Ann Schnake and a series of abject Mickey Mouse figures are currently in residence at Dream Farm Commons, making work that will change throughout the month. As if in an oyster shell or a fishbowl, we are gazing out, guided by the vantage point of what our bodies, freshly emerging from the pandemic, now know. With new antennas quivering, we are sensing the ecologic crisis that threatens our collective existence freshly, acutely.  In this last late spring week, three malnourished whales died in the bay, the temperature outside is warm and the fire dangers in the hills and forests have already begun. Never the less, it is comfortable here as we work and consider narrative threads.

The Mickies appeared out of the clay of the earth some years ago as characters in Subterranean Borders, a collective body of work by MobileInTent. Our  group of six artists began in Tapalpa, Mexico and traveled to Dream Farm Commons in 2019. As an examination of colonialism and the culture of extraction, we searched beneath the surface: through dream sequences and time travel of poetics and materialism investigating extraction of minerals, water, and labor; white supremacist underpinnings for border claims; colonialism’s reach into our bodies and dreams; the deep rumblings of counter forces and possibility. Recalling the work of Ariel Gorman, Enrique Chagoya and numerous artists and activists who held Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck as stand ins for capital, extraction and colonialism, The Mickies took on a life of their own and went to an illogical extreme: extracting teeth for pearls

and making bigger and bigger necklaces.

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Ann and the Mickies are now thinking about the ecologic crisis and how distribution, complicity, whiteness, the ravenous appetites of an ever-expanding economy, and the crudeness of capital is operative in our current economy, bodies and lives. We want to re-imagine possibility but sometimes we are stuck.

Who gets what?

Why greed for pearls?

What do we value and how do we live it?

How can we make beauty out of cacophony and mess?

What is precious or false? Just what is a pearl? Or a rose?

Does the lambchop I eat today impact the hunger of the whales tomorrow?

When we are so interconnected how can we radically dismantle and re-imagine possibility?

Lately we have been reading contemporary Brazilian theorist Suely Rolnik[1]. Anthropophagic Subjectivity engages with a new subjectivity, or idea of self, that cannibalizes oppositional forces, literally eating one’s enemy, digesting and integrating the colonizer, colonized, high culture, low culture, opera and soap opera. Rolnik says we can resist binaries by moving through unstable realities with a compass guided by the body: a vibratile surface that detects the waves before they arise, learning how to surf and move with different flows of possibility. “We must learn to sail or surely we will end on the rocks”, says Suely Rolnik. We are listening, sensing, searching.

[1] Anthropophagic Subjectivity, Suely Rolnik Arte Contemporânea Brasileira: Um e/entre Outro/s, São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998.