Elana Mann: Both of us work with listening ingrained in both our process and product. I am interested in hearing more about what the listening process looks like to you?

Jesus Abril: A listening process is very active, it’s bringing community together in a physical space, talking to them, allowing them to voice their visions, voice their concerns, voice their ideas of how they would want to see their neighborhood change or how they would want to see their neighborhood evolve, and happening in an actual physical space within the community.

In the case of my class, my studio with Cal Poly Pomona and the students from East Los Angeles College, it involved the students organizing a day on a Saturday making flyers, using social media, using the local community organizations, community groups and neighborhood councils, spreading the word and then to come together again.

Allowing the students also to come into that environment, to physically walk those streets and to physically meet those people within their space and get an idea of what the space looks like. To us that listening meant taking notes, creating sketches, taking walking tours of the community, photographing and sharing those images with the community members, and seeing what they had to say about those spaces. But it also meant reaching out to other professionals in the field who might give us some feedback.

In this case it was James Rojas, an urban planner, who trained my students on how to use his interactive type of workshop technique.

It gave community members a platform to voice their memories, to speak about their communities in ways that they were comfortable speaking about their environment, and to voice the things that they knew firsthand, their lives on an everyday basis — but it was just that.

It was us being quiet for those couple of hours and showing them maps and showing them their neighborhood from a point of view that maybe they hadn’t seen before — quite literally an aerial view of the project site — and diagramming and color-coating certain areas, allowing them to understand that layout from a different point of view. This was a combination of techniques, stuff I had learned as an undergrad studying Chicano studies, and stuff I learned later on in architecture school.

My time spent in architecture school at SCI-ARC there wasn’t a lot of attention being paid to those social issues when it came to designing. The more I got involved in architecture and the more I started asking these questions, professors are telling me you can’t do that—There’s no way you can do that.

Like, you’re gonna accommodate 10 people and piss off 50 other people? You can’t do that! That’s not what architecture is! And I had the hardest time in architecture school really finding my voice, or establishing my aesthetic, or establishing my point of view because professors were not willing to work with me in terms of my pieces.

EM: Well, so much of art and architecture training is about formalism, even though context, history, community, and experience are vitally important to how a work is received and what gives it meaning. When I was studying art at Cal Arts, most of my professors were not interested in socially engaged art. This made many of the conversations about my work quite limiting.

JA: Yes, and because of that when it came to my thesis professors, they were telling me oh, your idea is outdated. That was until I met Coy Howard who is an old soul and just old school and we just kind of vibed out. The energy was cool and mutual, and he really helped me out.  His idea of aesthetic and building up something that expresses some sort of uniqueness or something that adapts with time taught me to appreciate process and I, I ran with that, and still do.

Just because I went to school for eight years of my life to focus on this, that doesn’t put me at any position higher than them. So, I feel it’s my responsibility now to take all that and sort of package it to some kind of service to say yeah, I’m a social worker, yeah I’m a designer, yeah, I’m a contractor, I’m an architect… (hopefully in the future once I pass my exams), but I’m more than that.  I’m a person as well. I’m not a robot. I’m not just gonna plop something here. I’m going to create something. Something that can grow with the community as the community changes that can still be relevant through those changes, you know, it’s not just a one use deal and it ends there. Part of the thing that I carry with me now is also that there’s a history in these spaces and a lot of that history is being forgotten.

EM:   It’s classic L.A.

JA:    Definitely! Wipe it clean! But I think it’s best to tell that story. I think it’s best to pay homage to that story. You don’t have to replicate it—but it’s about becoming aware of it.

EM: So, in school you learned a lot about design, about aesthetics — and I feel like that is just another tool in your toolkit that you can use. Community engaged work can be also aesthetically challenging and experimental and interesting. But sometimes people feel like there’s not that possibility somehow because you have to please people, or you have to be more easily digestible. I don’t think that’s true.

JA: It’s not, not anymore.  

EM: There’s a disconnect depending on who you’re talking to because—kind of like what you were describing formalism within design school — there are a lot of people in the art world who are really only interested in formal aspects.

JA: Right?

EM: Artists are trained to work individually, they’re not trained to work communally at all, which I think is a real lack because, as an artist, you always have to work with people no matter what.

I’m also really driven by thinking creatively about what are the potentials of art socially, politically, and interpersonally?

Art spaces are valuable more than ever right now, because there are so few spaces that function like a pause outside of the virtual or physical spaces that we’re engaged in every day, like social media, TV, the news, or at our jobs or whatever. Sadly, art spaces can be so inaccessible for so many people: some of them are really expensive, they’re located in parts of town where wealthier people live, and a lot of the perspectives that galleries and museums show are not from everyday people. How can the access to aesthetics and art be opened up? 

Now there are more classes and programs in socially engaged art, but at the time I was in school there were not a lot of resources for me. Like you, I ended up going to other fields to learn about different techniques of social engagement, like nonviolent communication. I learned this type of organized conversation called council, which was developed by a center in Ojai --- it’s about getting groups of people to tell stories from the heart. The Center for Council took a lot of inspiration from Native American traditions of talking  — and eastern and western traditions — and brought them all together. Now they use council in prisons and schools.

I also took a workshop in IWW (International Workers of the World) community organizing, like how a to organize workers to unionize. Now I’m doing this deep listening certification program, which is also about listening both to oneself and to others ---

JA: The community workshop component in our studio was like that — giving the students additional skills and an opportunity to engage with community.

EM: Where was the project?

JA: It was a big project that was the future biotech corridor of Los Angeles in El Sereno. Now, it’s a very sensitive subject. It starts questions of gentrification and then you have discussions of displacement and right away students were asking, “What’s gonna happen to the people who live here?”

Are we designing something for the people or are we designing something for the medical/biotech field, and who is our client? And I kind of left it open ended for them, like, you decide what do you want to do. I’m not gonna force anything on you, but I am going let you know we are going talk to them and just being in that circle and being aware of what’s going on, I felt a responsibility to let people know. Even though it was a theoretical project, the students were still treating it as if it was something real.

EM: Just getting people to a meeting is a challenge. Did people show up?

JA: Yeah, we were surprised. I mean we had a packed house and the techniques that James Rojas showed us were amazing. I mean James Rojas told us that the memories and the dialogue are much more powerful than any rendering that’s gonna be put out about this future space. So, that was the focus — their stories — and there were a lot of stories about people growing up in Mexico or somewhere and as a child having access to fruit and herbs and stuff like that.

That led to a discussion about community gardens, people talking about plazas and communal space. So, the students started developing ideas for green areas and stuff like that. So it’s not asking communities specifically what color would you want for this to be, but what uses should be there, what kind of activities should happen there? The students who have mastered or familiarized themselves with these techniques were able to take that and do renderings or do something with it and I think that’s crucial. So, the students were able to take that and make boards and make their projects and then our final presentation for the course was also held in El Sereno down the street at El Sereno Graphics.  It’s a printing shop and I had met the owner and I told him what we were doing, and he was like, “Yeah, I’m up for it.” So, he let us use the space.

EM: Sounds like a pedagogy for the community members as much as it is for the students. Like a public pedagogy.

JA: And I’ve always wanted to do something with that. I’ve always wanted to go against the system — you know it’s like all right go against the system…make something of your own.

So tell me about a project where you used all your listing skills you had acquired?

EM: One project where I directly used my listening skills was called “Listening as a Movement.” It was commissioned by a community arts organization, Side Street Projects, who wanted me to create an artwork that amplified the voices of the neighborhood of Northwest Pasadena. At the time, Northwest Pasadena was an economically depressed area of Pasadena and it is still struggling more than other neighborhoods in Pasadena.  

I ended up connecting with an organization called, Day One, which is a youth advocacy organization. Day One didn’t want to only paint a mural or do some one-off art project; they wanted to teach their kids actual leadership skills. I also started attending the Northwest Commission meetings, which is the local neighborhood council. The neighborhood council was like, “We just want people to show up for our meetings, we just want more community engagement.” So, both organizations had different aims.

I decided to connect these two groups by inviting Day One students to present to the neighborhood council in a big public even. I decided to use my artwork as publicity to draw people in.

JA: …and they get people at the meeting.

EM: …and they get people at the meeting! And these kids get to practice leadership skills. Day One did this community mapping project with the students. It was kind of similar to what you were describing going to community meetings and people being like, “Whoa, I had no idea this is happening in my neighborhood,” where the teenagers were like, “Whoa, I never looked at my neighborhood this way, I never evaluated what are the assets and the deficits.”

Day One printed out these big maps and the kids put stickers and notes with their comments about the neighborhood on the maps. For example, this is an empty lot and it’s awful, this a community center that helps women, which is good--- and they presented that to the neighborhood council.

One of the things that came up was street lamps. They were like, “It’s dark and it’s scary to walk home at night.” They’re just kids and you feel really bad for them because it’s awful that a kid has to experience that. What the youth didn’t know was that the Northwest Commission had been working on the street light issue for years without any traction. City council people from the rest of Pasadena are there, too, and they’re listening to this and I’m sure that they had egg on their faces.

The Pasadena City council was forced to listen, and so new street lamps were put in. And they also made this whole summer long program for teens.

JA: (laughs)

EM: When you are an artist going into a community that you don’t know, you are an outsider. Because of the nature of the commission, and my own social and political goals, I really wanted to make some kind of impact, rather than having the project be just plop art.

I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I thought maybe this will be an exercise in community pedagogy like you were talking about. I’ll just plant the seeds that we need to speak more, listen to each other more, voice our concerns, be more civically engaged and that’ll be it. But what happened was really awesome.

There are other issues that came up with the project — one of them was I worked on it for 10 months, or a year, and I didn’t get paid at all. I mean there was some money to build large-scale sculptures, but I got no payment for my labor. Unfortunately, that’s something really endemic in these kinds of projects, whereas if you work for the city, you have a salary. I’m super passionate about the outcome but—

JA: It’s work.

EM: It is work.  

JA: So, real quick, what were the sculptures?

EM: I built three sculptures. The organization I was working for, Side Street Projects, is totally off the grid, it’s run all through solar power. It’s a mobile organization, which works out of trailers and they have this mobile woodworking school bus that goes around to all of the third graders in Pasadena and teaches them woodworking.

JA: That’s off the grid as well?

EM: Yes, it’s a school bus that’s retrofitted with woodworking stations.

JA: That’s awesome.

EM: It’s so cool. At the time of my project, they happened to be in this empty lot that was pegged for a retirement development that hadn’t happened yet. So, I made this giant satellite dish, and then I worked with an acoustic engineer to build a 20 by 20 foot circular room that would carry sound around it, and I covered it with satellite dishes that were all painted different colors. People would literally stop in the middle of the road. It was Fair Oaks, which is this big throughway, and they were just like: “what are you doing?” They’d start screaming at me!

That was the space where the students put up their environmental scans and had dialogues with community members before the meeting with the neighborhood council.

JA: Within that space?

EM: Yes, but I used it for other things too, ‘cause there were other workshops that happened during the project.

I also I built this sculpture that was based on WWI spying devices, before radar was invented. They’re these huge listening horn devices that militaries would use when that was the height of technology. People would listen with these giant horns and it would give a few minutes heads-up that there were airplanes coming.

This was also right around the time when Edward Snowden was releasing all of his information to Wiki Leaks, so there was like a lot of stuff about listening just in the air.

Side Street Projects found these giant horns that had been used in the Rose Bowl Parade — again before electronic amplification was invented — to project voices. A lot of these early listening technologies both amplify and receive. So, I put these horns in my sculpture and they were weird, bizarre sculptures. But people in the surrounding area weren’t dismissive, they were kind of like: “Oh, this is interesting and cool.” We had an opening event where there were musicians playing the sculptures and people just started joining in. It wasn’t intended to be participatory, but they just started banging on the sculptures along with the musicians.

JA: So, what do you think about El Sereno and Lincoln Heights?

EM: I love Lincoln Heights and El Sereno. I’ve had an art studio in Lincoln Heights for eight years. I had a studio sale the other day and my friends came and there’s this burger joint across the street called Dino’s that I always go to.

JA: Where is your studio it located?

EM: Right across from Dino’s.

We love George, the owner of Dino’s -- he’s so nice —he’s talking to my friends and it turns out George is from the same small Greek village that my friend Nikolas is from.

It’s crazy, in Lincoln Heights and El Sereno there is such an amazing mix of cultures. It’s really changing though. I don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to be there. There are developers walking around our space all the time, knocking on our door. I worry about what’s going happen to people that live there now, and whether they’re going be displaced. Another case of what happened in Echo Park or Highland Park.

JA: It is. It’s such a multi-faceted problem. There’s definitely something that can be put into there, but I think, like what I was talking about earlier, these people need to voice themselves somehow.

I’m not even sure it guarantees anything at that point, but just to get it out there one way or another or to take that into account. These people — developers or whatever — they do have a responsibility. They have a responsibility to listen, to accommodate and unless the stuff is put out there then I don’t think anyone would listen.

EM: I did a project once with government officials, having them talk with each other about their listening strategies and how they communicate — that was fascinating because there were judges that were just like, “I don’t listen. I already have an idea before I even enter the courtroom.”

JA: Wow, and this is a judge?

EM: And then there were other people from DWP or DOT that were like, “I am so overwhelmed with all of the complaints that I don’t even know how to respond to them, there’s so much that I have to kind of…

JA:    "…start ignoring them?"

EM: Yes, because it’s a cacophony of voices.

JA: People know they get ignored after a while. People know. Even with community workshops, people were telling me, “What are you doing that for, that ain’t gonna do nothing, that ain’t gonna change shit,” and there’s this negative attitude that builds up.

I’m not trying to be a hero, I’m not trying to be anything like that, but I just want to do my part in breaking down those barriers, and let them know that, hey, maybe one small thing at a time can accomplish that.

But I do believe we have to we have to speak the language of whoever’s making decisions, whoever’s language that is. We have to be able to communicate, and share our vision, our stories. We have to let them know that they should take this seriously.