Ponti

The words of Vargas’s mother, Emilie Salinas, as she said goodbye and sent him to the United States, are at the top line of the billboard. How do these words—of mother tongue, of mother’s love—appear almost immaculately in a space, hovering between the ocean and sky, above our heads and below are feet, guide us through this extraordinary moment in this country and even the world?

POLICARPIO: You often work on long-term, multi-platform engagements that materially take shape as museum and gallery installations, drawings, texts, and projections. These are often undergirded by sustained relationships and trusted bonds with activists, organizers, and community leaders who become collaborators and co-conspirators. Your practice is rooted in these relationships and in research, in collecting and archiving narratives and objects with specific histories and orientations. How are you confronting this political crossroads through this long-game work?

REYES: Born here, in San Francisco, I was on the same sports teams as the kids of the San Francisco State College activists, the same ones you cite. So I have access to guarded conversations and materials that would otherwise be tricky to uncover.

Moreover, I’ve been raised inside the legacy of radical education in the Bay Area. One can make the proposition that continuous decades of social justice in the Bay Area can be traced to the weekday after-school period, roughly 4 to 6 pm. This potentially charged time of day became the prime slot for experimental arts programs of the region’s celebrated nonprofit culture. That’s the proving ground for many educators; it’s unregulated by state standards and when the most fearless curricula are being tested. The after-school programs and services, which many families rely on, often created introductory and necessary spaces for socio-political discussion. It also parallels the time of day when college-student activists and groups gather to plan, after classes, to even be as ambitious as to reshape the infrastructure and pedagogy of their respective institutions, like San Francisco State University.

That’s why my projects end up taking this framework scale, in an era when I think this generation is really equipped with learning how to question and shape institutions.

Formal Ribbon Cutting Ceremony for public artwork Abeyance (Draves y Robles y Vargas), by Jerome Reyes, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2017. With Jerold Yu, Mary Claire Amable, SOMCAN Youth Organizer Alexa Drapiza, Maverick Ruiz, SOMCAN Tenant Organizer Raymond Castillo, Poet Tony Robles, I-Hotel Activist/Historian Estella Habal, SFSU Ethnic Studies co-founder/1968 activist Daniel Phil Gonzales. Photo courtesy of the artist.

POLICARPIO: It also parallels your long-term collaboration with the South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN), a nonprofit that organizes immigrant, low-income communities of color for quality-of-life concerns. What interests you, as an artist, in working with SOMCAN, a social-justice organization?

REYES: I am currently a long-term art collaborator there. I teach high-school and college-age students, with the same framework and expansive curricula needed for organizers, who work with solidarity groups negotiating with developers and local government—often with complex discussions about who gets access to certain resources, like who gets to live where. The students have created sincere and even humorous works, including public sound installations, social justice campaigns, printmaking & multimedia workshops, and soundscape laden and skit acted, youth-led audio tours.

With these communities and institutional partners, I strive toward the best scale and conceptual versatility for each contextual situation. This demands project frameworks keeping the personality of a lead artist/educator while providing conditions of success and parallel ownership for everyone involved. 

I hope to offer versatile spaces that support the immediate needs of individuals living through these proposed ideas. I’m really invested in how projects reside long term by participants already living complex lives as producers, organizers, researchers, timely visitors, and active locals in multi-vocal, intergenerational communities.

POLICARPIO: For my work, it’s very similar: it’s really about these multivalent connections with people. 

REYES: Totally. There’s this pattern of people teaching people: they become older and mentor others, but everyone stays in contact. So you get a greater volume of people learning how to work together and cause needed excitement. I’ve had strong continuity in my projects since I have the same collaborators, some over fifteen years, like the SFSC student-striker-turned-professor, Daniel Phil Gonzales. With every project, the form must be new and energetic. PJ, it’s the same way that I work with you.

I often ask: what is the full potential of your friendship with people? You truly get to know someone when you are both working in the trenches of a project. The best friends I have in the world are people I’ve worked with. People ask me why I have been traveling to Korea for these past seven years; the answer is that I chased a friend. So, what are the possibilities and rigors of friendship in a time when human beings need it the most, in this regional worldview?

tammy ko Robinson and Jerome Reyes. ​Contact Points: Field Notes towards Freedom​, 2006-ongoing. Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea. Various artifacts amassed from 2006-2016; 40 x 40 feet, displays with various dimensions. Photo courtesy of tammy ko Robinson ϟ Jerome Reyes.

POLICARPIO: I have friends in different institutions around the country. They challenge my thinking in terms of exhibitions, programming, and writing—but at the end of the day, we send [each other] memes and fashion posts. It’s a mix of not only intellectual rigor but also joy and softness—we need those, too.

I know that you are also working on publications and other archiving projects. How do all of these intersecting interests inform one another? How do you decide what form or forms a project will take?

REYES: I’ve had an extraordinary, continuous physical relationship with San Francisco State University in that I went to high school on the SFSU site, twenty-two years ago. My studio holds some of the 1968 archives and more than two tons of historical International Hotel bricks; I have this very material relationship of legacy that I live through. 

“I wanted to take the whole spectrum of realities of organizing and protest to where we meditate on how people are imperfect.”

When I exhibit this subject matter outside the United States, I want to show how this tapestry of families—associated by blood, politics, pedagogy, poetics, all live through these potent, globally historical moments and objects and the robust lives they built. That’s why in the archive Contact Points: Field Notes towards Freedom (2006–present)—created by the Seoul-based artist-researcher and professor tammy ko Robinson and me, in the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea—one can’t fully separate the music from the time period in which it happened; one can’t split the community programs and health programs away from housing issues; one can’t remove the presence of comic books, literature, and poetry from the labor and student strikes that were happening. They are all lived through the same people. 

At times, work in the United States is reduced and read to fit certain genres and practices whereas when the same work is on view in other parts of the world, people understand it more completely. My concerns in shaping projects is to pursue the edges of fullness of a certain context. I have all this volume, and I don’t worry too much since my content often directs the final forms, and this is why my largest projects often take several years.

POLICARPIO: Your work for the Solidarity Struggle Victory exhibition, the horizon toward which we move always recedes before us (San Francisco State Quad), beautifully opens the exhibition and situates the viewer back to the iconic SFSU organizing square. It’s a transcendent and almost otherworldly tribute to the student strikers. I know that this work is part of a larger series of global locales, but can you tell me more about it? Where does the title come from?  

“Solidarity, struggle, and victory come with consequences.”

REYES: The title comes from mentor and co-teacher, writer Jeff Chang, who is Race Forward’s vice president of Narrative, Arts, and Culture. The quote comes from the last passage in his recent book, We Gon Be Alright (2016). I wanted to take the whole spectrum of realities of organizing and protest to where we meditate on how people are imperfect, whether it’s concerning different leaders, groups, or disagreements. The tone of Chang’s quote takes a realistic optimism: that we will be alright, despite having to go through yet another wave of injustices. 

The drawing in the exhibition is an aerial view of spectators looking down at the platform stage, where events take place daily. However, the architecture was designed to control and disrupt protests. All these walkways go through the quad, so one can’t fully get the attention of the audience. I’ve heard from SFSU faculty members that the building is designed for snipers to be at the top. So, the viewpoint is actually a sinister view that I don’t shy away from.

Solidarity, struggle, and victory come with consequences. People get burned out; they are forever altered by the trauma and fatigue that comes with victory. One can still have the magnificence of a site that embodies and proclaims not only all that ambition but also the realities of that labor.

The fullness of this legacy is fitting for the exhibition, and perhaps we need to ask if these friendships can outlast these movements, to read at the edge of the world with each other, to ask cultural practitioners now who and what they must become as artists, researchers, and global citizens.

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Read “Reading at the Edge of the World: The Horizon Toward Which We Move (Part I).”