BLW (BeLoW or BeLikeWater) is an artist-activist collective engaged in investigating the power of speech in a culture where oral competence is displaced by media forms. Our methods include memorization and public re-stagings of significant recordings in the history of radical media informed by investigating the conditions and implications of their recording. We also organize public meetings in provocative locations.
Fragments of a Strike: Reconstituting the San Francisco State Strike a workshop in politics performance pedagogy at Southern Exposure Gallery – In November 1968, SFSU’s Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front led students and faculty in a walkout that closed down classes for five months and resulted in the establishment of the School of Ethnic Studies. BLW invites you to re-constitute with us recorded moments from the strike. Working with rescued archives of newsreel footage, we will re-speak recorded student, faculty, and community member statements, considering the relationship between politics and education that this history brings to bear on today.
Invitation to a Hearing: The Coalition of Inquiry into the State of the Future at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; collaboration with Think tank that has yet to be named. A Public Hearing to investigate how the future of Philadelphia is imagined and acted upon by institutions such as the ICA and other public and private entities. The audience was invited to be investigators, offer evidence, and act as a witnesses throughout the proceedings.
Witnesses offering testimony included: Carolyn Thomas, Philadelphia resident, featured in documentary “All for the Taking”, Nijmie Dzurenko of the Media Mobilizing Project, Mark Warshaw an Organizer for the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, and Rozalinda Borcila, co-author of “Past Futures”.
Shooting Fred Hampton – a theatrical re-staging of final interview of Fred Hampton conducted by the Videofreex in his apartment in Chicago, where he was subsequently assassinated. Audience members collectively re-staged the recording of this video while a projection explored the simultaneous planning and execution of Hampton’s assassination by the FBI. (performed at the Hartford Atheneum). The original video document was not at the time restored or publicly accessible; BLW produced and freely distributed transcripts of this recording for the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.
A Meeting is a Question Between – a weeklong performance of lunchmeetings in Millennium Park, our contribution to„Pathogeographies”. An 1836 map designates the site as “Public Ground”. Our immersed explorations included a search for the original “ground”; a workshop on the public trust doctrine and the shaping of public futurity; (dis)orientation exercises; open-airing of blogospheric debates, a search for the corporation’s corpus. In the Boeing Promenade, we explored the permanentization of war through Lull and Awe, “linger time”, (a spatial parameter) and “cost-per-kill” (a financial instrument). More extensive report-back here. see also Rebeca Zorach’s text here
performance workshop exploring a 1973 People’s Communication Network recording of a speech by civil rights activist Queen Mother Moore, delivered to inmates at Green Haven Federal Prison.
Queen Mother Moore at Green Haven Federal Prison – a restaging a 1972 People’s Television Network recording of a speech by civil rights activist Queen Mother Moore, delivered to inmates at Green Haven Federal Prison (performed/recorded at Pilot Chicago – also at Southern Exposure Gallery). See essay and toolkit : I am going to tell you something nobody else can tell you who wasn’t there... in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Vol 5. PDF here