The Endeavor

(an Art on the Atlanta Beltline Artist in Residence Project (2020-2021)

The Endeavor is a tired body. Tired Bodies are figurative, soft sculptures that are distorted and exaggerated in various ways that reflect their experiences. Tired Bodies are meant to take up space, despite their fatigue caused by the expectations placed on bodies both physically and mentally, in our culture and society. They are meant to make us consider their presence and what it means. They are meant to remind us…

The Endeavor is monumental and while she rests, she invites you to take part in something monumental:

She asks you to care as a community should. To hold yourself accountable as you hold others accountable.

She asks you to fail. And to try again. 

She asks you to remember that our value is not in how hard or long our bodies labor. 

She asks you to take. And to give if you can and choose.

Processions (performances/Activiations)

Installation procession: Monday, April 19th at 5:30pm

Procession: Atalanta - June 1st, 3pm start

The community is invited to celebrate the birth, life, and death of Atalanta through a processional share of knowledge and labor.

In this durational performance, you may witness the birth of Atalanta from the womb of the Endeavor and then observe as her doula carries her through life and into death while reciting knowledge related to the acts of love, care, gift, failure, death, and community. She will be returned to the arms and body of the Endeavor at the end of the performance. You are invited to take in this gift of knowledge.

Procession: Astarte - June 15th, 5:30pm start

The community is invited to celebrate the birth, life, and death of Astarte through a procession, community gathering, and meal.

In this performance, you may witness the birth of Astarte from the womb of the Endeavor and then observe as her doulas, a family of women, carry her to a space of celebration and community for a gathering and meal. Her doulas will then carry her through death and return her to the arms and body of the Endeavor. You are invited to take part in this gift of community and care through picnicking with us. (location TDB)

Procession: Inanna - June 29th, 5:30pm start

The community is invited to celebrate the birth, life, and death of Inanna through a processional exchange of labor.

In this performance, you may witness the birth of Inanna from the womb of the Endeavor and then observe as her doulas, facilitate her procession with the assistance of any community volunteers, celebrating her life and death. She will be returned to the arms and body of the Endeavor at the end of the performance. You are invited to take part in this exchange of gift and labor, bringing with you any gift you feel can be given in exchange for another and to exchange your labor for another’s.

Volunteers who would like to participate in this procession/performance must:

+Wear red

+Wear a face mask

+Choose a place along the beltline between the old fourth ward skate park and the Ormewood Park section of the trail

+Bring a gift of any kind that can be exchange for another (this gift does not have to have value or can be valuable, it can be ephemeral, it can be material, the nature of the gift is your choice)

+Be willing to exchange places with someone already carrying for some duration of the performance

+Please reach out to Jessica at jessica.r.caldas@gmail.com if you have questions about volunteering.

The research that went into the creation of the Endeavor is catalogued here

You are invited to take in that research or submit information/knowledge you feel is relevant to the project:

Key Texts/Sources

• All about love: New Visions by Bell Hooks

I have been reading and rereading this text intently for the past year. I have also noticed that many of the people I know, both intimately and in passing, have been finding solace in this text It is invaluable for challenging yourself and the ways you/we think about love and care, and what it means to truly love others. Hooks approaches this topic without hesitation or softness but instead with the intensity and demand it requires.

• Monument Lab

  For any student of monument art and history, Monument Lab should be a primary source of learning. In particular their bulletin features many voices reimagining what monuments can be and how they might better function in our society.

• The Nap Ministry

  I discovered the Nap Ministry after I began making Tired Bodies. They have been doing their work, and liberating folks through their knowledge and expertise since 2016. Led by Tricia Hersey, The Nap Ministry is the best resource for understanding rest as resistance and how grind culture, capitalism, and white supremacy function to suppress and destroy us.

• “The Gift of Strawberries” from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

  In this chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer elegantly describes gift economies, how they function, how we understand them, and the way that gift economies can be exploited. Using the strawberry as a metaphor, she is able to break down the ideologies present in Lewis Hyde’s work simply and clearly, a gift unto itself. PDF

• The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World by Lewis Hyde

THe Endeavour Space Shuttle

• SPACE SHUTTLE ENDEAVOUR

• Endeavour: NASA's Youngest Shuttle

Atalanta

• CHAPTER 5: OF THE WINGS OF ATALANTA - The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois

• The Values of Multiplicity by Mary Anne Case

• Atalanta in Calydon by Algernon Charles Swinburne

• Gender and Excellence in the myth of Atalanta by Michela d’Entremont

Astarte

• Ulalume by Poe

• III. Dramatic Astarte from Poetry of Byron - Chosen and Arranged by Matthew Arnold

• Transformation of a Goddess by David Sugimoto

Inanna

• The Descent of Inanna

• Restoring Inanna: an ancient myth for contemporary women? by Raelene Bruinsma

• Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and a Coincidence of Opposites by Rivkah Harris

• RESURRECTING INANNA: LAMENT, GENDER, TRANSGRESSION by KIMBERLY M. TORRES

• The Three Faces of Inanna: an

  Approach to her Polysemic

  Figure in her descent to the

  Netherworld by Rodrigo Cabrera

• THE LEGACY OF INANNA by Michael Orellana

Gift Economy

• The Gift by Marcel Mauss

• Part III of Sacred Economies: Money, Gift, & Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

• The Maternal Roots of the Gift Economy, Edited by Genevieve Vaughan

• The Gift Economy by David Cheal

Love

• Love as the practice of freedom, Bell Hooks

• The Essays “Love, QPOC style", “An open love letter to folks of color,” and “The Myth of shared womanhood and how it perpetuates inequality,” in Black Girl Dangerous by Mia McKenzie

Labor

• The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century by Michael Denning

• Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, Edited by Barbara Ehrenreich

Gender/The Body

• Glitch Feminism, A Manifesto by Legacy Russell

• The Body Project: an intimate history of American Girls by Joan Jacobs Brumberg

• Woman: An intimate geography by Natalie Angier

Monuments

• Art Papers Fall/Winter 2020 - Monumental Interventions

• The Relic Report Part One

• The Relic Report Part Two

Doulas

• How Death Doulas Ease the Final Transition

• One way to die - Hire an end of life doula

• Exploring a tradition of support

Other

• Hase / Rabbit / Coniglio

• Keep Walking Intently: the Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the situationist International, and the Fluxus by Lori Waxman

• The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

• Chapter 5 - Body of Where is Ana Mendieta? by Jane Blocker

• Chapter 3 - The Zany Science in Our Aesthetic Categories by Sianne Ngai

• Chapters 1, 3, 6, 11, 14-17 in Zones of Contention by Carol Becker

• Bearing Witness Featuring Ilse Reiner (A holocaust survivor who sewed her wedding dress from used military parachutes)

The original intent for this Artist in Residence project was to interview many members of the Atlanta community about their experiences living on or near the Beltline (with the knowledge that feelings about the presence and success of the Beltline are mixed), and then create Tired Bodies that reflected their experiences. Eventually, a performative procession carrying one such Tired Body along the Beltline would link all these stories together, a celebration and memorandum of the success and failures within these stories. The idea of reflecting specific challenging experiences from the community through the vehicle of these soft, exaggerated, and fatigued forms was an appealing task, but that is not what this project became.

The Endeavor has instead become a vehicle for examining larger, more sweeping experiences. This work touches on deeply entrenched social and political norms but also attempts to imagine a kind of space where those norms are turned on end even as they are illuminated.

Previously, Tired Bodies was a series that mostly involved large-human-scale soft sculptures and installation environments where they would reside. There was a lot of freedom within this work to experiment with medium, and it incorporated smaller sculpey sculptures, drawings, paintings, and stop motion animation, among other things. In the beginning, Tired Bodies were mostly concerned with labor and fatigue. Over time they become ways to talk about gender norms, sexuality, body image, ableism, and motherhood. With even more time, Tired Bodies became something humorous, resisting much of the normative demands forced on them by the culture they inhabited through their strangeness. They were failing, but in so many ways, they were resisting those demands through their resting, soft, diminished frames and their failure was also an act of resistance: Resisting the dominant culture and its expectations.

Being awarded this residency and the time to produce this work during the pandemic, as well as during a time when many were forced to reckon with their own privilege and issues of race for the first time or in real and tangible ways, meant that many of these initial ideas shifted. Because Tired Bodies reflect the relationship our bodies have with the world around us, they easily take on new meaning. While many of the ghosts of these original ideas still haunt the project, the specific direction of the work changed drastically for logistic and conceptual reasons, and the outcome of the work reflects all of those shifts.

In her/their final form, The Endeavor is a 100(ish) foot long Tired Body. She will live along the Beltline resting in the grass for 10 weeks. Overall, she resembles so many of her sisters, only much, much larger in scale. She has become a monument. Technically, monuments are meant to exalt someone famous or notable, to commemorate the dead, or to mark a site of historical importance. Our country has been made hyper aware of monuments recently, and how much they can end up representing more than history, and instead represent a viewpoint or ideal, no matter how twisted. There is a lot of new, and some not so new, work being done to document our monuments, their removal, and to create new and different kinds of monuments. The Endeavor is a kind of study and student of that work.

She/they might represent the labor of survival that most everyone has had to endure to some degree, many in far greater and more painful ways than others, and especially in the past year. Through their rest they might also represent the necessary resistance to the capitalist drive for additional and unnecessary labor beyond survival. As a creature that required much labor to produce, she is, in many ways a reflection of failure to resist as well. She/they take up space consciously and self-consciously. The space they inhabit is fraught, it does not necessarily belong to them, but they are there, existing, and she/they might represent the kind of learning we must all do in the spaces we exist in, even if, and when, we fail to do so perfectly.

But more than anything The Endeavor is to be a monument to love and care. In another timeline, when exchanging objects and being in community was easier, The Endeavor would have been a creature literally lined with gifts. Her/their body lined with 500 pockets, based off a silly but lovely passage in one of my favorite novels, she would have contained 500 gifts/love notes to the community of Atlanta. In this past year, the ideology of “mutual aid” has entered the mainstream, and many were ignorant or unaware of it before. This work has become entangled with the idea of mutual aid, and by extension, theories, and ideas around gift economies, the ways we give and exchange, and the ways those gifts and exchanges are warped by the market and culture we live in are endlessly fascinating to me. There are ways so many of us participate and participated in many kinds of gift economies without being conscious of it. In any case, logistically, exchanging hundreds of gifts during a pandemic is not something advisable. Instead, the gifts The Endeavor contains are three Tired Bodies within her “womb” named Atalanta, Astarte, and Inanna and the community will receive those gifts via three separate performances that will reflect on labor, community, family, care, failure, learning, gift exchange, and love.

The Endeavor has also become a mother, resting, and surviving a pandemic, who will labor to deliver children/gifts unto a community at possible risk and damage to herself. The gift economy is seated in the matriarchal, and because our culture is seated in the patriarchal the pandemic has deeply impacted women and mothers in an alarming way and our revolutions are most often performed on the backs of women (all this especially true for black women and other women of color).

There are so many more things to write about this project and the work that has gone into it. For instance, the material choices of The Endeavor and Atalanta, Astarte, and Inanna are specific. The Endeavor is made from recycled military parachutes, dyed, and sewn. The appropriation of a tool of colonialism and violence for a project centered on care and community felt important, but also that the parachutes also served as methods of protection and care in their own right. There is no straight line to the answer, merely the constant shifting and evolving as we learn to do better, hold ourselves accountable, care more, and embrace community.