Know How

Public Address Systems collects a series of projects created and coordinated by artist and researcher Lois Weaver.

Each of these projects is at its core an engagement with the public, though Weaver’s extensive practice brings together multiple and interrelated strands. In a period when the nature of ‘the public’ is increasingly contested, Public Address Systems create spaces that are hospitable and open so that alternatives can be modelled and critical questions staged. What do we share and what do we owe each other? How are ‘we’ counted and who is included? From broad questions about material resources to intimate studies of bodies and identity, Public Address Systems asks how it is possible to think, and feel, publicly.

LONG TABLE

CARE CAFE

PORCH SITTING

Public Address Systems also appropriates institutional spaces for complex interventions around gender, sexuality, human rights and other crucial flash points for public activism. The library, the museum and the form of the manifesto are all radically reconfigured to create new public spaces for political action, and to question ingrained institutional boundaries.
For more information on each System, visit our Other Systems page.

PORCH SITTING

Like other projects in this category, Porch Sitting explores alternative models for public conversations. The project takes seriously the idea that dialogue can happen side-by-side, rather than face-to-face with an expert. Porch Sitting creates an open-ended forum supported by clear structures that draw on vernacular forms of exchange. The conversation space becomes a ‘household’ divided into two areas: the Kitchen and the Porch. In the Kitchen, you can get drinks, have a chat, have a bite to eat. There are no rules for behaviour. There is no need to leave the Kitchen, if that’s where you’re most comfortable. On the Porch, conversation is sustained by a few simple rules. It is a space to sit, think, dream or get involved in the ongoing conversation. It is ok if conversation goes quiet, or if it spills out into raucousness or song.

A few openers help ease you into conversation:

I wonder whatever happened to….
Who do you think that is….
I have a feelin’ it’s going to….
Or just about any phrase that begins:
I imagine…I wonder…I think…I feel…

Porch Sitting was initiated at LaMaMa Experimental Theatre in New York on New Year’s Eve of 2012/13.

DOMESTIC TERRORISM

As an act of Domestic Terrorism, Lois Weaver airs dirty laundry in public. The project makes literal the crossing of boundaries between private and public, and engages audiences with questions of what and why we hide. This project is one of several to deal with laundry as a political theme. The intimacy and materiality of washing is also a social marker of class and gender. It can disclose the population and income of a household. It reveals personal taste and bad habits; betrays acts of insurrection and indiscretion. How laundry is hung can be a statement of pride or an expression of modesty. It can elicit shame or shelter the good in good dreams. It can be a form of communication between neighbours, a violation of housing codes in certain communities or perceived as a national threat in times of national insecurity. The act of hanging laundry is a daily yet resonant gesture that holds the memories of mothers’ hands. It’s a local ritual that translates globally in both rural and urban landscapes.

In 2011, as part of Art in Odd Places, Weaver staged Domestic Terrorism: Hang Your Laundry in Public on the streets of New York. In the persona of a Lady in Red, Weaver made a daily ritual of hanging laundry and engaging passersby in conversation. Audio recordings and photographs (by photographer Lori E. Seid) from these interactions were placed alongside the airing laundry in a growing public installation. This gentle disruption of the everyday was a generative act of dialogue on the nature of what is public and what is private.

THE CARD TABLE

The Card Table is part of Weaver’s exploration into alternative forms of public conversation. The project reserves a place for specialist knowledge, but instead of an ‘expert’, in this place there is a ‘dealer’ in a new kind of card game.

In The Card Table, dealers create deconstructed panel presentations in the form of thirteen interchangeable points. Players decide how the presentation unfolds, forging their own connections and actively participating in the transfer of knowledge. Tournament organisers keep score, but everyone is a winner. After the game is played, the card deck becomes a living archive of each particular encounter.

This playful approach to academic formats directly addresses the problem of access to public knowledge. It substitutes the familiar complexity of a card game for the more rarified jargon of academic discourse. The Card Table celebrates the value of specialized knowledge, but makes the process of sharing this knowledge open and participatory.

The Card Table was released at the Affective Archives conference at QMUL in 2010. The dealers included Susanne Franco, Giulia Palladini, Heike Roms and Jurgita Staniskyté.

Know How

Know How is the way we've come to describe our commitment to providing people with frameworks of knowledge. We've done this in a lot of ways, including working with young people in universities, working with elders, teaching, curating events and exhibits, doing workshops, and having lots of conversations.

We're dividing this up into two bits, one which gives you a little more background about our work with other people, and the other that gives you some of the manifestos we’ve written over the years.

Background

Workshops

Work with Groups

Teaching

We have always used performance to help us face life challenges and reckon with the current political situation. We like to think of every performance as a vast interconnected conversation that we are constantly seeking to expand. This has meant our engagement work and performance work have developed a symbiotic, intertwined relationship. We are always trying to share the knowledge we gain to bring more people into the conversation, and using every project as a further prototype, using the learnings to inspire our next iteration.

Manifestos

A Manifesto on Making Change

There is No Such Thing as Solo

Screen+Shot+2020-03-27+at+11.28.53+AM.jpg

Creating a Non Cooperative

Kinship

How Do You Start?

33 Ways to Start

One thing that stays fairly constant when we begin working with new groups of people is the way we begin our first session. We always begin with an invitation:

ask us any question you like, and we will answer.

Our answers may be truthful, or they might be impulsive, or they might even be false, but we will answer any question that is posed to us. We've found this helps break down some of the initial barriers, gives us a sense of the other people in the room based on what questions they ask us, and sets a precedent for questioning.

Exhibitions

We’ve also contributed to two exhibitions in an attempt to pull back the curtain of obscurity on our work and the ways we make work, and to combat precious, exclusionary methods of making art. Desperate Archives was our first version of this, presented at La Mama Galleria NY in 2013, and we reinterpreted this material to make A Question of Decency as part of the Confrontations Performance Festival in Lublin, Poland in 2015. The exhibition incorporated archival material from Split Britches, Holly Hughes, Citizen Reno and Penny Arcade to expose the context of making queer work within the Culture Wars of the 80s and 90s in America.

Desperate Archives

A Question of Decency