Sun, May. 15, 2016 ⁄ 4:30–6:00pm
Food Enough? – Soil Lab
Since the beginning of the year a group of 9th Ward neighbors, environmental explorers, and urban farmers have been meeting together with the Twin Cities Agricultural Land Trust at the experimental publication site, Beyond Repair, in the Midtown Global Market. We’ve called our get-togethers Food Enough? We’ve gathered to discuss ideas and possibilities around truly equitable food land use in the Twin Cities and how the meeting of like minded yet disparate skills and knowledge can help put into place a landscape that is more abundant and fruitful than we’ve yet to imagine.
On May 15, at 4:30pm, we invite you to bring a handful of soil to explore, and talk with the conveners of the Soil Lab project and neighbors interested in our relationships with soil. What lives in the soil here? What can we learn from soil about ourselves and our surrounding systems, and therefore what can it teach us about equity and inequity, about our neighborhoods and societies?
We invite you to join us, add your thoughts, and broaden the ideas and experiences within Food Enough? towards future conversations and actions.
I was lucky enough to grow up with Geoffrey Holder playing a significant role in my childhood. How could he not? Physically and personally he was so gigantic in life, especially to a child. Even after I’d moved away from NYC, I’d run into him walking the streets of his neighborhood and he’d remember me, calling out my name over the traffic and noise in SoHo near his loft. This advice to kids is advice for us all. We should never stop asking “what?” and “why?”
I recently read someone describe a neighborhood as “a place where someone feels some human sense of belonging, a human sense of being part of a society.” So, as my mind is on my neighborhood now, I can’t help but wonder how Geoffrey’s advice for children can be advice for us all. By asking “what?” and “why?” as often as possible of our own place and sense of place, how can we move towards that “sense of human belonging” that defines a neighborhood?
It cannot simply be achieved through policy – safer streets, access to good food, etc… Though certainly those considerations play a big part, we can’t arrive at them till we endeavor to ask one another “what?” and “why?” But how? How do we arrive at that space of questioning in a productive, inclusive way that begins outside of a space crisis? Prior to the notion of a “problem that needs to be fixed”? – Sam
The new Riso we got at the shop uses this moving graphic when it needs you to wait before taking the drum out of the machine. We have determined it is a chipmunk.
We have decided to name the machine based on this graphic, and seeing that Riso is a Japanese company it seemed only right that we should use the Japanese name for Chipmunk.
So, if you come into the shop and ask “what’s that machine over there,” we’ll answer, “Oh, that’s Shimarisu.”
Fri, May. 13, 2016 ⁄ 7:30–9:00pm
Book Release: We Believe in Infinite Intelligence by Lacey Prpic Hedtke
“This is a little of what I’ve learned through talking to Spiritualists, researching the religion, looking at it through art, and practicing mediumship and healing. I’m also interested in the religion and its relationship with photography–both grew up around the same time (March 31, 1848 is the official anniversary of Modern Spiritualism), and photography is recognized as officially starting on January 7, 1839.
It feels good to be connected to a history of a religion that has been feminist and anti-racist from the start.” – from We Believe in Infinite Intelligence by Lacey Prpic Hedtke
Let’s celebrate South MPLS Society Librarian and resident Beyond Repair Spiritualist and weirdo, Lacey Prpic Hedtke’s new – and quite hefty booklet – We Believe in Infinite Intelligence. It’s Lacey’s own personal guide to Spiritualism here, in the 21st century, all coming from her own long engaged experiences with the practice.
Along with useful histories and tools, the booklet comes with amazing Risograph printed 19th c Spiritualist photographs.
Booklets and posters will be available. Chanting, snacks, spirit songs! After 8pm we’ll move to Eastlake Brewery for more revelry and kombucha or beer on tap.
As a way to move more complex reflections around the neighborhood, both on and offline, we’ll be producing a series of broadsheets, intermittently produced, that reflect both our own experiences facilitating the space and assisting the ideas and interests of those who step into it, as well as making light of urgent ideas and actions within the neighborhood on a whole.
Free, as it should be – these are communiques after all – Occasional Notes Nº1 is currently available within the shop to take, read, and distribute as you wish, dropped off throughout the neighborhood, and posted here on the site, to read on whatever device you are currently tuned into. Enjoy.
Calling all 9th Ward neighbors (that’s Powderhorn, Central, Phillips…) and Twin Cities residents interested in our neighborhood: Beyond Repair has started a Publication Residency called 9W / PRP. If you are interested in forming a public around ideas and issues within the 9th Ward, reach out to us so we can help you realize your ideas through the tools and processes available within the shop.
Meet our first Public-Maker in Residence, illustrator Fiona Avocado.
Over the last few weeks Fiona, our first resident within the 9th Ward Publication Residency Program (9W / PRP) has been stopping by the shop, thinking through ideas and projects that she’d like to work on this month. Yesterday we finished production on This is How You Quit, a two color mini-comic of Fiona’s inspired by quitting her job and giving in to life. We fully support her desire to “give up.”
Fiona, as with all future 9WPRP residents lives in the neighborhood. Actually, just a block away from Beyond Repair to be exact. A self-described “artist, writer, media maker, educator, and agitator,” Fiona has produced many comics and illustrations, often taking aspects of her daily life as a subtle entrance point to engage larger social issues.
Sun, Mar. 6, 2016 ⁄ 4:00–7:00pm
Beyond Repair… We Think we Might be Open Now
We’ve been open for two months now and we might just be getting the hang of it. So maybe it’s time to host a “grand opening,” right?
Come and see all the titles that have been published in the last two months. Learn about what’s coming up in the near future. What should one expect from such an occasion?
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We’ll have new work from Fiona Avocado, our first resident within our 9th Ward Publication Residency Program.
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A new publication from our head librarian at the South Minneapolis Society Library, Lacey Prpic Hedtke, entitled We Believe in Infinite Intelligence, a pocket guide overview of Spiritualism.
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The first release from Wooden Leg Print & Press and Uncivilized Books co-imprint on utopianism and utopian histories.
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The grand re-opening of the South Minneapolis Society Library. Get your library card today! Check out books!
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$2 off your beer at Eastlake Brewery with a purchase a book, $1 off with a purchase of a booklet.
If you haven’t been down to Beyond Repair, here’s your chance to come and say hello, learn about what our hopes for the project are, and imagine what we can build together with your involvement and support.
So far…
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We’ve hosted Emory Douglas and will be making a book out of our conversation with sales going to create programming and projects addressing the role and conduct of the 3rd precinct within the neighborhood.
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Each Saturday a pop-up portrait studio has materialized through Sean Smuda‘s project What’s Your Beauty and Will You Share it With the World?
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The Undercommons Reading Group has begun to meet each Saturday evening around Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.
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We’ve devised a “Rent Check” editions project with new artists making work based on our actual rent check each month as a means to sustain Beyond Repair and preserve its autonomy. We released the first Rent Check with an edition by Josh MacPhee in February.
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Three groups have begun to emerge (public defenders, food access advocates, and health professionals) all engaging the question, in one form or another, “What does a healthy neighborhood look like?”
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Oh, and we’ve been making lots and lots of books, with way more to come!
Hope to see you there!
Sat, Feb. 13, 2016 ⁄ 6:00–8:00pm
Undercommons Reading Group
“In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.”
Can we ethically release ourselves from a social moment that we find reprehensible? What about those we leave behind? Politically, socially, ethically can an individual be in two places at once? How do we live within contradiction and feel empowered, not hypocritical?
The Undercommons Reading Groups meets each Saturday evening from 6 – 8, usually followed with some beers and tacos at Eastlake Craft Brewing.
Free “bootlegged” paperback copies are available at Beyond Repair. For those yet to attend, a PDF is available here.
All levels and interests of inquiry welcome, from the theoretical to the deeply practical and local.
“Thanks for participating in “What’s Your Beauty and Will You Share it with the World”! I’m hoping you’ll write a few sentences about your object and its beauty. Even better if you include something about the neighborhood, e.g. if you have a special spot of beauty you look forward to walking by, how you’ve seen the neighborhood change, story or rumor…. I ran the Shoebox Gallery on the corner of Chicago and Lake for eleven years and am planning a book about it. Your input would be a great help towards a portrait of the neighborhood!
Sincerely,
Sean Smuda
Wed, Feb. 3, 2016 ⁄ 4:30–5:30pm
South MPLS Society Library
The South Minneapolis Society Library (SMSL) exists as much as a space to enjoy books and the moments they can generate as it does a tool to consider the landscape and actions which often materialize within the space between books, readers, and the publics which are spawned by their convergence. Printed matter, often more visibly than other forms of media, serves as the fill – the rock and soil – of our shared lived experience, and inasmuch, creates a potent and shifting space to critically engage our experiences of living within a shared space and time. Now, in the digital networked age, this potency is not sapped, but heightened and fractured, allowing books and printed materials a special confusing resonance radically altering their specific-use as a technology from what it has been for the most part of the last 500 years.” – text from the South Minneapolis Society Library mission statement (2015, Red76)
In 2015 Red76 housed the South Minneapolis Society Library (SMSL) in the lobby of Pillsbury House at 35th and Chicago Ave. Anyone who lived in the 9th Ward was welcomed to check-out a growing, and often thematic, selection of books. All titles were sourced from the internet, printed and bound.
Beyond Repair is interested in the idea of resurrecting the SMSL on site in the Midtown Global Market, but how would this incarnation be different, if at all, from the last? How else could get involved, and how would a diversity of “librarians” and bookmakers alter the narrative and possibilities of the lending library?
Join us at the shop next Wednesday afternoon to discuss. All unaffiliated librarians, radical nerdists, bibliofreaks, and lovers of the printed word welcome to attend.
Sat, Jan. 30, 2016 ⁄ 2:00–4:00pm
What’s Your Beauty and Will You Share it With the World?
You are invited to Beyond Repair in the Midtown Global Market to have your portrait taken and talk about beauty as you see it and its place in our neighborhood.
Along with your beautiful self, bring your favorite painting, drawing, photograph, video, dress, stuffed animal, etc, along with you! In time the accumulated portraits will be made into a book; a document of the Phillips/Powderhorn neighborhoods, its people, and their cherished objects.
An on-going neighborhood portraiture project by the Shoebox Gallery, the results will be made into a book. Participants will be given a free print of their portrait!
The Revolution in Music / The Music in Revolution
ed. by Anthony Romero & Matthew Joynt
Coming in early March, 2016…
To resist regulation, regimentation, and normalization is the struggle of what has come to be called free jazz, the musical and political culture which emerges in the United States in the 50s and 60s during a time of great social and political upheaval and experimentation.The immediacy and urgency of the art form provides us with, not just an experience, but a framework for thinking about collectivity, individualism, self-determination, and the many ways in which these processes and practices intersect with and enliven one another.
Make no mistakes about it, the implementation of alternative and radical politics, like those that can be found in and around the history of free jazz, at least within the United States, is difficult. Free jazz, like other social practices, is a difficult art. And it should be. NOW is no place for the passive, NOW is the time, and NOW is the place for difficult politics and difficult art.
A series of publications and audio releases, The Revolution in Music / The Music in Revolution faces this difficulty head on, summoning a constellation of ideas and regional histories that confront the relationship between free jazz and radical politics. Highlighting and advocating overlapping social and political practices, through booklets, books, records and more, the series makes current the past, and advocates for the political potentiality of the difficult.
Wed, Jan. 27, 2016 ⁄ 12:15–1:30pm
Working for Health… and Justice
Calling all health care professionals:
Many “students of health” (LPN, RN, APRN, PA, MD, LICSW, PHN) learn about specific communities through studying “health disparity.” The neighborhoods of South Minneapolis’s 9th Ward – where Beyond Repair, and in turn the Midtown Global Market, reside – are sociopolitical landscapes that are often approached as “disparaging communities” within such training.
Seeing as neighborhoods suffering “health disparities” are often predominantly of color, as well as poor, and often are affectively rendered voiceless regarding their own health care needs, what does this say about pedagogy put into practice within the field of health? Furthermore, with these questions in mind, what role, in specific, does this play within pedagogy and practice considering the area around Beyond Repair and the Global Market are within reach of several well-recognized, large scale hospitals and health systems?
These will be continuing, semi-formal, lunchtime and happy hour conversations aimed at seeing how we, as individuals within health hierarchies, can leverage our skills and knowledge through publication and public-making towards more radical and decentralized practices within the neighborhoods in which we live and work.
Come with questions and considerations about how we can move our ideas across bureaucracy and into the public realm to assist those who we serve.
I love Christopher Allen‘s paper cut work.
Christopher stopped into the shop today to chat. We’re working on putting out a artist book and poster edition of his paper cut portraits of other-world sentient beings. Soon, soon!
Are you racist? 'No' isn't a good enough answerAre you racist? 'No' isn't a good enough answer.We can pull off being non-racist by being asleep in bed while black men are killed by police. We need to stop being non-racist, and start being anti-racist
Posted by The Guardian on Wednesday, January 13, 2016