What is a welcoming day?

for Ariel René Jackson

Cindy Elizabeth was born in an Austin hospital that no longer exists. She has always been in Austin, except for when she cleared out to college.                    Through interviews, Jackson gives a sense of Austin’s Black community: the housing eventualities of Black families, beginning with buying homes within a community, trying to start their lives.                       The history of environmental racism is the history of being rejected, shunted, not just as a body, but as a community.                      “What would you say to newcomers?”                    A note on speaking: it’s tough to know how to frame knowledge meant for ears and eyes that haven’t experienced what you have. How could you know what you’ve experienced anyway?             
                Suspecting what is different about my life versus someone else’s life, wishing to make sense of that difference in any way a young mind can. That early making-sense of my environment becomes how I make sense of all of the environments, of all over the place, the world’s geography.                   The making of a model citizen of a public, a place.                  I appreciate Jackson’s gaze, peering from behind the city’s model. Ariel René Jackson makes the model of Austin we see fully formed.                   Many people who have been in Austin for their entire existences, plus a couple of people who are fresher transplants. As we discover Austin from their perspectives. Another man, been twenty years in Austin. “Why did you decide to stay?” Businesses change, weather changes; larger systems-level tendencies stay the same, like environmental racism, which has hurt the property values. A chronicle of gentrification that is familiar to Black people across the nation. A familiarity impossible to describe decently.                       Can we agree on what change is? Can we change our own community and the way our community is judged by the government, the encircling culture? How does a welcoming place seem like? To be welcomed as a somebody or a community? (A cluster hire of 100 Black workers.) What does it mean to be holding as a place, to become even more welcoming over the years? “How have things changed?”                        What does it signify to grow up in a space, to have every experience of life linked back to the same topography? A place keeps both good and bad memory. If you spend all your life in that place, it holds legacies in-between good and bad, too.                          “Tell me a good memory.” We might think of the overlapping of archival images as a responsibility to get up into the body’s senses.                          I appreciate the languaging of the video, which seems to linger in the vocabulary of meme culture: a finite experience made to fractal outwards, expand, rotate. The dancing image-spheres moving across the video screen. Black people shown running around a prison yard, perhaps, or playing baseball, a meteorological office. A sculptural, meteorological contraption we may as yet understand, or ever understand, but were we to study it further, we might.  What is a welcoming day?                            Weather balloons signal a climatological process: trying to find out what welcomes us. We see the artist engaged in technological study. Various large gauges for surveilling life, for gathering particulars; a rotating satellite aimed at the sky. Monitoring the sky and other cosmic bodies, projecting astrally and onto someone else’s life. A balloon sent up into the sky with scientific intentions. The balloon bears on up into the sky. A position, an aerial position, that might observe all of these Austinite lives erupting. Then, the balloon is sucked back to the ground, like a kite retracted.                             It’s profound to have hope, says one interview subject, not to fall perfectly into cynicism. The community’s cynicism as to whether protesting leads to the sense of life being better than it was before.                            The economy and the environment in a feedback loop of dereliction. Violences that are physical, intellectual, emotional. The social relations we experienced in school, formative, as what happened at home. The police’s presence within the school, so that nowhere was out of danger. Long, early childhood ghosts of schools and schooling, involving desegregation and being a Black student in a bitter environment.                               “What does a welcoming place look like?” Like a lack of money for infrastructure?