The Foundry Theatre

Community Programs

United States Social Forum Delegation

8 Artists at the 2010 US Social Forum

 

Continuing to explore artists’ participation in the global Social Form process, The Foundry organized a national delegation of 8 artists to attend the 2nd edition of the US Social Forum, held in Detroit. In keeping with the World Social Forum’s process, the USSF provides an open space for social movement analysis, popular and political education, convergence, strategic discussion and imaginative approaches to building a more democratic and just United States. The Foundry is committed to actively participating in this progressive discourse, seeking to build a newly oriented relevancy for art and artists in the progressive fabric of our future.

 

June 2010 :  Detroit, MI

 

The Delegation

Jorge Cortiñas

Marcus Gardley

Ain Gordon

Melanie Joseph

Casey Llewellyn

Carl Hancock Rux

Lucy Thurber

Alice Tuan

 

 

 

… while we absorbed the ideologies being debated in the US Social Forum, we found ourselves unexpectedly obsessing over the revolutionary landscape [of Detroit] outside the convention doors. We organized a tour through the vast, silent, wreckage of shuttered auto factories (cities in themselves). We found, out there, manifest, the physical history of all the inequities the thinkers inside the Social Forum were striving to alter. 

Ain Gordon  Full Transcript

 

A wealth of Social Forum panels, seminars, action committees, fevered with possibilities. A huge discussion of green economies, ingenious resourcefulness. For instance, technology that would harness winter cold into natural refrigeration. Plans of how to rebuild Detroit completely green. O if there were only enlightened capitalists that could invest not in getting Detroit back to how it was, but fury it forward into how it could be the environmental prototype, a model for our future and its dire ecologies.

Alice Tuan    Full Transcript

 

 

A Landmark Conversation:  one of the best events from the USSF