In our current reality, where there are no shortages of crises -- be it public health, white supremacy, labor exploitation, migrant detention or lack of mental health care -- it is clear that our current systems were not designed to care for all of us. The artists in this show see that failure and respond with direct support to enable the survivance and thrivance of their communities.  

These multiple crises are being confronted with a growing demand for the abolition of carceral systems and investment in self-determined, self-governed alternative economies and ecologies of care in the ongoing fight for Black liberation. As scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, “Abolition is not absence, it is presence. And indeed what the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, in experiments and possibilities... It’s building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” 

The Life Instinct brings together 9 artists and collectives -- Lauren Halsey, Jordan Weber, People’s Space, Guadalupe Maravilla, Tanya Aguiñiga, Indigenous Kinship Collective, Tiffany Sia, AgitArte, and Abuela Taught Me. These artists have turned to or doubled down on mutual aid and direct action work during the Covid-19 pandemic -- work that builds beyond the state,beyond economic control, beyond health inaccess, beyond carceral systems, beyond citizenship, and beyond borders. Grounded in Black and Indigenous traditions, mutual aid is a historic and ongoing anti-capitalist practice of equitably redistributing resources to meet long-term community needs. Controlled by the community and based on reciprocal exchange, mutual aid is a practice of solidarity and not charity. Indigenous Kinship Collective member Regan De Loggans describes mutual aid in their recent zine as a legacy and a practice, “the breaking of the binary of the ‘haves and have nots.’” Tiffany Sia explains her use of mutual aid as “a choreography of political critique.”  

Rooted in the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm and the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program, artists Lauren Halsey's Summaeverythang Community Center and Jordan Weber's urban farm Prototype for Poetry vs Rhetoric (deep roots) practice self-directed community empowerment through food distribution and collective farming, respectively. Protecting against state-inflicted violence, The People's Space established an anti-police sanctuary for residents of color (aka Artist-in-Residents) in New York City that provides free food and radical education, and AgitArte organized a network of self-managed Centros de Apoyo Mutuo (Mutual Support Centers) around the main island of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and re-activated during Covid-19.

Utilizing solidarity networks, Tiffany Sia’s DIY supply chain Hong Kong-to-New York Mask Circuit and the Indigenous Kinship Collective’s distribution of cash and medical supplies have crossed borders and territories. Drawing from personal migration journeys, artists Guadalupe Maravilla and Tanya Aguiñiga organize resource distribution and performance rituals for collective healing for and with their communities of immigrants, day migrants, deportees, and asylum seekers. Abuela Taught Me, a modern botanica collective, is circulating herbal medicines to Black and brown people in a promise to “heal by any means necessary.”

Named after a guiding tenet of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s timeless Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, The Life Instinct perpetuates and maintains survival systems as art. These artists have turned to mutual aid and direct action during the pandemic, and are seeding alternative systems to lead us into freer futures. Here exists a constant, cyclical practice of care, “sustain the change… repeat the flight.”