Episode 10: Milenko Matanovic - Everyday Democracy

Threshold Questions / Delicious Quotes

Why is our democracy struggling, What's wrong?

Right now the default modality is that we are at our worst with each other. And that troubles me because we are robbing ourselves of the possibility to understand, first of all, the complexity of our time and second of all, to prepare ourselves for a future that would work for all of us.

How can the process of community art-making help strengthen a struggling democracy?

This is not an academic idea. This has been tested, and I'm more convinced than ever that we live in this treacherous and wonderful in between times right now, and the quality of this in-between time is that the music, the background, the understanding has changed, but our habits have not. So, we still dance to the music with all the dance steps. And so, it's absolutely vital to start learning the new dance, ... unless we learn these new qualities and apply them to daily activities, and everybody has a chance to that. A staff meeting can be a mini kindergarten for learning collaborative practice, ... what interests me right now, is everyday democracy and how opportunities are everywhere and inviting us to rise to the occasion. ... That's the foundation for which the change will happen

Under what conditions can we rise to our better selves?

So what we've learned is when something specific is at stake, it's easier for people to flip from their differences into what can I contribute ... which is powerful. So, when it's abstract, we just argue about how we're different.

What is the artists job when our collective capacities are threatened?

We artists do not do it for them, they do it with them. Artists need to accept responsibility that they ... they need to put their ego aside. And when they exercise, the ego is within the framework of what the community wants, rather than what the artist wants, and then you invite people to become artists, to turn into construction workers and artisans and crafts people for a few days and do something together.

Transcript

Bill Cleveland: I met Milenko Matanovic on the US/Mexico border. We were there to confer with a couple of dozen other citizen artists from both countries to explore the audacious idea of creating a common ground cultural space, that literally straddled the border physically and creatively. The aim was to establish a creative laboratory for arts-based strategies for changing borders from dividers to cross community connectors--- not just for North America but for the whole world. Like I said it was audacious. 

Anyway, one amazing outcome from that cross-cultural collaboration festival was that one of the two countries actually signed on to crazy idea. I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure which one opted out. Another important outcome was the birth of the Pomegranate Center, which has served as the platform for Milenko’s community collaborations for the past three decades. In the decades since that border summit, I have come to know that challenging assumptions, poking holes in the impossible, and good-times-for-all are hallmarks for Milenko's way in the world. As an artist and designer, as a writer and speaker, as a teacher and philosopher, as an organizer and provocateur, Milenko Matonovic above all a hands-on maker and doer--- a creator on a lifelong journey to help communities realize what he views as the real American Dream -- grassroots democracy.

Our conversation took place in February of 2020, just as the gathering storm of the pandemic was appearing on the horizon.

Part 1: An American Dream

BC: I like to dive in and first of all, begin with you describing what your work is.

Milenko Matanovic: My work now is to think about the invisible currents that are moving through our society, and try to answer the question, how can a democracy work better? So, I'm interested in questions that are much more than questions of an artist, a traditional artist would ask. I think that something is happening in our society that should be worrisome, and I'm trying to look at that now that I have the privilege of more free time, and reading, and researching, and talking with my colleagues like yourself. Something is going on and I'm trying to understand what it is and I'm trying to provide some answers. 

BC: So given that there is a long history that preceded this particular moment where you are in a space where you can reflect, could you describe how you came to this and just a bit of your history and obviously touching bases on your on your artistic career, but also, the time you spent, in the trenches at the pomegranate center? 

MM: Sure. So, I'll go way back, I grew up in former Yugoslavia in a truly remarkable city with roots going back 2000 years. A kind of city where you walk and feel safe and you explore all the time and you bump into friends. Architecturally designed around the principles of placemaking because it was intuitive to the people who built that place. It's not by coincidence that we had to invent the term placemaking because it was lacking here. It was not needed in that city. 

So great, great memories of the city, great memories of spending several in a tiny village that basically existed in a pre-industrial fashion when I first visited it. But the society itself was a little bit foggy. It was like people were covered with heavy blankets and the joyfulness, the lightness, the excitement about the future, the optimism, creativity, all those were qualities lacking from the daily culture that I bumped into. I had a sense early on that something was wrong with that picture. You know, I think in retrospect, the leaders, political leaders in former Yugoslavia worked very hard to keep an arranged marriage between different cultural groups going, and that all exploded, as we know, in those atrocities after a hard hand of Tito disappeared. I was born only three years after the end of the Second World War, so my early memories was of very humble existence. You know, we turned off the lights because if police would see lights in two rooms from the street, they would knock on your door. So, the energy was so precious. 

Memories that everybody was trying to tell me who I should be, and who I should become, and how to behave, and I've rebelled against that. I looked with envy across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States, and I said to myself, here is a country where people deliberate their future together. They go to town halls, and they float different ideas, they wisely select the best ideas and they join their forces to make them happen. You know, that was the idealistic perception of healthy democracy, and I had this yearning for that state of affairs because it was utterly electing lacking in my early experience. Nobody ever asked me what I thought.

BC: So, you became an artist [chuckles] 

MM: That's exactly right. That's led me to the only place where I could go and still keep some kind of integrity with myself, and I was very lucky to bump into friends who were thinking similar thoughts. Long story short, I ended up working with a collaborative artist called Group OHO, which is kind of a combination of two Slovenian words or "oko," for eye "uko," for ear. And we said that's kind of the media in which will be working in the center. The senses will engage.

But I think, you know, I started in a very traditional way. I painted and I start to make some sculptures. But then one summer I discovered the different approach that shaped my entire career afterwards. Everybody was making objects, and what was the most important is the object that they were created. And I scratched my head and said, what if I start playing by different rules, which is that I will always try to learn from the setting first and then I will do something that highlights the setting rather than boast my own genius, and so this idea of collaboration has been with me for a very, very long time. But that was kind of a conscious beginning of that journey. 

BC: So could you talk about some of this work, share some examples of how It actually placed the setting and the foreground. 

MM: So I use the simplest of materials, like wooden sticks and string, connecting them together into a long snake and put them on top of the river, they would float on the river, and start visualizing the invisible currents that were under the surface of the river. So. So what kind of art is that? It's an art that highlights something in a relationship, right? It's not Milenko putting sticks in the river. It's highlighting what was there already. So, it is this idea that collaboration can be expressed in any way, not just between people, but between the artist and the river. I had summer jobs in the printshop, and I would beg them to sell me for very few cheap money, discarded roll of newspaper paper. about maybe 400 feet long. And I would take it to the rolling hills and fold it in the gravity of the hills would start shaping this pathway. So again, is art the paper? No, the paper was just a method to highlight something inherent in the situation that I found. 

BC: And, then you left Slovenia to expand on these ideas, but your idealistic view on the United States didn’t exactly pan out, did it?

When I came to the United States, I was shocked to discover cities lacking those qualities that I became familiar with and become became second nature to me in Lubyanka (the Slovenian capital). Walk-ability, fresh food, bumping into friends, a sense of community. All of that was lacking in many cities that were designed much better for cars than for people. So that shocked me and the other thing that shocked me is that when I would go and start to attend public meetings, I remember the very first one I attended in the United States had to do with widening a bicycle path on the shoulder of a of a street. And I went there because I was a bicyclist and I wanted to learn how true democracy works. And I was shocked to discover that it was dominated by a few very, very selfish people whose argument it was that they would not want to widen the road because we just don't want bicyclists obstructing our entry on the road when we exit from our homes 

BC: So, your bubble burst, but it didn’t deter you did it? Instead you went into inquiry mode and problem-solving mode, right?

MM: And so that piqued my interest. How come there was such a discrepancy between the ideals of participatory democracy and the reality? And eventually that started to really dominate my work, so even as we build artistic products with pomegranate, we had to learn how to convene meetings in a different way that downplayed those negative, selfish tendencies that I saw that have become the norm, and highlight creativity and forward looking and thinking on behalf of future generations. And this became gradual. My main work, how to design processes where people step up to their better selves. And so, as I said at the beginning, what is my work? That's my work now, too, to ask myself under what conditions can we rise to our better selves? Because right now the default modality is that we are at our worst with each other. And that troubles me because we are robbing ourselves of the possibility to understand, first of all, the complexity of our time and second of all, to prepare ourselves for a future that would work for all of us. So that's kind of how I got through this long journey of more than 50 years.

Part 2: Gathering 

BC: So, one of the things that has always attracted me to the work of the Pomegranate Center is the fact that every time an idea emerges, there's actually a story of the experience of working in communities with people who may seem skeptical at first, but actually end up taking responsibility for not only the ideas, but the manifestation of those ideas. One of them that that I was particularly enamored of was the one in San Diego, which really was a very compressed period of time, and a lot of people in a neighborhood who didn't necessarily know each other very well, who did some amazing projects. Could you talk a little bit about the on the ground experience of helping people really find a sense of common ground and taking responsibility for it?

MM: Well, so that's basically been the model for the Pomegranate Center's work with gathering places, and the method is very simple. So a lot like a young artist in Slovenia where I was the only one in charge of what was I was going to do. Here I had to become a kind of artist that will say, I will serve the desires of the community. And in order for me to do that, I had to trust their input. I could not just serve their anger and their negativity. So, the contract we created with the community is you tell us what needs to happen, but in the process, can you be honest with your ideas and what really ought to happen here, rather than what you do not want to see, which is so often the case? And then we will design it with your help. You have the power of veto, but we promise you that will design it around your wishes rather we learned that there are some architects who would simply not buy into that premise. They knew better. There were specialists who knew better than the community. We will resist the temptation and learn how to really pull out to the communities their best sentiments. 

BC: Actually, another way of engaging people that reinforce the connectiveness and interdependence of community. Could you talk about how that actually works? 

MM: So, we have to develop some tools for doing that. So, ground rules for participation that diminished the negativity. So, for example, simple rules, everyone will participate. Why did we impose that rule? Because we learn without it, few people would have the tendency to dominate the meeting. Or are you willing to change your mind after you hear other people talk about the project, so that we diminished people being fixed on their ideas and has the idea of learning. So, there are tricks to this, and we learn tons about what makes community meetings work. In any case, they are driving this rather than us. We design, they have the veto power, and then we orchestrate a joint series of daylong workshops. Usually projects would go anywhere from four to ten days, depending on the complexity of the project, and they were expected to work alongside with us. The basic idea was we do not work for you. We work with you will add something to your value, but you need to put the skin in the game also invest. The reason why it works so well, and we have some as you mentioned, you are familiar with the project down in San Diego, the Manzanita, a gathering place. But I think what made it work is that there was something specific at stake. 

BC: I had the privilege of helping to document the Manzanita gathering place project in San Diego that Milenko is referring to. In many ways, this was a prototypical Pomegranate Center project, a derelict and blighted road end, a concerned community that just wanted to turn it into a safe and beautiful little where everybody could gather, and connect, and play. From the city’s perspective this was at a minimum, a one year, one half-million-dollar project. Pomegranate and 200 community volunteers, planned, designed, and built it in three months for $20,000. I asked Milenko to share the alchemy that makes something like this possible. 

MM: So what we've learned is when something specific is at stake, it's easier for people to flip from their differences into what can I contribute to kind of a modality, which is powerful. So, when it's abstract, we just argue about how we're different. But when something specific, in this instance was the safety of kids, that dead end street, which the neighborhood blocked off with barbed wire, and then this tiny space, one hundred square yards, something like that, started to be occupied by drug dealers, and everybody knew that. There was an elementary school that used to be accessed through that space until this negative activity started to happen there. So, the project was about doing something to transform it from this black hole, into something exciting and, you know, let's do something beautiful, something functional, and now what they tell me is the community gathers there to watch the sunset because the place faces west towards the Pacific coast and they gather there in the evening, ritualistically kind of and bump into each other. How great right? And the space had to be designed for that kind of an easy encounter.

So, again, the principle I think here is the community needs to be involved. We artists do not do it for them, they do it with them. Artists need to accept responsibility that they will be that they need to put their ego aside. And when they exercise, the ego is within the framework of what the community wants, rather than what the artist wants, and then you invite people to become artists, to turn into construction workers and artisans and crafts people for a few days and let's do something together. And if that's enough right. And surprisingly, people step up to their better selves when we do art together. You know, people are not jerks to each other anymore, is just something about the activity of that nature. Now, let's do the mosaic together. You cannot argue. I would not just say “you jerk, you put this pink piece right here”. You kind of say in that context. Oh, that's interesting. Let me be them. There is that kind of a feeling starts exploding between people. And then I think those are the unexpected results. So, at the end, they feel safer with each other, more trusting of each other and they're excited to be involved again in something similar. That's what a powerful, powerful sentiment that is in our cynical times where people say, watch me not come to another meeting, 

BC: Now, Manzanita was a little park project that had a profound impact on a little community. But you see much broader implications for this work. Could you talk about that?

MM: And so what I'm learning from that, Bill, I'm asking the question, can this be applied more broadly beyond our projects to kind of the way we work between elections when with decisions about new community garden and new library and widening of the street, and you want whatever is being contemplated and often their community meetings, they're complementing those processes. It's not just professionals and government agencies doing it. There is a structured place for people to be involved. Unfortunately, they are involved through negativity, and I'm scratching my head and say, wait a minute, there's thousands of those meetings happening every month in the United States. What if we turn them into laboratories for collaboration and for learning from each other, for looking into the future, for all those good qualities that I dreamt about when I was in former Yugoslavia. That to me, what represents a living, breathing democracy. So, in some ways I'm...