The Infernal Grove

5:00pm CENTRAL (6:00pm Eastern) MARCH 18

YES WE CANNIBAL
1600 GOVERNMENT ST, BATON ROUGE LA
& ON ZOOM.

RSVP here or just show up (but please do RSVP)

READINGS

Jasmine Amussen, “Letter from Arkansas: In the Pines”, 2023 website or pdf
Raymond Carver, “Where I’m Calling From,” 1983 website or pdf

READING THE TEXT IS NOT A REQUIREMENT FOR PARTICIPATION IN THE DISCUSSION.

MODERATORS

Jasmine Amussen, Mat Keel, Emily Duke and Cooper Battersby.

The study group brings into dialogue a group of artists and scholars from across the continent who have lived experience with substance-use and a range of current relationships to sobriety and its alternatives.

In some recovery programs there is a push to accept received wisdom. But for addict-intellectuals, it’s hard to forfeit critical thinking to recovery. Recovery can mean recovering that part of us. 

For the sixth session of the Infernal Grove Study Group, we will read Jasmine Amussen’s plaintive, smart “Letter from Arkansas: From the Pines”.  

The text sprawls like a teenager in a rec-room–but it’s precise like a tooth or claw.  Amussen is an essayist, and her work is so good because it integrates personal and sociostructural analysis without differentiation.  

Amussen chose the Raymond Carver short story “Where I’m Calling From”, in which an unnamed protagonist is dropped off at a rehab to dry out.  It doesn’t sprawl or bring to mind a teenager, but it demonstrates a similar deliberateness to Amussen’s.  Precise in the way of lawns and the neat American men that tend them.

She said she chose it because “it’s about the feelings of disconnection and isolation that happen when you remove yourself from life to either get clean or get high, two sides of the same coin (emphasis mine), how our relationships with others change in those private, isolated places, and how we can come back to each other.”

Anti-capitalist artist and scholar Mat Keel locates the utility of The Infernal Grove in its rejection of dualism.  The work refuses the simple distinction between sober and drunk, clean and unclean, useful and worthless. Between the poison and the antidote.

Infernal Grove participant Liz Roberts made a movie in 2022 called Midwaste, about her years of active heroin use and subsequent sobriety.  It closes like this:

“I wasn’t bad then.  I’m not good now.” 

JASMINE AMUSSEN is a writer & editor focusing on utopia & terrorism.  She lives in Atlanta, GA and is editor of Burnaway, the only journal about contemporary art in the south. She is a MFA candidate at Bard College and is represented by brittni collins.

MAT KEEL is an artist and scholar living in Baton Rouge LA.  He is pursuing a PhD in Anthropology/Geography and an MA in Philosopy at LSU. He and partner Liz Lessner co-founded  Yes We Cannibal, an anti-profit art collaborative.

COOPER BATTERSBY & EMILY VEY DUKE are artists and substance users. They ambivalently teach at Syracuse University. 

YES WE CANNIBAL is an artist run project space that hosts exhibitions, performances, community feeds,  a community fridge, a food forest, and a cannibal reading room. Please consider supporting YWC via Patreon. @yeswecannibal

YES WE CANNIBAL will be hosting a screening + discussion with EMILY AND COOPER AT THE MEAT MEET SALON!

Sunday Jan 22 5:00 eastern /4:00 central
IN PERSON AT 1600 Government Street, Baton Rouge
ON TWITCH HERE

*Please note: you need a Twitch account to participate in the conversation. You can sign up here for Twitch.

MEAT MEET SALON SERIES runs most Sundays from 4-6pm/central. YWC hosts musicians, philosophers, authors, film makers, performances and artist talks. There is no paywall for any of our events. 

YES WE CANNIBAL is an artist run project space that understands arts praxis as experiments in living. Located at 1600 Government Street, we have a gallery that hosts exhibitions, performances, community feeds and other events. We are also home to a mutual aid community fridge, a food forest, and a cannibal reading room. We rely on your help to remain that way.  Please consider supporting YWC via Patreon.

@yeswecannibal

Yes We Cannibal is an anti-profit institution for experimental art and social practice.

An Infernal Grove Study Group
Appetite, Euphoria & The Inevitability of Coming Down

Moderators: Michelle Lhooq,   Mikiki, Liz Roberts,  Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke.

Please RSVP as soon as possible. Space is limited.

Readings: 
Kane Race, (pdf), “Exceptional Sex: How Drugs Have Come to Mediate Sex in Gay Discourse”, from Pleasure Consuming Medicine , 2009

Amia Srinivasan, (pdf), “Watching Porn with my Students”, The Right to Sex, 2021

Infernal Grove Study Groups bring together artists and writers with lived experience of drug use who have a range of relationships to sobriety and its alternatives. We started the groups out of thirst for rigorous, emotionally dense discussion of drugs and drug use, where entry isn’t conditional on abstinence.  The groups are founded on curiosity and care.

This session was built around Infernal Grove member Mikiki’s screening at the Whitney Museum  – Being & Belonging for the Day With(out) Art. We will discuss excerpts from Kane Race’s Pleasure Consuming Medicine and Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex. WE DON’T CARE IF YOU DO THE READING. WE WANT YOU JUST AS YOU ARE.  

Race’s text examines the relationship between drug-taking and sex in queer communities, positing that in certain contexts drugs open a space of “exceptional sex” where participants experience liberated disinhibition.

“For those of us who study drugs and drug use, the power of official discourse can seem inescapable…Race’s book demonstrates the critical importance of examining that framework.”
–Wendy Chapkis, Contemporary Sociology

Srinivasan’s book describes the effects of misogyny and white supremacy on women’s desire, and delineates the relationship between epistemology and sex.  We were drawn in particular to her measured discourse on the ways pornography imprints sexual subjectivity; and to her constant insistence on the central role of capitalism in these matters. 

“Amia Srinivasan is an unparalleled and extraordinary writer―no one X-rays an argument, a desire, a contradiction, a defense mechanism quite like her. The Right to Sex is a bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing.” 
–Jia Tolentino, Staff Writer, The New Yorker

Michelle Lhooq is a journalist writing about drugs.

ig: @the_infernal_grove

 The Infernal Grove  Always Against Professionalism

The People of the Lenape Nation are the rightful stewards of this land. Give it back.

Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Mellon Foundation.

This project is made possible, in part, with funds from the Media Arts AssistanceFund, a regrant partnership of NYSCA and Wave Farm, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

THE WHOLE GRIMOIRE

A screening – in person and online
Tuesday Sept 20
8pm ATL / 7pm Eastern IRL screening (online – links below)
9pm ATL / 8pm Eastern Q+A IRL and (online Zoom)

The Blue Building Gallery
2482 Maynard St, Halifax, NS B3K 3V4, Canada

Laura Harrison and Paul Wong in Conversation

---

When we first saw Prime Cuts by Paul Wong, we had just moved to Vancouver BC from Nova Scotia. We were video artists in our twenties and we were hungry for everything: friends, glamour, heroin, gossip, art, justice, knowledge, meaning, beauty, validation, jobs. And we found all those things on Main Street: at Video In and The Western Front, two artist run centers with reputations that certainly exceeded their operating budgets; and at Main and Hastings, a neighborhood with international renown for its open-air drug market and as the site of the first needle exchange in North America. 

We already knew Wong’s (in)famous work 60 Unit Bruise, in which his lover Kenneth Fletcher, tenderly injects 60ml of his own blood into Wong’s back. The work was made in 1976, preceding the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and we saw it in probably 98, the year Clinton declared that the AIDS crisis had risen to the level of a “severe and ongoing health crisis”. This was a big deal because in the intervening years Reagan and Bush-the-Elder had done their best to erase people with AIDS, despite HIV being the leading cause of death among Americans aged 25-44 for most of the years of his reign. The AIDS reading of the Wong’s eerily prescient piece eclipsed any other analyses at that point, but we saw different things in it as well: how stylish it was, how iconic, how cool, how sad, how brave. It made us see that the gutter and the art world were adjacent—We could make art from the gutter, and it could be stylish and profound. This was exciting.

It sliced open the teal-and-dusty-rose underbelly of West-Coast yuppiedom.

And then we saw Prime Cuts, which performed surgery from the gutter. It was that precise. It sliced open the teal-and-dusty-rose underbelly of West-Coast yuppiedom. It was a nuanced, Brechtian sendup of the horrible people of the 80s, and it was clear to us from this work that Wong understood that style is something to be taken seriously: it’s somewhere form and content tighten into a tiny, unpickable knot. 

We knew that Wong, like us, had been a heroin user, but when he swept into Video In trailing expensive grooming smells and acolytes, none of us saw anything but a star, forged in fire. There was no whiff of madness, save that which made him smell more world-wise and complex.

I’m allergic to the word “redemptive” in relation to drugs and sobriety, but Wong’s work made us feel like we could still become people with brains and gravitas and sway; that our willful uncoupling from reason didn’t necessarily mean we would be stripped of our right to choose how and whether we were seen. This, we know from Hurston (who insisted on being seen and showing where she came from) to Abounaddara and Glissant (who insist on the right to control ones image, to become opaque), is a basic right of all beings, and it’s a slow violence to live a life deprived of that right. It can make a creature howl, hide or preen until she bleeds. 

So when we started to build The Infernal Grove, we reached out to Paul right away to see if he would be comfortable talking to us about drugs, addiction and recovery (not necessarily in that order). He talked about many things including NA, about how it was there that he was finally able to let go of the shame he felt about his drug use. “They say you only hurt yourself,” he said “but I reject that. I don’t really feel that hurt.”

I won’t say that the cinema holds the potential for boredom…

We saw Laura Harrison’s animation Limits of Vision this March at The Museum of Moving Image. For context, I shall just let it be known that for some among us, the cinema is a fearsome place. The expectation of stillness and quiet can feel like a heavy, hateful hand gripping our shoulder while one  tries, tries, tries to pay attention, to not crunch or squirm or speak. I won’t say that the cinema holds the potential for boredom, because (again, for some of us) that is foregone. I won’t say, either, that experimental work poses a special threat, because everyone already knows that.

But Limits of Vision had me transfixed from its strange opening salvo, which comes in a form oddly reminiscent of the text crawl from Star Wars. It’s a quote from Jesuit mystic and evolutionary scholar which reads:

“Once and for all she understood that like the atom, woman has no value save for that part of herself that passes into the universe.”

— Emily Vey Duke

Description
The Infernal Grove Study Groups bring into dialogue a group of artists from across the continent who have lived experience with substance-use, and who represent a range of current relationships to sobriety and its alternatives. This session, moderators will include Liz Roberts,  Mikiki,  Devon Narine-Singh, Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke

The study group was formed as a space for conversations about both ideas and feelings: emotional conversations about the academic and critical conversations about affect.  In recovery programs, perhaps by necessity and certainly by design, there is a push to accept received wisdom. But for addict-intellectuals, it’s hard to forfeit critical thinking to recovery. In addiction, connection to the intellectual can become tenuous. It’s easy to lose the relationships and identities that support rigorous critical thinking. Recovery can mean recovering those relationships and identities. 
VSW will host a week-long online screening of two works chosen Emily and Cooper for The Infernal Grove.  Prime Cuts (1981, 20 minutes, Paul Wong); and The Limits of Vision 2022, 30 minutes, Laura Harrison). Moderators will discuss the works in relation to the project of The Infernal Grove.

The study group is part of The Infernal Grove Project, an unsystematic structural analysis of drug use, addiction and recovery (not necessarily in that order). It is anti-carceral, anti-prohibition and seeks to amplify the voices of radical harm-reductionists and their coalitions. 

ig: @the_infernal_grove

The Infernal Grove Project takes place mostly on stolen Mi’kmaq and Onondaga land.

The text for this episode of the Study Group is a screening: Read the descriptions and watch the two films below.

THE INFERNAL GROVE PRESENTS
THE WHOLE GRIMOIRE

Previous Screenings

May 12 2022 Visual Studies Workshop

DRUGS AS PRAXIS

SOBRIETY AS PRAXIS

Friday April 8, 8:00-9:30pm EST
Sporeprint Infoshop
(in the Third Hand Bike Co-op space)
979 E. 5th Ave.  Columbus, Ohio 43201

ALL ARE WELCOME to join the conversation in person or remotely on zoom HERE.

Reading: Club Sober – New Forms of Sobriety for the 21st Century, Michelle Lhooq

For those who are interested here is the video at the center of The Infernal Grove project.

Moderators: Cooper Battersby,  Emily Vey Duke, Leilani Monfort, Devon Narine-Singh, Dani Restack and Liz Roberts.

Reading the text is not a requirement for participation in the discussion. This has become a consistent practice, and is part of a commitment to accessibility.

The study group brings into dialogue a group of artists and scholars from across the continent who have lived experience with substance-use and a range of current relationships to sobriety and its alternatives. We will be reading  “Club Sober: New Forms of Sobriety for the 21st Century” by Michelle Lhooq.

In recovery programs, perhaps by necessity and certainly by design, there is a push to accept received wisdom. But for addict-intellectuals, it’s hard to forfeit critical thinking to recovery. In addiction, connection to the intellectual can become tenuous. It’s easy to lose the relationships and identities that support rigorous critical thinking. Recovery can mean recovering those relationships and identities. 

This third session of the Study Group explores a notion sobriety that is not absolute.  ne that allows certain drugs (weed, mushrooms) but not others (alcohol, stimulants, opiates etc). This version of sobriety is seen as a new and potentially massive market as weed becomes legalized throughout the US.

The Infernal Grove Project exposes the disproportionate effects of public trauma (including the COVID pandemic) on drug users, especially addicts of color.  It’s become an organizing principle in our thinking about this work: we need to show the connections between addiction and the socioeconomic forces that create and exploit it.

This event will take place on the stolen territory of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe and Cherokee peoples.  The Indian Removal Act of 1830 resulted in the forced removal of many indigenous peoples.  The Infernal Grove Project supports efforts to change the name of the city of Columbus, although we are not sold on “Flavortown” as the alternative.

PARTICIPANTS

Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke have worked collaboratively since 1994. They make video and installation. Their works can be found at V-Tape in Toronto, Video Databank in Chicago and Argos in Brussels. They ambivalently teach at Syracuse University.

Leilani Monfort is an activist and anthropologist who investigates the relationship between child-rearing practices, cultural narratives, and structural inequality. She currently runs the food pantry for a Columbus nonprofit serving people with cancer. 

Devon Narine-Singh is a filmmaker and curator. His works have screened at Prismatic Ground, Microscope Gallery, YOUKI International Youth Media Festival, NOFLASH Video Show, UltraCinema, The New School and The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. He has presented screenings and presentations at The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Maysles Cinema, NYU Cinema Studies and UnionDocs. 

Dani ReStack has screened her single-channel videos at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Gene Siskel Film Center, PS1, Cine Cycle, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Union Docs, The New York Film Festival and Anthology Film Archives. Restack is a recipient of the Kuzuko Trust, Wexner Center Film/Video Residency, the Milton Avery Fine Arts Award and the Astraea Visual Arts Grant. 

Liz Roberts makes artwork that is often collaborative and rooted in moving image and sound. Recently she’s been working on autobiographical filmmaking as a way to try and reckon with the violence of an extractive documentary camera. Her new file Midwaste will premiere at Hotdocs, 2022.

March 20
Film-Makers Cooperative, NYC

Compiled by Devon Narine-Singh and Liz Roberts from the collection of Film-Makers Cooperative.

Being Fucked Up (2001) 10:00 – Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby

Bitch Beauty (2011) 7:00 – MM Serra

Medication (2007) 3:00 – Anne Hanavan

Six Jaguars (2021), 4:45, Michael Love Michael 

I Woke Up in the Mud and Picked Up a Camera for Jonas (2019) 13:00 – Devon Narine-Singh

Liz Roberts pre-recorded introduction to her film.

A list of Things That Make the Heart Beat Faster (1996) 11:00 – Liz Roberts 16mm print

Glimpses of Garden, Marie Menken (1957) 5:00 16mm print

The Infernal Grove is an artist group focusing on those who have a lived history of substance use and various relations to sobriety. Grove and FMC members Liz Roberts and Devon Narine-Singh have put together a wide range of FMC’s collection surveying addiction and recovery, with a particular eye towards the communities of the Lower East Side. This program is an unflinching and honest look of artists processing their lived experiences and speaks to FMC’s original mission statement of wanting films that “are not rosy, but are the color of blood” (J.M.) This screening also holds space for those in recovery to have a cathartic dialogue around these issues and centers the community values key to FMC’s mission.

hosted by Nocturne and The Blue Building Gallery

The Infernal Grove Study Group
CAPITAL, DRUGS AND THE SEARCH FOR ENCHANTMENT

Thursday Oct. 14, 6:30-8:00pm EST

Presented by in partnership with Nocturne and The Blue Building Gallery


All are welcome to join the conversation remotely on zoom here.
Reading: Silvia Federici’s Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018) (pdf) (audio)
Video: The Infernal Grove

Reading the text was not a requirement for participation in the discussion. This has become a consistent practice, and is part of a commitment to accessibility

The study group was livestreamed at The Blue Building Gallery, where The Infernal Grove was showing as an exhibition.

The study group brought into dialogue a group of artists and scholars from across the continent who have lived experience with substance-use and a range of current relationships to sobriety and its alternatives. We discussed “Re-enchanting the World: Technology, the Body, and the Construction of the Commons” from Silvia Federici’s book Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons.

In recovery programs, perhaps by necessity and certainly by design, there is a push to accept received wisdom. But for addict-intellectuals, it’s hard to forfeit critical thinking to recovery. In addiction, connection to the intellectual can become tenuous. It’s easy to lose the relationships and identities that support rigorous critical thinking. Recovery can mean recovering those relationships and identities. 

This first session of the Study Group explored the notion of drug-taking as an adaptive strategy in a world stripped of ritual and connection to land.

The Infernal Grove Project exposes the disproportionate effects of public trauma (including the COVID pandemic) on drug users, especially addicts of color.  It’s become an organizing principle in our thinking about this work: we need to show the connections between addiction and the socioeconomic forces that create and exploit it.

ig: @the_infernal_grove

This iteration of The Infernal Grove Project took place on stolen Mi’kmaq and Onondaga land. https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/join-the-informants



Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke have worked collaboratively since 1994. They work primarily in video. Their works can be found at V-Tape in Toronto, Video Databank in Chicago and Argos in Brussels. They are currently faculty at Syracuse University.

Liz Roberts makes artwork that is often collaborative and rooted in moving image and sound. Recently she’s been working on autobiographical filmmaking as a way to try and reckon with the violence of an extractive documentary camera. She has held teaching positions in cinema and art departments at Denison University, Columbus College of Art & Design, and Ohio State University. While living in Ohio she worked collectively and horizontally with a large group of artists called MINT in their warehouse space. Her work has shown widely, and her early films are in the collection of the Filmmakers Cooperative in New York City.

Participants

Vince Tao – VANDU member, activist
Samona Marsh – VANDU boad member, DULF member, activist
Hugh Lampkin – VANDU board member, activist
Mikiki – artist, harm reduction worker, @mkkultra
Liz Roberts – filmmaker
Margaret Sadovsky – writer, editor
Paul Wong – artist
Zaire Knight – artist
Matt Kimber – weed entrepreneur
Sarah Whidden – harm reduction worker
Dani ReStack – artist
Ellery Bryan – artist + activist
Deven Narine-Singh – filmmaker + curator

Credits

Devi Penny – Project Manager + Editor
Aya Garcia – Camera
Marijke Pieters – Kwiers
Kevin Thornton – Music

Thanks

VANDU – Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users
DULF – Drug Users Liberation Front
Star Daniels
Eli Horwatt
Jason Fox
Vanessa Lore
Brett Story
Robyn Schleihauf



Support

TBB – The Blue Building Gallery, K’jipuktuk / Halifax
Nocturne – Nocturne: Art at Night a fall festival in Kjipuktuk/Halifax.
Canada Council for the Arts – Provided funding for the The Infernal Grove video.
Department of Transmedia – Syracuse University

The Infernal Grove [v1 TBB]
38min

The Infernal Grove is an unsystematic structural analysis of drug use, addiction and recovery (not necessarily in that order). It is anti-carceral, anti-prohibition and seeks to amplify the voices of radical harm-reductionists and their coalitions. It recognizes the value of the sacred while rejecting all forms of piety. It posits wonder and the land as spaces of enchantment, as not an antidote to but an extension of the space opened up by drugs.

It’s based on the artists’ lived experience of drug use and the consequent interventions of state and medical establishments, which included both involuntary hospitalization and outpatient rehabilitation.

This is the version 1 of The Infernal Grove as it was shown at The Blue Building Gallery in the fall of 2021. The Infernal Grove video will change which each new exhibition or screening.