Burn Your Ideas
Burn Your Ideas is a sculpture intervention, with artist talks and edible art workshop. Artists and community participants are invited to bring ideas for change, make up new tactics and destroy our work in a closing ceremony where we ritually smash supremacy thinking, eat our accountability and burn with curiosity.
This is not a cage, at Nexus Arts Gallery Nov 2020. Photo Aaron Schuppan.
THIS IS NOT A CAGE
This is not a cage, 2020, is a human-sized cage, handcrafted from steel, a quintessential Bunker Essential, the Shrine to Transcendence. Door ajar, a void, the incubator of fear, distrust and systemic violence awaits. Enter at your own risk, this social blueprint has entrapped entire cultures and portends the eradication of all life forms.
We are all imprisoned as long as any living being is locked behind bars.
In our dreams of liberation, will we dismantle the cages or carry them with us?
Sculptor: Felix Weber
Bunker Essential concept: Jen Lyons-Reid, Carl Kuddell
Burn Your Ideas sugar art. Photo Change Media.
Bunker Rulz 9: Promise liberation. Technology drives our myths of immortality drives technology. The Colony insists our minds are separate from the world – this delusion of immortality hides the moral impact of creating technologies that further injustice.
Liberation and freedom appear to have two directions. A radical demand: Freedom from oppression, from slavery, incarceration, abuse - freedom from violence. And a social-Darwinist libertarian, privileged entitlement: Freedom to choose, gated communities, schools, hospitals, holidays. Freedom to escape the responsibility of negotiating power and sharing equitably.
As gated AI, big data and bio-technology corporations attempt to enact our stories of immortality, collectively we have handed power to corrupt politicians and a greedy concept that the ‘free market’ will protect us.
Liberation becomes a commodity for sale, alt-facts and spiraling conspiracies confuse collective discussions. Decisions that are impacting everyone and everything on the planet are being made by a few privileged people who believe their wealth grants them the right to choose for all of us.
Here Lies Humanity, Nexus Arts Nov 2020. Photo Aaron Schuppan.
How do we support each other to regularly challenge our thinking?
How can individual solutions address collective needs? How can liberation be a joyful struggle? Caught in the headlights, how do we support each other while the train of progress is coming straight for all of us?
What is a life well lived?
Burn Your Ideas sugar art. Photo Change Media.
Provocateurs corner: We fear that our separate struggles will be futile if we don’t recognize the unity of oppression and act on our intersectionality. How do we frame reciprocity as part of a mindful, respectful process that challenges and devolves our power and privilege? Or do we risk to get picked off, one by one? Part intervention, part revolutionary symposium, part candy installation, Burn Your Ideas explores how we can challenge our personal and collective assumptions. In the words of Aboriginal women activists around Lilla Watson: How is your liberation bound up with mine?
Burn Your Ideas sugar art. Photo Change Media.
Creative concept, development and curators: Jen Lyons-Reid & Carl Kuddell
Installation: In collaboration with participating artists
Bio art: Jen Lyons-Reid
Concrete and metal sculptures: Felix Weber
Text: Jen Lyons-Reid & Carl Kuddell
Poetry: Poets tba
Photos: Change Media
Venues: Our _this breath symposium has been postponed due to COVID-19. Date to be announced in early 2021.
Sugar sculpture in self portrait SCOBY, Coral St Artspace Oct 2020. Photo Johanis Lyons-Reid.
