Assembly (part 1) — Utilizing a series of visualization and embodiment exercises, Assembly youth fellows invite you to challenge your preconceived notions, while developing a historical understanding of policing. By collectively imagining and learning solutions for conflict, we hope to create a community that is able to establish safety without the use of coercion, policing and violence.

joined by Shaun Leonardo and Assembly fellows, Amir Akram, Geremia Romain, Latham Butler, Darrell Santana

Assembly offers system-impacted young people, aged 18-26, an inroad to art and connections to working artists, while serving as an alternative to incarceration and its intersecting systems of oppression. Founded in 2016, Assembly is a core part of the Brooklyn-based art and community space, Recess, furthering its mission to reimagine a public for art. The curriculum of Assembly empowers young people to take charge of their own life story and envision a future through art. The program diverts both misdemeanor and felony charges and in 2020 expanded to include a peer-to-peer referral model, allowing the organization to broaden its reach. https://www.recessart.org/assembly/

(Socialise)

First broadcast on Montez Press Radio as Tongue and Cheek- Ep33: Assembly (part 1) —with Amir Akram, Geremia Romain, Latham Butler, Darrell Santana with Shaun Leonardo - Wednesday, Jan 26th, 6:00-7PM, 2022

A radio series of proprioceptive exercises, interviews about practices of communication, and archival sound. A routine for warming up our means of communication. Presented monthly as a combination of live and prerecorded sessions.

Lend me your ears!
-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works… Dorothy Parker caught eloquent examples: "'Well!' the young man said. 'Well!' she said. 'Well, here we are' he said. 'Here we are' she said, 'Aren't we?' 'I should say we were' he said, 'Eeyop! Here we are.' 'Well!' she said. 'Well!' he said, 'well.' "
-- Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics”

To reach an arm out of one’s mouth, peek through one’s ear, and speak out of one’s eye. Communication happens by any means possible. It is the different ways bodies extend themselves, as limbs that bridge things—reaching out, stretching and sometimes touching, with a light tap, “Marco!”

How we voice, how we gesture, how we manner, how we empathize.
Exercises to find all ways of thinking of language, and to exercise them as their own paths of communication.

To empathize over radio. Invite to do the same—feel, mimic, echo. “Polo”
The sound of leading, of following, of teaching speaking.
And learning to make a body of a limb.

"Tongue and Cheek" was first developed and aired on Montez Press Radio beginning in the summer of 2018. Montez Press Radio is an experimental radio station and commissioning platform for unexpected works from artists and other creative voices. MPR continues to air new episodes of Tongue and Cheek during its monthly live broadcast at 46 Canal St in Chinatown, New York.