Intentional Community or Conceptual Art Piece?

“social practice and relational work is about what it means to be human”
Carol Zou

Social practice is a term that I use almost everyday. It’s also one that my parents probably don’t completely understand (yet!). So talking with other people who work in deep relationship with others, whose work is about understanding and uncovering the ways we live together, is a refreshing change. 

I was lucky enough to talk with Carol Zou, a self-described cultural practitioner living in Los Angeles, to talk about their work and understanding of social practice and how to move in crushing times. We spoke in October of 2024, before Trump and a temporary ceasefire in Gaza, but a lot of what we discussed still resonated deeply with me when I went back to it. Even now, we need time for imagined worlds and—more importantly—spas. 

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Carol Zou: Thanks for reaching out. The PSU program has always been kind of a sister program to where I did my MFA.  It’s nice to see that it’s still going.

Lou Blumberg: Yeah thanks for agreeing to be interviewed! Something I remember from your “Crafting the Social” article, which is how I found out about your work –

Carol: That’s so weird and silly. I literally don’t anticipate anyone reading my master’s thesis.

Lou: I won’t hold you to it because I know grad school can feel like another world! But I think you said something about how social practice is the term that describes what so many people, often people who hold oppressed identities, have been doing already to support each other and create communities of care. I wonder if you still feel that way or how you might elaborate on that.

Carol: I think this does relate to my thoughts on the institutionalization of social practice, and I feel like all radical practices, like abolition, right? Creative or not, I think there is this tension between what is legible and what is not legible. I think social practice is really just a term that makes that legible. 

And I feel like, in some ways, there’s a need to create that legibility–I support social practice programs. I support field building. I support meeting other social practitioners. I think there’s value in legibility, but you just have to acknowledge that tension of legibility.

Lou: I was excited to hear you talk more about one of your current projects around spas with Queer Spa Network. I think a lot of your projects have an ethic of care in them, which is something I think a lot about in my own practice. I would love to hear you talk more about how that project is going, how it started, and how you’re thinking about it.

Carol: The spa project started because I was recovering from PTSD. That shit is real. I was working with refugees and an unhoused refugee died in one of our art spaces, which was really intense. The week after I just laid in a warm bath and ate weed gummies. The somatic is very present when we’re thinking about trauma. That’s where my interest started, but of course, spas are also a space of pleasure, pleasure activism, and all that.

I think it was nice that I could find a space to heal, but also share pleasure with others. It first began by collaborating with Carrie Marie Schneider on our love of spas, and now it’s morphed into Queer Spa Network, which has about six core group members thinking through topics centered around care, disability, and potential values-aligned public projects. 

What I really appreciate is that we have astrong disability justice ethic within our group and everyone holds that, not just me. I really feel it in the way that we move—we move very slowly. We meet once a month. We’re not perfect. We’re not trying to operate at the pace of capitalism. Sometimes we just do internal culture-building stuff like pooling funds to rent out a swimming pool and sitting in a hot tub together.

I feel like this undoes some of my personal urgencies around art making. Because I feel like, in the art world, I’m like, “I have a CV. I gotta produce X amount of stuff per year. If I’m in a collective I’m still producing. What’s the artwork? What’s the output? What’s the blah, blah, blah.”  The ethos of this group allows us to just slow down and internally build with each other.  It feels like intentional community as much as it does a conceptual art piece.

Lou: I really appreciate that notion of slowing down and moving at the speed that makes the most sense for everyone in the collective. I see that in and of itself as a social practice: the way that you work together besides just the thing that you’re creating.

Carol: It’s felt like a good organism. Being within Queer Spa Network feels the way my body does when I’m in a spa, like I’m just slowly moving and relaxed. Because there’s this contradiction, right? I feel it too, as a social practice artist, I have a huge output, actually. And I’m very used to, like, output, output, output. So this has been a learning for me in terms of a different way of working that is a lot more aligned with values of care and healing.

Lou: That relates to another thing I wanted to ask you about. You describe yourself in your CV as a reproductive laborer. I’d love to hear you talk more about that and what reproduction means to you and what labor in that sense means.

Carol: I am very influenced by the work of Merle Lederman Ukeles, as well as Silvia Federici, the feminist economist. Once again, it’s that tension between production and output seen in the logic of capitalism, which tells us to always be producing something new, something visible. And of course, Ukeles famously questions this by saying, “actually, what if our work is cleaning? What if our work is actually the maintenance of the everyday, which is actually what leads to reproduction?” 

Federici builds upon this by talking about the work of women in social reproduction and saying, well, the reason that men are able to be in the workforce is because women are doing the social reproduction work, they’re doing the child care that allows us to grow up and enter into the workforce.

I also build upon both Ukele’s and Federici’s work by thinking about queer social reproduction. To add gender diverse folks to feminist analysis, I think there’s a lot of queer ways in which we maintain the social fabric. One of my favorite roles is being an auntie. One of my favorite roles is being part of the village. I feel like within our modern social structures, we have to have these other reproductive roles because the nuclear family has in a way failed us. We have teachers who are doing so much care work. We have social workers, right? They are also part of the reproductive fabric as much as “actual” caregivers and mothers are. 

Lou: I love being able to break apart the notion of the nuclear family as the central unit because that’s not how we actually exist as a species or as a community of people.

Carol: Also, the nuclear family is a structure that was encouraged by capitalism.

Lou: So much of your work seems to work towards bringing the world that we want into the now. I want to make work that not only speaks to oppressive conditions, but actually kind of tries to intervene on them. I wonder if that’s important to you, or if that’s too high a bar and instead the important part is the beauty of what imagination and speculation can do. 

Carol: I think about Deepa Iyer’s graphic where she lays out the different social change roles that we play. Some of us are disruptors, some of us are visionaries, some of us are builders and weavers. I think it’s important to hold that there are a variety of change strategies out there, and it’s okay to respect people who choose a different change strategy from you, right? I think my personal change strategy is that I am a builder and I am a weaver. So I like connecting people, I like building networks. I also believe that it’s important to build institutions, or rather, build social organisms larger than the individual. And of course, this does not discount the value of any of the other social roles, right?

Lou: I think something that is constantly on my mind when thinking about our roles in social change is how this year of witnessing a live-streamed genocide has impacted us all. I’m sure it’s on your mind too, especially with a lens of disability justice, which you already talked about. I wonder what this last year has meant for you or if it’s changed anything for you and your practice.

Carol: Yeah, that is a really big question. I circle back, once again, to the limits of legibility. It’s like, do I need to be making an art project right now? Or do I just need to be donating to GoFundMes? And I don’t need to say, hey, I donated to GoFundMes and now it’s social practice, right? At some point as a social practitioner, you need to know when to stop doing social practice. Responding to the moment right now, none of it has to be legible within this professionalized field.

Something that I have been thinking about a lot is what witnessing a genocide and being complicit in committing a genocide with our tax dollars does to our understanding of what it means to be human. Because in a sense, I think that’s how the Holocaust is narrated. Like, how could this ever be humanly possible, this extreme atrocity? And of course, we’re seeing this extreme atrocity happen before our eyes right now. I think something I also return to is that social practice and relational work is about what it means to be human. It’s very much about people, it’s very much about how we engage with people, it’s very much about our ethics around relating to each other. I feel like there’s just been a really great unsettling of the foundations of what it means to be human, which is also connected to the extreme dehumanization of Palestinians, which is used to justify their genocide.

Lou: I appreciate that. Sometimes I feel like we are becoming so much less human by witnessing this violence. It’s a hard place to be because if I don’t look at this, I’m not human, because I’m not connecting it to people who are suffering on an empathetic level, but if I do look at this, that vicarious trauma is changing me and normalizing this violence. 

Carol: Yeah. I think it’s a very strange time for social practice because we are obviously also seeing the limitations of art institutions, in terms of silencing folks who support Palestine even as they espouse radical politics. I think this past year has made me question a lot about what kind of art I make, or question what question needs to be asked right now.

Lou: Thanks for sharing. One other thing I wanted to ask you about is your writing practice. You’re such a prolific writer – I was enjoying reading a lot of your work in preparation for talking to you. I wonder how you think of your artistic and your writing practice together. What does the label “writer” do for you versus artist, and how do those two inform each other?

Carol: I think writing is a more introspective practice.  Sometimes it can be difficult for me as someone who’s so used to dialogic or relational practice. I also feel like that is a tension I have as a social practitioner. Sometimes I’m extremely social. And then other times I need to retreat into my own world.

It’s also that negotiation of self and community, which I think we’re always negotiating. I think field building is important. I think creating mirrors for people to see each other is important. And I think that as social practitioners it’s actually really hard sometimes to see mirrors for ourselves. I get really excited when I meet other artists working in the same way, because there’s that moment of recognition. What I try to do with my writing is to field build and try to provide moments of recognition for the situations we found ourselves in. Once again, I’m shocked when people read stuff I’ve written. I’m genuinely shocked. 

So what are you investigating? What are you up to? What’s exciting for you?

Lou: I’m thinking a lot about security and safety and what that means. Right now I’m doing a deep dive into Portland’s private security industry. Because there are so many private security guards here, more than any other place that I’ve ever been to, and I was super struck by that. Something I’ve been thinking about also in such a relational field is how to hold my own politics and belief in an abolitionist vision of safety while speaking with people who are engaged in something I see as the opposite of that, but who are human beings with their own life stories.

So that’s been a really insightful investigation for me, giving me a chance to feel through my own politics in that relational way. So yeah, that’s what this year is looking like so far for me.

Carol: That sounds like a really worthwhile and meaty thing to investigate, especially with Portland’s race relations and history as a sundown town, right?  I mean, in L.A., the security guards are primarily people of color. I don’t know if that’s the case in Portland.

Lou: It seems like that in Portland, too, from what I’ve seen.

Carol: So then there’s also like a class and race intersection, right? People who are forced to take these jobs and maybe thinking, “what are my personal politics vis a vis my material reality?”

Lou: Yeah, and I know we all value safety, even if that might mean different things to us.

Carol: I’m also curious, what is the premise? Because, I mean, the question is safety for whom? I’m curious about the origins, even, of the words security and safety, right?

Lou: Oh, this is super juicy. Well, thank you for being willing to chat! There’s so much rich stuff to think about. Thanks for that.

Carol: Yeah, of course. Take care.

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Carol Zou (b. 1988, Hepu, China) is a U.S. based community-engaged artist whose work engages themes of spatial justice, public pedagogy, and intercultural connection in multiracial neighborhoods. They engage durational, process-based collaborations with community contributors using mediums of craft, media arts, and public installation. As a counterpoint to their collaborative work, their writing and conceptual works interrogate questions of conflict and antagonism constitutive of the public sphere. Their style of multi-sector collaboration gestures to an interdisciplinary, liberatory future in which we are all hopefully a little more undisciplined.

Lou Blumberg is an artist, educator, and facilitator interested in how we make our lives more liveable. They use facilitation and mediation skills built over ten years as a sex educator and organizer to find ways to be together that strengthen our connection to each other and our capacity for conflict. Their practice stems from a belief in the connective and humanizing power of vulnerability, especially the vulnerability of trying things we aren’t perfect at. They are also a community mediator.