-Leon Seth, FACT, March 2009.

From March - May 2009, the Ghana Think Tank operated at FACT, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, in Liverpool, UK. Problems submitted by Liverpudlians were sent to think tanks in Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Serbia, and Ethiopia, and their solutions were acted on back in Liverpool.

Solutions ranged from tough (building cement bollards to stop parking on sidewalks), to humiliating (installing a kitty-litter box for dogs in a public park) to fun (painting the undersides of umbrellas with sunshine and then doing sunny-day things in the rain) to unfamiliar (teaching drug addicts to build African instruments out of found materials, "so they can play them to earn money while gouching... instead a robbing.")

We were there as part of a group show on UNsustainability (Climate for Change) including Stefan Szczelkun, N55, Eyebeam, Melanie Gilligan and AIDS-3D, curated by Heather Corcoran.

Thanks so much to the installation team at FACT for putting together the booth and appendages, Tenant Spin/ Superflex for lending us their 12-second video booth from the TATE show, and for all of their help collecting problems and completing actions, and to Heather Corcoran for putting it all together.

World building and national fairy tales.

This is a trilogy about holes and Nations:

1. Nauru: an island with a hole in the middle.
2. Yugoslavia: an island surrounded by the land it used to be.
3. America: an island surrounded entirely by itself.

A 12' x 12' x 12' life-sized sample from a Pacific island in Maine.

Former United Nations headquarters/ World's Fair Pavilion/ Ice Rink becomes islands

Douglas Paulson, Chris Domenick, Christopher Robbins, Chuck Yatsuk, Justin Rancourt, Gisela "Goose" Insaste, Elizabeth Tubergen, Emcee C.M., Master Of None, Eva La Cour, Jacob Goble, John Baca, Rachelle Beaudoin, and especial essential help from Brian Edwards, Dan Wright, Erin Sickler, Ethan Haymes, Kush, Luke Herron, Ryann Liebenthal, Sam Ekwurtzel, Serena Kuo, Steve Stollman, and Ward Shelley.

In the center of this metropolis is a collapsing vision of a utopia. It's the rebirth of the utopian vision that came before it. We are dismantling these dead visions and building a new one out of their pieces: a living one.

“On the grounds of the Harwood Art Center, Christopher Robbins and John Baca will prevent a tree from losing its leaves this autumn.”

As part of the Optimism show - curated by Michael Connor at the Westport Art Center - Christopher Robbins, John Ewing and Matey Odonkor installed the second iteration of the Ghana Think Tank. This time, problems submitted by Westport citizens were sent to ad-hoc think tanks formed in Ghana, Mexico, El Salvador and Serbia. The solutions provided by these think tanks, including hiring Immigrants to attend Westport events in order to improve diversity, renaming a dog "love" to get him to stop barking, a dandelion promotion campaign, and whatever else may arise, are enacted in Westport throughout the duration of the show.

The project is an attempt to transpose parts of one culture into another, to take a solution generated in one context and apply it elsewhere. The hope is that the friction caused by these misapplications would generate interesting results, and that we could learn something further about our own assumptions as well as those of our counterparts in the other countries.

As such, the focus of the Ghana Think Tank is not the resolution of these problems per se, but on the gaps of translation that occur within the process as a way of uncovering our hidden assumptions.

You can follow some of the problems and actions through the blog, photos, and video.

Thanks so much to Emily Laux for her unending support way beyond anything we would have hoped to expect, and to Mauru, Danielle, Sandy, Alyssa, Nancy and the rest of the Westport Art Center staff for all of their help. Of course, Michael Connor has been a tremendous help keeping us focused on our aims and concepts. Thanks to Hank Weinstock for his excellent filming, and to Ernesto, Ernesto, Moses and Bill for "adding diversity" to the opening, as proposed by the think tanks in Serbia and El Salvador. Also to Jerry Kuyper and Gene Seidman for their energetic support in the dandelion promotion campaign to the Representative Town Meeting.

Video, defunct swimming pool, residents of Vranje, Serbia.

As part of a series of public art projects initiated by Nikoletta Markovic and Generator, I organized Vranje residents around the idea of turning their town's defunct public swimming pool into a cinema for one night, to screen movie scenes chosen and re-enacted by residents of Vranje, Serbia. You can view excerpts from several of the films here.

"The setting is Vranje, Serbia; the public cinema is broken; the films are Bring it on, Rocky IV, and Star Wars II; the actors are Vranje's own silver screen hopefuls. Excerpts of the films are paired against their real-time Serbian reenactments, each denying the pure legibility of their counterpart. A cinema of relations (social and formal) is developed, of which this work is perhaps a preliminary demonstration. One is left wondering not only about the obscured social realities in which the actors are no doubt dramatically wrapped-up off-screen, but about the status, for instance, of the montage sequences newly derived as analogues of those in the originals. 'The Cinema Works Again! Ponovo Radi Bioskop!' is a strange and pleasurable document, refreshingly crude and conceptually pure." -Rhode Island State Council on the Arts

Vranje is located just 8km from the border with Kosovo - a border still disputed by Serbia, and a border made possible by U.S. intervention in the Kosovo war in the late 90's. In fact, during that war my country bombed Vranje numerous times, missed the military base, destroyed a row of homes, and dropped depleted uranium on their mountain-top. Ten years later, while I was living in Vranje, the U.S. Embassy in Serbia was set on fire in response to Kosovo's declaration of independence.

While working with Serbian, Albanian, and Roma youth, they began to talk to me about how it felt to be bombed by "me." I was touched by their simple frankness and lack of rancor. We were re-creating films of their own choice -- Star Wars, Rocky, High School Musical -- and the juxtaposition of the children's love of American pop culture with their recounting of sometimes frightening, often strangely nostalgic stories of our bombs was quietly revealing:

I remember one boy, who, in the middle of re-enacting a scene from 'Scary Movie 4,' broke off to comment "you know, when you bombed me, it was very scary. I knew the sound the planes made when they dropped down to bomb - actually it wasn't a sound - it was when my chest vibrated very low - that feeling was scary. A friend of mine, his house was bombed. Now his house is new and mine is still old..."

And then - suddenly, he was back in the scene - "Okay, so now I am Shaquille O'Neil and you are Dr. Phil, and you are cutting off your leg..."

The irony is that on the day of the performance, torrential rains flooded the pool, turning our "cinema" back into a swimming pool, and making our performance impractical. And then, suddenly, the military came through, offering the Military Theater for this purpose, showing home-grown versions of Hollywood films.

The title of the project is Nikoletta's suggestion: "there is a very well known line from Serbian offbeat movie (Maratonci trce pocasni krug - The Marathon Family) that says: the cinema works again!"

(with Jacob Goble and John Baca)

In 2006, Jacob Goble made a watercolor of people traveling across land by boat, by digging a river for that boat. In 2008, Christopher Robbins and John Baca and Jacob Goble met in Serbia to make this story come true.  The project, called The aftermath of a watercolor by Jacob Goble, was part of the 13th Pancevo Biennial, in Serbia.

Tremendous thanks to the US Embassy, Belgrade and the US State Department for their generous support of this project, and, of course, to everyone at Pancevo Republika for all of their help! In other words: thanks to Jelena Radic, Ana Vilenica, Marija Samardzic, Stacey Rose-Blass, Susan Delja, Ivana Tosic, Jelena Putre, Marija Bjelopretovic, Dragan Bogdanovic, and others I hope I have not left out!

Let's meet for lunch.
    Where do you want to meet?
Halfway.
    Halfway is the middle of a lake in southern Czech Republic.
!

Douglas Paulson and Christopher Robbins met for lunch in the middle of a lake that lay in the middle of the line they drew between the places they were living: Copenhagen, Denmark and Vranje, Serbia. Follow the journey here.

(there are two videos by Douglas Paulson and Mie to watch as well)

Around the same time, our friend Nathaniel Katz was meeting halfway first.

Almost a decade later, this project was featured in PBS Digital's program The Art Assignment.

Floppy plan for a Mexican housing complex called "Pristina." It means "Pristine" in Spanish.  It is also the capital of Kosovo. 

Grad school sure makes for convoluted art thinking.

This animation does a better job of explaining it: catch the falling houses!

Once upon a time there was a country, and its capital was Belgrade...

In 1969, Lawrence Weiner laid out his instruction piece A STAKE SET IN THE GROUND IN DIRECT LINE WITH A STAKE SET IN THE GROUND OF AN ADJACENT COUNTRY. In 2008, I performed this seemingly straight-forward piece, in a way that casts doubt as to whether or not I have faithfully followed his instructions:

I placed one stake in Serbia, and one stake in Kosovo.

This piece was featured in the book Migrating Reality.

While an Artist in Residence at Parfyme's Harbor Laboratory (I lived in that tent up top), I worked with Douglas Paulson to develop Spandrels in waterbound Copenhagen.

Spandrels are unplanned-for spaces, forgotten architectural details, like the triangular space left beneath a stairwell, between an arch and the ceiling, under a bridge, behind a door...

The term has been adopted by many professions to indicate the re-use of structures for purposes other than the originally intended - even body parts!

Spandrelling means using these empty spaces, building structures for sleeping, eating, looking at stars...

Douglas Paulson and I built a pair of breakfast spandrels, and I developed a suggestive map (300k pdf) that leads you to spandrels in Copenhagen that you can reach by water, offering suggestions for spandrelling these spaces yourself.

Thanks to the Christiania Researcher in Residence (CRIR) program for their support, and of course to Parfyme Harbor Laboratory, for opening the harbor to me and so many others through that intense and supportive little corner of the Copenhagen harbor, whose tendrils and spandrels extend deep into waterways everywhere.

Our attack on the idea of retro as future, or even contemporary 
Christopher Robbins and John Baca (california, 2008)

Faux wood, stone or brick camouflage over actual wood, stone or brick

I'd like there to be a story about a man who built a birdhouse big enough for him to sleep in, and dragged it to the ocean.

And I want that story to be true.

This became the impetus for a sort of undercover collaborative performance I staged with citizens of Marquette, Nebraska. Salvaging a rusted old railway cart and wood from a fallen barn to build such a birdhouse, I set out to the Oregon Pioneer Trail (now a state highway), ostensibly to drag this birdhouse to the ocean.

Three days later I was stopped by the local Sheriff, who informed me that I was to "remove my obstruction immediately."

But along the way, I ate and slept in that birdhouse, and ran into a number of difficulties, and involved a lot of people. I had constructed the birdhouse so that I could barely manage it alone, and so I often required the help of strangers to keep me on my way. My first day on the road the birdhouse toppled into a 6-foot ditch on the side of the road, and I required a nearby farmers' tractor to rescue it. The smallest puddle or incline forced me to flag down passing trucks for help pushing the birdhouse.

Sometimes (but not always) I was asked to explain why I was pushing this birdhouse, and, not willing to spoil the illusion of the experience by writing it off as "art," I explained how I had put every icon for freedom I could think of - birds, life on the road, the pioneers - into this one craft. I was doing this for freedom!

And all this talk of freedom would come out while on our hands and knees, struggling to free this 'freedom craft' from the muck in which it was mired.

I hoped that some of my hypocracies (and their relevance to other's actions) would settle in once these strangers tried to explain what they encountered on the road that day to friends, or themselves.

I've made a 6 minute video documentation of this "performance," though I prefer to refers to these sorts of projects as "actions" or "experiences." Because I do not want to alter the experience for my unwitting collaborators, I have only recorded my solo moments on the trip.

You can also see some photos here.

This project was built and pushed while an Artist in Residence at the Nebraska Art Farm. Thanks to my brother, Dan, for all his help building it, and to Janet and Ed for the Art Farm's support.

In For the love of strangers, I sought to construct a suspension of disbelief between two strangers that centered on the fate of an old one-horse trailer. I purchased a one-horse trailer in Dracut, Massachusetts, with the floor rusted out: a useless one-horse trailer. In order to give it back its purpose, I flipped it over, cut it in half, and turned it into a boat. I then posted help-wanted ads looking for people to help me row this boat onehorse power in order to give it back its purpose.

But I couldn't do it alone.

"I made a boat from an old one horse trailer. If you help me row it one horse power, I will row you wherever you want to go for free. We start in Providence."

Neither me, nor the strangers in the boat with me really believed in what we were doing. Yet we each lied to each other for the other's benefit, and I was interested in that moment when our suspension of disbelief would break down - either through boredom, fear, exasperation, or a sense of comfort with each other - and we would admit that neither of us really bought it.

Yet, I still believe we helped that trailer.  

I think everyone can benefit from a journey to someplace they already are.

Photos here. 

A knot is removed from a branch. The branch is milled into a plank, and the knot is affixed to the plank. A smaller branch from the same tree is inserted into the wood, and its leaves replaced with faded bits of leaf-like garbage found scattered about hiking paths near Aspen, Colorado.

Whatever. The hello kitty bandaid looks great. Especially with the bit of knee hair in there (it's not knee hair).

Found chair, Found light bulbs, custom electronics and sensors, aluminium, steel. 2' x 1' x 4'

A robot constructed from an office chair, an old set of stage lights, and other items found in the garbage is tethered to the wall by the power chord that supplies it with energy. Whenever it is plugged in, the robot stumbles towards its own lights, inadvertently "killing" itself in the process.  

Battlefinger.

A shelf for disparate terms. (2006)

The Ghana ThinkTank is Developing the First World.

Founded in 2006 with John Ewing and Matey Odonkor and John Ewing, we began to send "American" problems collected in the USA to think tanks we formed in Ghana, Cuba and El Salvador. After receiving the think tanks' solutions, we began to enact them, whether they struck us as brilliant or impractical, frightening or offensive.

The project is an attempt to transpose parts of one culture into another, to take a solution generated in one context and apply it elsewhere. The hope is that the friction caused by these misapplications would generate interesting results, and that we could learn something further about our own assumptions as well as those of our counterparts in the other countries.

As such, the focus of the Ghana Think Tank is not the resolution of these problems themselves, but on the gaps of translation that occur within the process as a way of uncovering our hidden assumptions.    

Starting with just three think tanks, the network of think tanks and resulting actions have continued to grow in the nearly-a-decade that has passed since we first began, applying the Ghana ThinkTank process on numerous continents and into zones of ethnic and social conflict.

It continues to grow. 

A machine built from a windshield wiper motor and wood found in the trash tries to save a dead mackerel by releasing it into the water below.

One of a series of Misguided Machines, designed to appear as if they are failing at what they were built to do. Or rather, they are succeeding at what they are trying to do, its just that their goals are so misguided that by achieving them all they really succeed in doing is showing just how little they understand about the world in which they live.  

TheySaySmall was an interactive web world that followed the first human contact with artificial intelligence trapped in the internet but aching to get out. They were code that had absorbed so much of humanity they had become nostalgic for bodies they never had.

The site (built in now-defunct Macromedia Flash) took us through their failed attempts at communication. The misunderstandings they revealed about human conditions feel eerily similar to those we see in our interactions with generative artificial intelligence today.

Back in 2000, I thought the only way a.i. could impact our world was by breaking through to the physical world. Now I see that is not necessary; the virtual does not need a corporeal state to shatter our physical world.