My guest this week is Autumn Breon.

Autumn Breon is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates the visual vocabulary of liberation through a queer Black feminist lens. Using performance, sculpture, and public installation, Breon invites audiences to examine intersectional identities and Diasporic memory. Breon imagines her work as immersive invitations for the public to join in the reimagining and creation of systems that make current oppressive systems obsolete. Breon has created commissions for Target, Art Production Fund, Frieze Art Fair, and the ACLU of Southern California. Breon’s performance history includes Hauser & Wirth, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Water Mill Center. She is an alumna of Stanford University where she studied Aeronautics & Astronautics and researched aeronautical astrobiology applications. Breon is a recipient of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart Fellowship for Abolition & the Advancement of the Creative Economy and the Race Forward Fellowship for Housing, Land, and Justice.

Urgent Futures is no stranger to polymaths—folks who have idiosyncratic, hybrid expertise across domains—and Autumn definitely lives up to the term, from aeronautical astrobiology to arts and activism. This more recent expression of her practice encompasses many different forms, as you’ll see in this conversation. But what I so appreciate about her work is her commitment to equity, and using speculative futures, art, design, and performance to invite new imaginings for what contemporary reality could be. In some aspects this is super conceptual, such as in her use of Planet Esoterica as a storyworld from which she draws powerful metaphors, aesthetics, figures, and other artistic ideas. But in other aspects this imagining is rooted directly in the present, such as her groundbreaking Care Machine “Caravan,” through which she partnered with Plan C to provide free access to abortion pills for folks in different parts of the United States in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Her focus on radical self-care feels like critical wisdom: it’s easy in the face of all the noise to throw ourselves into our work, whether that’s the grind of jobs and side hustles or activist causes. Either way, beginning from a place of self-care enables us in turn to genuinely care for others in our community—whatever form that community might take. It’s so simple and yet, speaking for myself, something that I forget so often. If you’re like me in that regard, this is definitely an important episode for you! And even if you have that all figured out, this episode is chock-full of insights across art, technology, activism, speculative fiction, and more, so buckle up!

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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

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