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Cauleen Smith: ‘COVID MANIFESTO’ Calendar 1 – 7 November 2020

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An unfolding calendar of supporting content to accompany Cauleen Smith’s COVID MANIFESTO presented by CIRCA in collaboration with The Showroom.

In November 2020 we were proud to collaborate with CIRCA, the new and independently curated digital art platform created by artist Josef O’Connor, launching its second month of programming with the interdisciplinary California-based artist Cauleen Smith. The inaugural c. 20:20 exhibition transforms the giant 4K screen of Piccadilly Lights into a digital canvas each month by pausing the adverts on screen for two minutes each day at 20:20 - 20:22 GMT.

More info and watch CIRCA’s evolving live programme with a different artist every month (currently Tony Cokes) here: circa.art

Cauleen Smith’s works compile her Instagram series COVID MANIFESTO which the artist initiated a couple of weeks after the United States went into lockdown. For c. 20:20 Smith rewrote and revealed each point of the Manifesto throughout the duration of November, as a sort of ‘living’ still life where the artist’s desk became the tableau. COVID MANIFESTO consists of 23 pronouncements punctuated by 7 intermissions selected from Smith’s existing works. Over the month, the personal and poetic, the eventful and now historical, featured as Smith responded to Covid-19 and its multiple aftermaths.

This online platform now serves as a space for filling in the voids, turning the volume up and dynamic storytelling. Here you can dive into the creative process and research archives that have produced the work, revealing a further radical narrative fully enunciated.

During November 2020 The CIRCA website was transformed into an extraordinary archive of past projects from the artist’s trajectory, references from her ongoing research and allusions to her revolutionary imaginary, constituting a virtual mid-career survey. We welcome both local audiences standing in Piccadilly and global participant tuned in online to engage with both the scattered snippets of COVID MANIFESTO and the long form.

By accessing web content persistently, you can generate conditions of possibility. The collaborative project is a call for a proposal of virtual proximity and distance, in which a series of new social relations to content and the meaning of place are entirely reshaped. It is a timely narrative providing insight into an individual’s intimate experience as shared through social media— a form of storytelling that holds a mirror up to society, one daily pronouncement at a time.

CIRCA’s November 2020 daily calendar was curated in collaboration by CIRCA’s Tony Tremlett and The Showroom Curator Katherine Finerty – HERE

Explore COVID MANIFESTO: Week 1 (1 – 7 November 2020) below!

1 NOV / COVID MANIFESTO 1

“Over the course of April, May, and June, Smith posted the 23 tenets, or principles, of her COVID Manifesto on Instagram, which in recent months hasbecome a locus for sharing protest information, bail fund databases, and educational materials like playlists and reading lists of Black feminist texts akin to the artist’s own illustrated syllabus. Like the Human_3.0 Reading List, the COVID Manifesto is manually inscribed with graphite on notepad paper. Handwriting these notes compels one to take pause from scrolling through their social feed to parse through them. This is similar to how Smith’s drawing of the book covers on the Reading List slowed people down and invited renewed interest,” as Smith explains in an interview with Art in America.

The Manifesto acts as a call to action rather than an instructional manual to dismantling capitalism. Responding to national and global events in real-time, it began with more playful tenets such as watching movies online and gradually grew into calls for the abolition of prisons, police, and “capitalist racial illogics.” Some tenets were also love poems to the planet suffering due our relentlessly extractive economy, and others were odes to the Black women, who are leading the struggle for collective liberation.” – Jad Dahshan

CAPITALISM
IS THE
VIRUS
INOCULATE YOUR IMAGINATION

TABLEAU I SPY

- Plant
- iPad with Cauleen Smith’s “In The Wake” Banner, “No Wonder I Go Under”
- Plate of food with salad and fork**

Cauleen Smith, *COVID MANIFESTO 1* on the Piccadilly Lights. Video, colour, sound, 2 min. Courtesy the artist, CIRCA, and The Showroom, London.

Cauleen Smith, *covidmanifesto 01.00 13 April*, 2020. Courtesy of the artist

Human 3.0 Reading List

“This abridged list is an offering for study. Each entry acts as an index for nodes of knowledge that enable the expansion of consciousness, empathy, and insight humans will need in order to approach a sustainble ontology. Expand and augment as needed.” – Cauleen Smith, 2015

“Greetings to mankind! The five-note sequence of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is performed outdoors by New Orleans musicians at sites in their city loaded with memories. The playful interpretations of this iconic motif are a testament to the city’s free spirit, despite its unstable present and uncertain future.”

Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) – as featured in H-E-L-L-O, 2014

2 NOV / COVID MANIFESTO 2

“I choose this little film to think about Form. I’m a formalist to the core. No one believes me because I also give very much care to meaning. What I mean to say. What I mean to show. What narratives I weave. Yes I also very much care about that. What do you call it when both matter, when both happen? This film has always been received with complete indifference from experimental/festival film circuit and bemused puzzlement in art circles. It’s one of my favorite works. It’s elemental. Basic in the best and funniest ways, I think. It’s all about form. And it’s all about thinking about black figures in white space. It’s about estrangement and the dissonance of black interiority within structural racists spaceways ( that being the city street, gladiator sports, fashion, public transport, whatever!) We make our own Spaceways. We make our own Spaceways however we can. Vintage pre-gentrified Hollywood. Oh how I miss it! Wandering around looking for things to film. Oh how I miss that. I was so broke when I made this. Soooo broke inside and out. I don’t miss that. Gorgeous Viola by Keith Barry aka Tree. ## walkoffame #afrofururism #whatisthe4thtome #covidmanifesto #uclatft #bolex” (Cauleen Smith’s Instagram 5 July)

WHEN WATCHING FILMS
ONLINE, I HAVE BEEN
KNOWN TO:
A) CUT TOENAILS
B) SWEEP LIVING ROOM
C) WASH DISHES
D) SLEEP
E) SCROLL THRU I.G
F) READ A BOOK
D) ALL OF THE ABOVE

TABLEAU I SPY:

- WILLI SMITH Butterick sewing pattern by Willi Smith**

Cauleen Smith, *COVID MANIFESTO 2* on the Piccadilly Lights. Video, colour, sound, 2 min. Courtesy the artist, CIRCA, and The Showroom, London.

Cauleen Smith, *covidmanifesto 02.00 13 April*, 2020. Courtesy of the artist

Loodo by Baaba Maal & Mansour Seck – as featured in WHITE SUIT, 1998

3 NOV / COVID MANIFESTO 3

“I started a Covid Manifesto on Instagram to disrupt our dependency on social media and the ways in which it soothes us. Over the years I’ve made a lot work about the police and capitalism, but I want to be present for what’s happening right now. Our estranged relationship with this planet is the reason for Covid-19. Full stop. Our leaders are so obsessed with the maintenance of this exploitative economy that we can’t have a conversation about how to live. Art is for creating another space that isn’t about power, but rather about intimacy, fragility, and humanity.

Students were really traumatized by having their spaces taken away, and it made me think about what public means—even beyond this virus. If we want to progress as a society, we need to engage our surroundings. We have an opportunity to dissect our assumptions about the system in which we live—from the institutions to the workers. I hope we take that hard look.” - Cauleen Smith

I do love
seeing
my students
on the
ZOOM.

TABLEAU I SPY:
- Wooden mask
- The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson**

**Deborah Roberts Collage

Cauleen Smith, *COVID MANIFESTO 3* on the Piccadilly Lights. Video, colour, sound, 2 min. Courtesy the artist, CIRCA, and The Showroom, London.

Cauleen Smith, *covidmanifesto 03.00 13 April*, 2020. Courtesy of the artist

Cauleen Smith, Hafiz’s *The Gift*, Graphite and acrylic on graph paper, 2015

4 NOV / COVID MANIFESTO 4

“Some images in life and art remain seared in one’s memory because of their sublime effect and power. Such images are found and masterfully constructed in the films of Cauleen Smith. For over a decade, Smith has developed a lyrical visual practice, weaving in and out of the independent film world and occasionally gracing the art world with breathtaking film installations that upend traditional forms of narrative filmmaking… Her travels, intellectual rigor, and desire to tell stories contribute to each detailed and highly crafted frame in her films. Her play on narrative conventions and her unique photographic impulse work in tandem and continue into her installations in spaces outside of the classic movie theater.

The visualization of Afrofuturism and an interest in black diaspora identity formation as well as in modes of agency, rather than oppression, are common in Smith’s repertoire. An exploration of landscapes both real and imagined also propels her experimental cinematic narratives.”” - Leslie Hewitt

WHILE READING ONLINE
I HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO:
A) PLAY MOVIE SOUNDTRACK
B) READ 1ST 3 PARAGRAPHS
THEN DOWNLOAD THEN NEVER
FINISH
C) TAKE AMPLE BREAKS
FOR ONLINE SHOPPING
D) ____ YOU FILL IN
E) ALL OF THE ABOVE

**TABLEAU I SPY:

Cauleen Smith, *COVID MANIFESTO 4* on the Piccadilly Lights. Video, colour, sound, 2 min. Courtesy the artist, CIRCA, and The Showroom, London.

Cauleen Smith, *covidmanifesto 04.00 13 April*, 2020. Courtesy of the artist

Further Reading:

ESSENCE, 2016
Penn, Charli. “Every Single Time Black Love Reigned Supreme On ESSENCE Covers Through the Years”. Essence. September 27 2016.

5 NOV / COVID MANIFESTO 5

“Through films, objects, and installation, Give It or Leave It offers an emotional axis by which to navigate four distinct universes: Alice Coltrane and her ashram, a 1966 photoshoot by Bill Ray at Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, Noah Purifoy and his desert assemblages, and black spiritualist Rebecca Cox Jackson and her Shaker community. These locations, while not technically utopian societies, embody sites of historical speculation and radical generosity between artist and community. In reimagining a future through this mix, Smith casts a world that is black, feminist, spiritual, and unabashedly alive.” – Cauleen Smith: Give It or Leave It, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2018

The internet
is a tool,
not a
HABITAT
I DON’T LIVE HERE

TABLEAU I SPY:
- Theaster Gates ceramic sake cup**

Cauleen Smith, *COVID MANIFESTO 5* on the Piccadilly Lights. Video, colour, sound, 2 min. Courtesy the artist, CIRCA, and The Showroom, London.

Cauleen Smith, *covidmanifesto 00.05 15 April*, 2020. Courtesy of the artist

Further Reading:

Hito Steyerl: Too Much World: Is The Internet Dead?, 2013.

The New Yorker: A Coronavirus Chronicle, 2020.

David J. Goodman & William K. Rashbaum: N.Y.C. Death Toll Soars Past 10,000 in Revised Virus Count, 2020

6 NOV / INTERMISSION 1

“Episode 6 of ## shutinfilmfestival. Lessons in Semaphore (2013) is a fast collaboration with the great and luminous choreographer #taishapaggett and a corner lot in Washington Park Chicago and a neighbourhood kid and frequent visitor to my studio, Malyk. My camera was busted. This was the last time I used my beautiful Vietnam bell+Howell wartime wind-up. I never convinced my fellow residents that the empty lots offered a wild prairie beauty. Fair enough. Because these empty lots also remind us of redlining and anti-black economic operations on fleek in Chicago and all over the country. But this was a small attempt at looking at the way the violence of American racism might, for a moment, be undermined and resisted. Chicago, I miss you. - Cauleen Smith’s Instagram 30 March 2020

WATCH:
Lessons in Semaphore, IFFR, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Cauleen Smith, *INTERMISSION 1* on the Piccadilly Lights. Video, colour, sound, 2 min. Courtesy the artist, CIRCA, and The Showroom, London.

**“Semaphore”, Scouting Resources, 2018**

7 NOV / COVID MANIFESTO 6

“Smith’s work is often described as political – and certainly it explores issues of race, identity and feminism – but really what she’s fascinated in is the mundane parts of the way we live, the decisions that humans make on an everyday basis and why that matters. “Outside of the political agenda or specific policies, individuals can practice their lives in a way that can impact the world around them,” she says. “Politics obliterates that, it’s about power. I’m not interested in power or who has it. I’m interested in how we relate to one another in the world that we’re in – that’s what culture is. We’re not human without it. Based on everything I’ve learnt about human history, art saves people time and time again.” – Ella Alexander in Cauleen Smith: “We're not human without culture; art saves people”

It is time
for
Financial
Forensics

TABLEAU I SPY:
- Patrice Lumumba book**