Walking Toward the Future
Walking down Cass Avenue this weekend felt like a slip in time. It felt like I had found a way into a joyful future. The streets from Wayne State, the Detroit Institute of Art, to the Cass Café and Avalon Bakery, were filled with Allied Media Conference goers. Together, they managed to create a vision of what our world could look, feel, and taste like if we put justice and care at the center of our lives.
This was the 20th annual gathering. The AMC defines itself as:
A vibrant and diverse community of people using media to incite change: filmmakers, radio producers, technologists, youth organizers, writers, entrepreneurs, musicians, dancers, and artists. We define "media" as anything you use to communicate with the world. You are a media-maker!
We define media-based organizing as any collaborative process that uses media, art, or technology to address the roots of problems and advances holistic solutions toward a more just and creative world.
The Allied Media Conference is a collaboratively designed event. Conference content is curated with care every year by 100+ volunteer coordinators of tracks, practice spaces, and network gatherings. The conference features over 300 hands-on workshops, panels, film screenings, Detroit tours, art and music events, strategy sessions, karaoke, bowling, collaborative art, and more.
The serious work of this joyful gathering was set at the opening conversation entitled “Past, Present, Futurism: Resilient Infrastructure.” The conversation began with a deeply moving performance by a sound artist from Flint, Jonah Mixon-Webster, reminding everyone of the callous poisoning of a city in the name of saving a few dollars. He described the ongoing neglect, as people continue to suffer.
Jenny Lee and Diana Nucera of the AMC were joined by Monica Lewis Patrick of We the People of Detroit, Tara Rodriguez Besosa from Puerto Rico, and Maya Wiley from New York. The conversation began with Jenny Lee framing the critical role of creating resilient infrastructures rooted in beloved communities if we are to survive the physical, spiritual, and political disasters of our past, present, and future. She emphasized the role the AMC has played in developing critical connections, most recently between Detroit and Puerto Rico, enabling us to support each other in the face of bankruptcy and then Hurricane Maria.
Monic Lewis Patrick said we need to find ways to change our thinking to become people-centered. She told the gathering about the efforts to shut off more than 100,000 homes in Detroit from water, affecting nearly 325,000 people, mostly children. These shut-offs were accompanied by a foreclosure crisis, based on clearly illegal processes, that is ongoing. In response, Detroiters have been organizing to support one another and provide basic resources to advance our capacity for self-determination. She emphasized the critical role of the community research collective in providing information about the dimensions of the water shut-offs and the links between them, foreclosures, and school closings. Such research makes vivid both the genocidal effects of current policies and the effectiveness of resistance.
Just as the gathering affirmed water as a human right, Diana Nucera emphasized that communication is also a human right. She offered ways for us to think about what constitutes a healthy digital ecosystem.
Much of the conversation and conference was a reflection of how we are all trying to find our way to answer the final question Diana posed, "If love is at the base of work,” she said, “We now have to ask, is love scalable?” In the conversations that followed, the encounters, questions, skill sharing, and tool-making that are the heart of the conference, give us hope that living in loving ways is already happening.