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 3 (16 – 22 November 2020) below!

16 NOV / COVID MANIFESTO 13

covidmanifesto
00.12 and 00.14
I miss the library so bad. And seriously. They gonna evict and foreclose on every single one of us? How? Educate me please! I don’t get why we’re begging to risk our lives to pay the bank.
11 May

“I made the “Human 3.0 Reading List” and the “BLCK FMNNST Loaner Library 1989-2019″ out of a sense of urgency. I wanted these books to be noticed, and, in our photo-saturated world, drawing them slowed people down and invited renewed interest. One thing I can offer young people is information on how to use language to affect change…

I have lived in Los Angeles for about three and a half years, and I’m quite keen on the idea of contributing a reading room to the city filled with the books from the “Human 3.0 Reading List” and the “BLCK FMNNST Loaner Library 1989-2019,” so that people can stop on their way to or from a protest and collect their minds and bodies. I imagine this as a space where anybody is welcome, as long as they respect it and the people in it. Many people don’t have time to read right now, but I’m hoping they get to it.” – Cauleen Smith (artnews.com)

I miss
the
Library
so
bad.

TABLEAU I SPY:

- Dada Africa, book
- The Rhetoric of Perspective, book**

• A War of Eyes, book
• African Design from Traditional , book
• The Domestic Plane, book
• Ancient sculpture
• Three ancient sculptures, tipped over
• Liquid acrylics
• Loose change
• Gridded paper with drawn designs
• Ship model
• Model stingray
• Model crawfish
• Ring of Paint samples
• Purple crystal
• Blue covid mask
  -Black beads
• **Henry Taylor piece

BLK FMNST LOANER LIBRARY 1989–2019

• As featured in MASS MOCA's Book Club: BLK FMNST Loaner Library 1989–2019 in conjunction with their 2019–2020 exhibition Cauleen Smith We Already Have What We Need

Further Reading

• Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism, 2020

17 NOV / INTERMISSION 4

“The Guardian of the Blackstone. Shot at Blackstone Bikes and 57th Street Beach starring bike shop kids, now all very grown. Capes kids and bikes just seemed like a no-brainer. But what was really special was the way the kids directed the camera operators✨ to make their own film. This is not that film- which involves saving the world from climate change- but rather a melancholy rumination on youth and friendship play and jeopardy. Hope you like”. - Cauleen Smith”s Instagram, 1 May

18 NOV / COVID MANIFESTO 14

If
WE ALL
stopped
honouring our
d̶e̶b̶t̶ DEBT…
what could “THEY”
really do?

TABLEAU I SPY:

- Hand sanitizer**

• Model starfish
• Brushes and pencils
• Pink rock
• **Mancala pieces, loose

HUMAN_3.0 READING:

• Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 1977

Further Reading

• Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt, 2013

19 NOV / COVID MANIFESTO 15

“I find myself as indifferent to the destruction of property as dominant culture is to the hunting and murdering of black people, indigenous people, latinx people in this country. It literally takes a snuff film to get white and white adjacent American people’s to feel a need to perform indignation. I am not trying to be in these streets with a deadly virus patrolling just as hard as the cops and national guard. Protest pointless. No@law in this land exists to protect black people. Politicians useless. The quest for power is not analogous with a quest for justice. Fire this time. Fire this time. FIRE THIS TIME.” - Cauleen Smith, Instagram, 31 May, 2020

Fire
has
Cleansing
Properties.
BURN, BANKS, BURN.

TABLEAU I SPY:

- Photo of Breonna Taylor**

• iPad with George Floyd collage
• **ROSCO FILM LIGHTING GELS

HUMAN_3.0 READING:

• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963

21 NOV / INTERMISSION 6

“Crow Requiem” is another film I made about our planet and some of its creatures—namely crows, incarcerated humans, women. Another by-product of the exploitation, hoarding, and accumulation of Earth’s resources is a surplus of human beings and the collateral deaths of non-human persons and their habitats. We need someplace to put them. Prisons—human-storage facilities—are the easiest (though terribly inefficient) means of dealing with human surplus.
I say all this but I do not feel hopeless for humans. I feel a greater sense of urgency for the non-human persons on the planet who we will have to watch die before we get our act together, but maybe I should make another film, structured like a gospel song, that celebrates the human wisdoms that do not surrender to capitalism, and the socio-economic structures that refuse to produce surplus.” – Cauleen Smith

“Crows are well known for their mythological reputation as tricksters and harbingers of death, but less for the reality that they are creatures of remarkable intelligence who lead complex social lives. Smith became fascinated by these misunderstood animals when she noticed the massive flock of crows roosting outside her bedroom window during her artist residency at Light Work. She learned that the native population of crows circulates between Syracuse and nearby Auburn, NY; and that this migration is partly in response to harassment and, at times, state-sanctioned violence at the hands of a human population who view them as a nuisance. Smith interweaves the figure of the crow through the histories of these two cities, both of which were key stations on the Underground Railroad and innovators in early cinematic and 3D optical technologies. “Crow Requiem” connects this history to recent and ongoing violence against people of color at the hands of the state. Shot on location in Central New York, and featuring selections from Onondaga Historical Association’s extensive archive of 19th century stereoscopic images” – Cauleen Smith

Further Reading:

• Kathryn Schulz: The Many Lives of Pauli Murray

• Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Ferris State University: The Origins of Jim Crow

• 'Evil' crows vandalise Newark woman's home and car

• 'Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates'

22 NOV / COVID MANIFESTO 16

Activist pressure has moved ## MayorGarcetti to pledge $150 million from #LAPD’s 1.8 BILLION dollar budget for investment into South LA African-American communities. …Sounds like Trump’s bail out to corporations. Like a Scooby snack for developers. But it is so more than what the city ever imagined having to concede. So go head with your bad selves young warriors keep expanding our notions of the possible. You are shining. But please stay as safe as you can. Don’t let the covid or the cops catch you. And don’t stop bringing the light. - Cauleen Smith, Instagram 4 June, 2020

Warriors in
the streets
COVID AND COPS
there to meet them.
I stay home
and try to
BREATHE.
THE ACTIVISTS – I THANK THEM

TABLEAU I SPY:

- Glass lettuce piece**

• Quick! Butterick, book
• Carrie Schneider photograph of artist Abigail DeVille for her “Reading Women” series
• Ceramic bust by Ally Fitzgerald
• **Original Covid manifesto on lined paper

HUMAN_3.0 READING:

• Frank Miller and David Gibbons: Martha Goes to War), 1995

Further Reading

• Angela Y Davies (Edited by): If They Come in the Morning…Voices of Resistance, 2016

• Deborah E. McDowall: The Changing Same: Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory, 1995