2020
video; shared as part of Gray Area’s Manifesto: City Lights x Gray Area project

Excerpt from Gray Area’s call for engagement:

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How can artistic thinking become a meaningful tool in the midst of a global crisis? What is the role of creativity in reimagining our world when great upheavals create openings for change?

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, artists, writers, and philosophers responded to times of calamity with manifestos outlining their creative and ideological principles as a means to both break with a disintegrating past and point towards a new future. In this contemporary moment of a global pandemic and ensuant economic fallout, these manifestos from the past take on a new importance as models for how we might define and create our post-COVID world.

Starting May 1st, City Lights and Gray Area will bring together artists, actors, performers, writers, and cultural activists to perform both original works and readings of famous artists’ manifestos to construct a collaborative poetic reflection on current sociopolitical, economic, and ecological challenges.

The manifestos will be showcased daily on the Gray Area Patch online platform and form a collective community vocabulary for creative intervention during this great 21st-century pandemic.

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