What are our supports, amidst current conditions of environmental, social and political precarity? How do artists draw attention to the underrecognized supports — material and relational, temporary and foundational — that sustain contexts for artistic communities, gift economy, and incidental encounters in our commons, amidst the increased privatization of public life? Are there ways to re-inhabit seemingly outdated support structures to embody different futures? What is the role of practice in relation to ongoing struggle?

This anthology of 23 contributors, based on a series of artist’s projects in a downtown Vancouver park curated by Joni Low in 2018, reflects on the urgency of these questions now intensified by a global pandemic and human-induced climate crisis. Situated in Germaine Koh’s HMH: Boothy — a telephone booth-like platform and imaginative time-space portal — these projects approach art as quest and friendship as medium, manifesting a critically-engaged pleasure activism. Responding on an intimate register, they made perceptible the embodied support structures and sensorial agency that will continue to guide us through precarity: sensing otherwise, restoring Indigenous worldviews and reciprocity, habituating communal interpersonal rhythms and care, and revealing multiple dimensions of space and time towards incorporeal transformation. Additional commissioned essays, poems and re-printed texts provide critical and wider perspectives in response.

CONTRIBUTORS
Germaine Koh, Aron Louis Cohen and Russell Gordon; T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss and Emily Neufeld; S F Ho and Elisa Ferrari; DRIL Art Collective, John Brennan, Justin Patterson, and Michele Helen Mackenzie; Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Khan Lee and Francis Cruz; Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Charlene Vickers, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Alexa Solveig Mardon, Jeff Derksen, Paula Booker, Jeff O’Brien and Joni Low. With additional artworks by Debra Sparrow, Chantal Gibson and Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, and Ron Terada.

Co-edited by Joni Low and Jeff O’Brien
Designed by Information Office
Co-published by Information Office, Doryphore Curators Society, Richmond Art Gallery and Art Metropole

Shortlisted for the 2024 City of Vancouver Book Awards
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SELECTED PRESS & REVIEWS
Yani Kong, "On "What Are Our Supports?"" The Capilano Review
Yasmin Whaley-Kalaora, "What Are Our Supports?" C Magazine
‍Am Johal interviews Joni Low on Below The Radar
Charlie Smith, "From Cathedral Square Park to the world, new anthology offers creators and communities ways to respond to crises," Pancouver.