Walked in to Center Street Free Space at around 6:20. 3 Tables were connected, and there were about ten people sitting around it and two men standing up. The two men standing up would be the members of the Beehive Collective.
We started the workshop by playing a game. My friend, Leyton, told me a story where she had felt uplifted & empowered by an act she had done, while this was happening I was supposed to draw it while she didn't look. I tried to draw symbols of the words she was saying & story she was telling. Then, she did the same to for me. It was a fun exercise and it was gratifying to be able to tell a story of where I felt uplifted and felt like I had made an impact. You don't get to tell people that very often.
Then, we played another game. We had to draw what "prison-industrial complex" meant to us. We then all passed around our drawings around the table. Some drawings were completely conceptual, for instance, a stairway leading to nowhere below the ground, others had literally prisons drawn and the United States inside of it, and many, many, many others of how people interpreted the phrase.
The games were allowing us to open our minds and share with others without the unnecessary judgement or competition one many feel in a big group.
We then came together and started to brainstorm things about Milwaukee, the good things and the bad things that we could change/that bothered us about our city/movements occurring/what we were passionate about. We came up with this huge spider web model of all sorts of things including...
- police assault/ police violence
-sexual assault
- gardens
- space reclamation
- food desert
- education
- potholes
- DIY action/ DIY bike shops
- sex trafficking
- sustainability
- etc.
We then tried to connect things together because by connecting the smaller variables we would be able to unleash the smaller details we could then put on paper and possible concepts we could follow. Then, we were separated in to 3 groups. I was grouped with 4 guys I had just met we all had to interpret and conceive a drawing based off these intertwining theories and connected-ness of ideas we all had brainstormed. It was hilarious and a lot of fun. We had a running joke about HOW WE HAD TO HAVE A POTHOLE in the drawing. Finally, we put a pothole in...it was great.
The Beehive members tried to let us feel at ease and didn't shoot any of our ideas down. They were all ears and wanted us to understand that instead of saying "No, but..." we should always say, "Yes and..." because it is a much more positive way of working with other people. They were extremely laid back and extremely inspirational. I talked with a member at the end, I feel bad because I don't remember their names, but he had told me there were only about twenty members of the collective. That really blew me away because I was suspecting a bigger number and I am not sure why. But, WOW, it was a great experience and I'd like to go to more events like that more often, or just make art and share ideas more often with people rather than living a 'basic' 'mundane' life. There is so much out there to discover and so much we can do to fix things in our city, school, and each other's lives.
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