Abstract
Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers are partners in work and life who founded Dream The Combine in Minneapolis, MN in 2013. They are now based between there and Ithaca, NY. Their work consists of site-specific installations that probe the section of an image. They aim to complicate regimes of visuality through methods that introduce perceptual uncertainty in embodied experience, and manipulate the boundary between real and illusory space. Dream The Combine are winners of the 2022–2023 Rome Prize in Architecture, the 2022 United States Artists Fellowship in Architecture and Design, the 2021 McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists, the 2020–2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize, the 2018 Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1, the 2018 Art Omi Architecture Residency, and the 2017 FSP/Jerome Foundation Fellowship. Dream The Combine are also part of the curatorial ensemble for the 2023 Counterpublic Triennial in St. Louis, MO.
V. Mitch McEwen and Cruz Garcia chatted with Newsom and Carruthers in Fall 2022 (via Zoom) about their personal histories and their time living in Minneapolis during the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd. This interview emerged from examining their accompanying Minneapolis photo essay completed in the summers of 2020 and 2022.
V. Mitch McEwen: I’d like to start with a question about your practice, Dream The Combine, specifically about its name and how the notion of dreaming fits into it. When I hear the word ‘dream,’ I think of Martin Luther King, Jr., but I also think about antipoverty and anticolonial programs. I wonder if the ‘dream’ in your name is related to repair? Is that something that was part of your lens?
Jennifer Newsom: I have trouble with the word ‘repair’ because I feel like it implies that something was at, one point, whole. We’re talking about things that actually were never fully formed in this context—there didn’t exist a point where everyone was copacetic and happy about the way things are.
I consider repair to be an inaccessible term, whereas dreaming is more open, more about potential. I mean, there are plenty of things that are trying to shut down our capacity to dream, but at the end of the day, dreaming is something that I hold within myself, within my own body. It is something that I can try and carve the space out for. Dreaming is my productive capacity, in a way. It is not overly romantic. It’s not about imagining utopia, but about moving in the face of tragedy.
We’ve been reading and rereading this interview between David Scott and Stuart Hall where Scott says that tragedy “orients us away from the assumption that the future can be guaranteed by the pasts accumulated in the present. And because action in tragedy is not guaranteed in this way by a progressive dialectical resolution, it is more willing to honor our openness to contingency, our vulnerability to luck and chance.” Dreaming is actually a radical capacity for love, a radical capacity to imagine something different than it is, and to try and work in service of that. Even if you never actually reach this ideal. You can still dream without the target of your dreams ever being or becoming whole. Dreaming exists as a capacious mode.
McEwen: This distinction between dream and utopia you mentioned is important. I also appreciate the critique that repair implies a kind of past utopia. Dreaming presents, then, an alternative to that relationship of the past and the future. Dreams can form a non-utopia open to contingency, including conscious dreaming. That to me seems really Black.
Newsom: It’s Black because I’m doing it, Mitch!
Tom Carruthers: We need dreaming because so much of what we have been fed as fact is a fiction. Take my family for example. I grew up in Canada where people try to exonerate themselves in relation to the United States. My parents were so proud to share William L. Shirer’s book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which riffs off of William Gibbon’s book about the decline of the Roman Empire. And at the same time, my parents’ and grandparents’ federal tax dollars were going towards supporting the residential school system through the early 1990s. This brutal, yet sanctioned, system alienated Indigenous people from their cultures of origin. It tried to erase them. There’s some unexamined contradictions, right? To be antigenocidal in one context while funding genocide in another. These intergenerational contexts are what we have to work through.
Cruz Garcia: Yeah, Canada has a very violent history and present, so is it really that different from the US? I mean Canada is still a capital of empire, but you know, the US is a much louder neighbor downstairs.
Newsom: A much louder, rowdier neighbor.
Garcia: Yeah, and also because the US is arguably the most destructive country in the history of humankind. So the scale of the structure we’re talking about is beyond comprehension, but there’s something else we wanted to bring up.
McEwen: Cruz and I were talking about these amazing family histories of Jennifer’s and her own intertwining in the Civil Rights Movement and Black Collective Empowerment. I want to open the conversation up to these stories, to see how in a way you’re continuing this dreaming that’s been passed on to you.
Newsom: For sure. To start, my family is very matriarchal. There’s not a lot of boys that are born into our family, so there is this legacy and pride of being—I won’t use the word “strong” because that is super problematic—but let’s just say fly Black women. My grandparents lived in Montgomery, Alabama. Discussing what life was like during Jim Crow was not something that we really talked about when I was growing up. My mother did not volunteer information; I had to ask her. There are definitely ways in which having lived under such an oppressive apartheid state regime in Alabama gives my mom a kind of radicality in her thinking. It’s not necessarily the first thing that you would realize about her because she’s also a bougie Black lady who had a corporate job, but the undercurrent is there. She has such a strong moral center. It’s definitely a part of how we, my sisters and I, were raised. There is an unfailing, internal sense of right and wrong, and that you should always be working for equality for more people.
Garcia: I want to talk more about family ties and about a beautiful legacy that Jennifer is building on. Your family comes from the South. Your grandfather drove people to work during the Montgomery bus boycott so folks would have an alternative means of transportation. Rosa Parks and Dr. King and others important to the movement were family friends. In your youth, your family moved from place to place but you were primarily raised in Minneapolis, MN. Recently you moved to Ithaca, NY. And right now, you’re in Rome. Every time when I’m out of the US it’s a mental holiday for me from some form of white supremacy. Because it’s a way to avoid interacting with institutions, dealing with having to continuously face history. Our history.
The ‘dream’ in the name of your practice and its relationship to Civil Rights and MLK: was that a conscious choice?
Newsom: We did not think about that at all. The name was literally uttered by our then almost-two-year-old son one morning after a night of dreaming about farm equipment while we were in upstate NY, moving away from Brooklyn. The doubled meanings, odd language, and expansiveness of it just stuck, and we named our practice after his statement a few months later.
Garcia: But there is a constant migration taking place. We can link this to reparations not having taken place, and the inherent violence that forces migration. There are some traumatic experiences that result from having to move around because history forces you to. Because the history of white supremacy and whiteness as an institution is central to the settler-colonial history of the United States.
How do you think about your own physical mobility? I’m kind of interested in how you understand the map of your family’s journey. Can you speak to that?
Newsom: When George Floyd was murdered and all the protests became more inflamed, I reached out to my mom and I was like, “How am I gonna get through this with these kids?” I remember having to translate the brutality and the complexity of the resulting emotions to our kids, even as I had absolutely no answers. I mentioned to them that “the person who probably best understands how you might be feeling is your grandmother. You are about the same age she was during the bus boycott” and living in the South during a period of racial terror. The ways in which these generational traumas repeat is haunting.
Carruthers: I’ve known your mother now for almost twenty years. She does not say very much about that time. One story I do know is that she would wake up very early as her dad set off to drive others to work during the boycott, which lasted over a year. She would get up early to see him off, not knowing if he would come back. It was a dangerous undertaking.
Newsom: It’s compelling that you pick up on the forced migration, Cruz, because it happens at different scales. There’s this sort of close movement, like the actual negotiation of my own body in these contexts. There was the boycott, with careful planning about transportation flows and circulation through the city—the reality of how a massive protest like that would actually manifest. These themes emerge in more intimate moments too. My mom told me how she used to crawl through the window to sit on the roof with my grandfather (who was a physics professor) and talk about constellations, the movement of the planets, and things. A space for dreaming which is a kind of movement away from the present. So, I mean, there’s all this overlapping imagery of portals and movement and transit at various scales. Plus the larger migrations stemming from experiencing something fucked up. Like, now we can’t have these kids here.
During Jim Crow, my uncle was sent to Connecticut for high school. He was taken in by some white family, and graduated from Greenwich High School in Greenwich Connecticut, because he was sent away by his own family to flee racial violence and an apartheid state. My mom and my aunt went to the Allen School, which was a prominent Black boarding school in North Carolina (Nina Simone was an alumna). It’s about going to “better” schools for opportunities, sure, but also about what my mom has described as a “movement from harm.” There is this stream of violence that forces movement of the body, a physical disaggregation of family. It happened on the other side of my family too. My dad was born in Cairo, Illinois, which is the southernmost part of Illinois, but then they moved to Minneapolis when he was six, you know?
The safety of home is an ever-moving refuge. Where it intersects with the outside, doors, windows, etc., can be a space of wonder, like looking out the window at the stars or my mom hearing music from the little juke joint across the street, but these portals can also be another way in which violence intrudes on the family home. One of the other stories my mom has told me is about when the windows to her bedroom got blown in while she and my aunt were sleeping. They woke up as glass was flying over them.
McEwen: It was a bomb?
Newsom: Yes.
McEwen: You think it was a bomb?
Newsom: It was a bomb. That’s what she said. The windows got blown in from the impact of something exploding outside. Ralph Abernathy lived down the street and a bomb went off in his front yard. Because the house next to my grandmother’s was only one story and ours was two, the upstairs windows got blown in. That’s where my mother slept as a little girl.
McEwen: I think it’s really important. I think in a way you’re talking about the aftermath of a violence, kind of echoing violence. Hearing the story that you tell about the window and the shattering glass, I think of Angela Davis and her autobiography. She talks about also being from Alabama and being friends with, and the same age as, the girls who were killed in the Birmingham church bombing by white supremacists. And that constitutes a core part of her being. It also makes me think about the way that we even allow such violence to become underlying and textual, like our resistance to making it a part of what can be printed.
I think it’s important to connect this somehow to the counter utopia, counter repair. This movement through the country that you’re describing is kind of an internal refugee situation.
Newsom: An internal refugee situation is a good way of framing it.
Garcia: I have to say, I have to defend utopia here. Because I feel like utopia is attacked because we gave the right to utopia to white supremacy. I believe that revolutionary emancipation, Pan-Africanism, anticolonialism are utopias too. So I decided to refuse to give utopia away.
Carruthers: Maybe to go back for a moment. Our son is nine years old, our daughter is six. These are our memories. The night that George Floyd was murdered was a panicked moment as parents. We talked with our kids about what was going on. That evening, we took the car with our two kids and blocked Highway 55 so protesters could get from where George Floyd was killed to the third precinct police station. So again, thinking about this movement through the spaces of the city and how it intersects with protest, whether it is a bus boycott, a march, or something more organically formed out of the tragedy of a moment. There was something important about blocking a space of mobility or creating a space for counterflow movement so that you got these kinds of islands.
And the window returns as an actor. Our son gave this long Black power salute to protesters walking down the highway through the car window. He wasn’t outside with them, but he shared something with them across the glass.
Newsom: It’s interesting you mentioned the window in the car because I felt like that was a moment of some sort of transformation for the kids; like, they know, fundamentally—and stand in solidarity with others—that what happened was wrong.
When we told them about the murder, they burst into tears. They were like: how? why? The police didn’t even know this person. Why, why would you ever treat another human being like that? But by going out, and seeing other people and looking through the window (because they were little and we didn’t want to get out of the car with them), they could see other people were similarly moved. Those folks needed to be out and be present and move with their bodies in the street, unmediated.
Carruthers: Yeah. The window became an immediate zone of interaction, a plane of communication. It’s not like their teacher in school, telling them about what happened. It’s not like they live in the suburbs and they’re hearing about it through the news media which was, as we know, a complicated space. They had a direct relationship.
In many ways, my hope was that the move to Ithaca was a form of healing. I asked our son,” How are you feeling about living here?” about six weeks into being in our new home. And he was like, “yeah, I like it. Here, I am more of an outside kid that likes nature.” Then, pausing for a second, he says, “plus there’s not all the killing.” That was hard to hear and it is also hard to deeply know that he is still in a space of precarity regarding his safety as a multiracial boy.
Garcia: I would like to bring up Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s essay “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” I would add that reparations are not a metaphor either. And what is really important for me about this conversation is your generosity of sharing these memories that I’m sure are painful and traumatizing.
There’s something sensationalist about making spectacle about the image of suffering without acknowledging the actual damage done to the people producing the work. And some people are burdened to have to go through these traumatizing experiences and on top of that have to move away from family to be able to do their work and have a normal life.
It’s something that may be worth emphasizing: that there are many layers to the experience that go behind what seems to be architectural production, or artistic production. And there’s something that is really embedded in life that is also architectural, because all of these experiences of disparities take place in cities and towns. As we talk about mobility, we already mentioned Alabama, Minneapolis and Connecticut. What was the other one? I’m missing one.
Newsom: I mean, it’s hilarious. Where my dad was born is spelled like Cairo in Egypt, but it’s in Illinois. We’ve mentioned just some of the places I/we’ve lived: Brooklyn, Minneapolis, Ithaca, Vancouver, Canada.
Garcia: On one hand there are the obvious maps of violence at the city scale, like redlining, and so on, but then there’s another scale that asks where can a Black child go and be safe?
Newsom: Where can you go?
Garcia: And then it becomes this humongous map, the redlining map or the plantation map. It’s so beyond the scale of anything shown that it’s difficult to comprehend. And that’s only part of the footprint. There’s another part that is the history of the land grab, labor and land dispossession, and the violence that ensues.
McEwen: Is it possible to think that that is where reparations happen? The repair cannot reconstitute something that is broken, something that has actually been working purposefully to break people, but is that estrangement from home. We had a conversation with Rasheedah Phillips from Black Quantum Futurism, and the most revolutionary thing that she ended up talking about, after all this quantum time, was housing: housing as a place for communal imagining. It strikes me that this estrangement from home resonates with this quantum need for housing as thinking space.
Newsom: Yes. I love that. There is a part of me that’s always longing to be the person who can stay in one place. I moved around every three years as a kid. My dad wasn’t in the military, but we just moved for different opportunities, for a different life, for safety, for whatever it was.
And part of me is like, oh god, I really want to be in one place. Our most recent five years in Minneapolis was the longest I’ve lived in one house ever. So yeah, I think that’s very provocative to think about an estrangement from home.
McEwen: Can we use that to talk about the images?
The images that follow were taken by Dream The Combine in Minneapolis during the summers of 2020 and 2022. Most are within their then-neighborhood, about a ten-minute walk from their home.
Newsom: I think the images are actually quite cynical. When you look at this image of the Autozone, the second image where it’s all pristine, one might think that was the before image. That the burn was after; but the chronology is actually reversed.
Tom and I have talked at length about this failure of imagination, a profound failure to imagine a different way forward. These images just keep getting reproduced. As if the city couldn’t think of anything better to do there after the protest. Yeah, okay, you improved the Autozone by moving the building closer to the street edge and putting a little landscaping here and there, and it is probably better in terms of accessibility, but it’s still something that is a continual echo. It’s just repeating itself over and over and reproducing capital, reproducing this same image.
Carruthers: But, crucially, there’s no acknowledgement of what happened. You know, at least nearby. There is an obliteration of memory here through the reproduction of these forms. They are like memes.
McEwen: Can you explain when you talk about the gas things—what were those? What was happening?
Carruthers: To answer that, it helps me to change some of the framing of the conversation, because this aftermath we are dealing with was first mediated by Darnella Frazier, the person who recorded the murder of George Floyd. She is a person of incredible bravery and a victim, as a bystander, of racial terror. Her footage led to an expanded social movement, but ultimately, she was a regular person with a phone camera. We have to hold space for her and recognize her bravery and the incredible toll this must be taking on her. The expansion, appropriation, and misinterpretation of video footage during this time makes it very difficult to talk about images like they are stable. Assumptions had a sedimentary way of coming together. From my perspective, the cops were the ones rioting. We need acknowledgment of how violent what was normal is considered to be.
When we were out in the protests, there were a number of actors. Yet the complexity of those actors in those spaces, in front of the third precinct and elsewhere, got narrowed quite considerably in the media. There were protesters on Lake Street.
Newsom: Yes, and at the same time, they were handing out water and making sure that people were hydrated.
Carruthers: So there’s two or three mutual aid stations right there. And then, within the group, there are two or three people who are just quietly managing and looking out for the safety of those gathered. They’re looking out for the fuckers that have plywood or other barriers who are inching forward on the street towards the cops. They aren’t protesters operating from a viewpoint of anger tempered by care, but instead they are antagonists. And at the same time, there are other people, caretakers with brooms and other found objects sweeping the flash-bangs and detritus from the police away from the protesters who are peaceful. There were many different roles.
Newsom: And then there were also dudes just walking around completely covered up so you couldn’t tell who they were: you see the wake of their actions in the burned Autozone image in particular. Later, a video surfaced of the person who first vandalized this building. He was a white man, casually smashing the windows while people around him were telling him to stop, saying “what are you doing?”
Garcia: It was probably a cop, undercover.
Newsom: Just like agitating shit, right? Trying to just incite something to be blamed on whom? Because the media was very quick to blame certain people for certain things.
Carruthers: He’s wearing a pair of black paramilitary fatigues while he’s doing this. When you look at why Minneapolis is burning, you have to look at the dispersion of violence that took place. There is a gas station near where we would get laser cutting done for our installations. They have it on camera that three cars show up and set that place on fire, which is a ten-minute drive from the third precinct. It’s not even the same neighborhood.
Newsom: It was the same thing with another gas station near our neighborhood. Someone set it on fire and then drove off. Same thing with our post office. Our library, too. It was this epic triangulation of hitting all these points in order to disperse any services: firefighters having to go to all of these different places.
Carruthers: Neither the city nor the state had a clue about what to do during a mass protest.
And people were already forcibly out of work due to the pandemic. These escalations and distractions created an imposed misery that was blamed on the people who are immiserated. The firefighters will not go out and attend a fire because they don’t have the support from the police who are rioting against the people who are protesting. Plus, other groups of police are out protecting the house of the man that murdered Mr. Floyd. And that made people even angrier. And they want to know why the city is burning. People were trying to use the fact of protests and pin it on that, but there were so many larger issues, competing aims that are troublesome to unpack.
This is coming out of me like a flood. I wish I could approach this like I would an academic subject. I don’t have a single story, or a single presentable analysis, but instead I am aware, because I saw and lived evidence of it, that there were many relationships playing within the larger field.
Newsom: Part of the way images work, too, is that you don’t get to see all of those different things that are at play. They get sublimated into an image somehow. For example, the image of the woman and the kid walking in front of the burned out Autozone could be about protest and agitation and vandalism, but there’s something also very quotidian about what’s happening in the photograph, as if she’s thinking, “I need to get to the bus and my kid is tugging on my shirt.”
Carruthers: You know, talking about the two Autozone photographs makes me think we could talk further about how Rome is now also in—perhaps not to the same degree—but it is in a space of protest. It is now certainly in a degree of active protest.
McEwen: Because of Meloni?
Newsom: Yeah, exactly. To Cruz’s earlier point of Rome being viewed as some sort of respite—that’s really not the case.
Carruthers: So the last head of the Communist party in Italy—before he was imprisoned by the fascists—was Antonio Gramsci. I’ve been using some of the time I have to go to the library here at the American Academy to read his Prison Notebooks. He has this one passage, “how is it possible to consider the present, and quite specific present, with a mode of thought elaborated for a past which is often remote and superseded?”
Maybe we can’t ever leave Minneapolis, but the Minneapolis we’re carrying with us is of a certain fidelity and is from a certain time. It’s a place we remember with respect to what we see after, after we have moved away but are returning to look for a point of comparison. What are the lasting acts of the imagination? The pictures show a mode of thought that feels asynchronous to the time. We are out of time somehow.
Newsom: But I don’t know if we actually answered your question.
McEwen: I think you did. I asked about those images and for you to explain those gasoline things.
Carruthers: Well, the gasoline was an inflammatory distraction. I guess it was a long answer or a non-answer.
McEwen: No, I think that was perfect. The field often talks about spatial violence as if the abstraction may be distinct from the violence in space. As if there’s a mode of spatial violence that exists at just the level of teaching an all-white syllabus with only European architects on it. Or teaching tabula rasa. Yes, that’s a mode of spatial violence.
The field speaks often as if, separate from those issues, there is lived experience or embodied reality, where violence never relates to architecture. I think part of what we have been discussing is the relationship between thinking in space and feeling in space. Reparations requires reimaging space in the midst of ongoing violence, in the midst of echoed ongoing violence. There’s no distinction between the abstract and the embodied in that. In the way that you are able to constitute these photographs, the pairings of the images become rather cynical. But then, they invite us to try to position ourselves where this cynicism is—how is this being reproduced? They stage an uncertainty: which is before and which is after?
Newsom: Yes, that’s true, as I said before. And they ask also, where do we see ourselves? You have to think about that when you see “Burn it again” written on that brick wall. That image is of the facade of a US Bank branch. The building was burned down, or actually it was completely destroyed on the inside, but the shell of it is still standing.
Someone tried to clean up the statement written on the brick. They carefully repainted over the brick and it became a palimpsest, a multi-layered image on a very thin surface. You could ask, well, where am I in these layers?
When I look at these images, it seems like time is reversed. As if one should have come before the other, but they’re actually not that way. It can make you ask “What is the future that I need to try and imagine in response to the cyclical nature of this kind of recapitulation of the same story?” It suggests that we must take some sort of position in time and in space relative to these things.
McEwen: And I think that’s a question for architecture. In that way, they’re not images of architecture, they are images that invite or accuse.
Garcia: All these images are also how architecture usually operates. When we talk about reparations, an initial response might be “Oh, let’s bring it back like nothing happened, let’s put paint down and erase history.” It’s a very violent infrastructure, this kind of engagement with actual history, it raises the problems of the frictions that the damage has caused.
If the station is fixed after the event, it looks like it was before. But this can be read as a challenge: “How dare you question our state? Our presence? This is private property.” The US is an institution that protects capitalism, an institution that protects what the nation-state stands for. So that is the construction and the protection of that property. And that is architecture as an act.
Newsom: This is precisely what the image of the Huntington bank is doing. It’s a bank by a different name, but it’s basically the same damn thing. It’s replicating with such a dominant force, just reproducing itself over and over and over again. How do you turn that image on itself? That is in some way what our installations are trying to do, to turn that image back on itself, to call our attention to its recursion, and to make a space outside for something else to happen.
And so, I have to return here to the first part of the conversation. I do think dreaming is actually very important, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, because without some sort of imagination we’re not going to find some other way out of what is represented here.
McEwen: Thank you so much. And thank you for being open and vulnerable.
Carruthers: On a tangent, MIT’s Technology Review reported in March 2022 that millions of dollars of federal and state money has been spent on continued surveillance of protesters exercising their First Amendment rights. They are keeping tabs on people who aren’t suspected of any wrongdoing.
McEwen: What?! And not the paramilitary actors who were placing the gasoline tanks?
Garcia: No, of course not.
Carruthers: This is why the images are really important, because that’s twenty-five million dollars that could have been put towards housing, to your point, Cruz and Mitch. You brought up housing, there’s utopia’s ghost right there.