Sofa Issues Spring 2025
When Words Hurt
Lou Blumberg in conversation with Lo Moran
“I think what people get out of these beliefs is a sense of purpose and belonging and community that are very powerful. I think the ways to counteract that would be also building spaces of belonging and community that aren’t harmful to other people.”
Lo Moran’s name has circled my social practice orbit for a while now, both as an instructor of the study abroad program in Art and Design in Berlin and Prague that I’m lucky enough to attend this summer, and as a program alumni whose work deals often in difficult conversations. Especially in this moment of political polarization, emboldened bigotry, and heightened/visibilized state violence, I was really curious how (or if!) Lo saw conversations with those who hold different or even violent viewpoints as not only an artistic interest but a way to bridging these social divides and finding ways forward. Living in Berlin, Lo’s past and current work and conversations provide crucial insight into my perennial question: can people really change their minds? And if so, how?
Lo Moran: What else have you done for SOFA so far?
Lou Blumberg: Last fall I interviewed a security guard as part of an investigation of security in Portland. We had a conversation about how he sees his role and what safety means to him, and if people are inherently good or inherently bad.
Lo: Was it something that you felt like you agreed with or were coming from a different perspective or…?
Lou: Definitely a different perspective. Something I’m struggling with is how to avoid platforming opinions that I deeply disagree with. I would love to hear your thoughts about that, and if you’ve encountered that in other forms of your work, that tension in social practice.
Lo: Yeah, I have thoughts on this. But I also kept running into a wall with that.
Lou: I’d love to hear your thoughts and your walls.
Lo: I was just talking to my friend about this last night, who’s a radio journalist, and we might work on a short radio piece together, connected to these topics about conversations across deeply different beliefs.
I have a lot of recordings with people saying things that I find pretty harmful but I was fascinated by. I was going into it not thinking very much or having any interviewing experience — just going into it very naively, I think. It’s worrying that people would listen to it and be like, “Oh, they don’t sound so bad, they sound pretty amicable and friendly.”
When I applied to the social practice program, when I started this project that later became “Difference is a Field”, I was living in Arizona. For one of my videos in my application to the program, I interviewed this street preacher guy. I was working at the University of Arizona and he was a student and had very violent rhetoric.
I was doing the part of the application that is an interview with someone about their clothing and he had these crazy shirts that he made and stuff. I made the video and it’s just him talking, I cut my parts out. I had it on YouTube. And I realized it was getting hundreds of views. There were a few comments and stuff and I realized they were from people that agree with him. I was like, “Oh, he can use this as part of propaganda—people can watch it not from the perspective that I’m watching it from, of being critical of his views.”
And I took it down. It was my first awareness of, “Oh, this material could really be used in a different way than I intended it to be.” I’ve struggled with finding ways to work with the material, which is why I ended up doing a comic that was more based on my personal experience of the conversations I was having rather than directly quoting people and stuff.
I also didn’t have any journalism ethics. I listened to an interview with a journalist who made the point that you should never take someone’s recorded interview and then comment afterwards if you don’t agree with them. Anything that you feel about what they’re saying, you have to say to their face in the moment or else it’s not fair to them because they don’t get to respond to your opinions.
I’m not a journalist, so I don’t have to follow those ethics necessarily. There’s lots of artists that I don’t think follow those ethics at all that I can think of examples of. But it made me think. In the moment, it’s so hard to formulate a response to what people are saying. I really struggle with that.
I’ve done some stuff where I was playing with conversations and because I make noise music I would play with the audio pieces, distort some of the conversations and use them more in that way.
Lou: What got you into doing those interviews in the first place?
Lo: I’m from Connecticut originally, which is very different now. My hometown feels very conservative when I go back and I think a lot of people there really like Trump, but at the time it felt like a very liberal bubble in New England. I hadn’t really been exposed to that many people with radical far right views.
In Arizona I was encountering that everywhere. It was 2014, 2015, the build up to Trump. And there were a lot of militia groups and this street preacher, those kinds of things. I was surprised and fascinated by it, also in a naive way.
I saw this guy protesting and I was like, “I have to talk to this guy.” I felt bad for him, which was also the framing of a Vice mini-documentary about him I had seen. It was like, “Oh, this guy has no friends and everybody hates him.” And I got really obsessed with the idea of, what if you just befriend people and then they learn how to be different? I think I’ve come to different conclusions now, but that was how it started.
And then I moved to Portland after that. It was 2016 and there were the anti-Trump protests, and then there started to be the pro-Trump groups that would come in and there was a lot of violence and it was directly affecting a lot of my friends.
I was in the counter protests to the Trump rallies and there was a lot of rhetoric about “we don’t talk to fascists,” which, yeah, is very understandable, and I don’t think anyone should have to ever do that. But I was like, I want to, also because my dad voted for Trump. I wondered, what is the psychology behind this. It was a kind of confusion that was the initial curiosity.
Lou: I like to use points of my own confusion or tension as starting places for things. I wonder if that can come off a little naive, but so it goes.
Lo: The right really thinks leftists are trying to censor and silence them, but it’s more that these right wing ideas are everywhere in mainstream culture, and it’s nice to have spaces where you can have alternative ideas without them being bullied and torn apart.
Lou: I would love to hear how you got into social practice as a form. I know you had a printmaking background and drawing background.
Lo: I was doing a lot of community-based work, and I’ve worked in different programs and groups especially in disability communities for the last over 10 years now. I did an AmeriCorps program after I graduated undergrad and that was living on an anthroposophical farm.
Lou: Whoa, anthroposophical? What is that?
Lo: Anthroposophy, it actually started in Germany. It’s very much like a cult and mixes a lot of things with Christianity. This guy, Rudolf Steiner, who also did Waldorf schools, he was working with Goethe and stuff and was more in the philosophy realm.
And then he had a vision of Jesus and got into very esoteric versions of Christianity, but he invented this version of farming, and a lot of ideas about society, and got a lot of followers, and there’s still these intentional communities. And I didn’t know any of this before. I just was like, yeah, I want to teach art on a farm, what is this? It was in upstate New York. There was some stuff I was like, I don’t know if I agree with this.
I’m not religious, maybe spiritual or something, but Joseph Beuys was very influenced by Rudolf Steiner, in social sculpture. There were a lot of really beautiful rituals that were used in everyday life and in the farming. I found the philosophies and approach really interesting, and something I’d never really encountered before.
I had studied illustration but was always more interested in conceptual art. That experience really made me think about the art in everyday life and how those things can come together more, and how people can value each other in different ways. It was just really different than anything I’d ever done.
And then I went on, I moved to Tucson. I worked for another program that was the opposite, not very respectful of people. But then I started getting involved in forming a community print shop there. It made me think of how I really loved the social aspect of art making, making events and making a space together and working collectively. It made me realize that I was into those kinds of things just as much as making prints or something.
I went with my friend who was applying to UC Berkeley—we were on a road trip and I was like, I’m going to go look at something too. It was a different school that had a social practice program and I’d never heard of the term social practice before. They explained it and I was like, whoa, this is something you can study. And then I applied to pretty much all the social practice programs. I hated Portland at first. But then I ended up staying there for six years.
Lou: What did you hate about it when you got here?
Lo: Tucson was just really down to earth. I was doing a bit of border activism stuff, and the place just felt very real and in many ways very open. I remember I was about to move to Portland, and I watched Portlandia, and then I cried.
Lou: Oh, no! And what sort of stuff are you working on these days?
Lo: I’m figuring that out right now. In the fall last year I worked on a big, pretty socially engaged project that we started in May, and then the exhibition was in October. It was with this group called Sickness Affinity Group, and we created experiential workshops that we did together, and archived it in a piece called Soma Archives.
It was about archiving experiences with disability in a somatic way. It was really nice to work in a collective way with people on these topics. I love archiving and got to experiment with that kind of stuff. I mentioned my friend who’s a journalist who I met with last night, who is maybe going to invite me to make a radio piece for the public radio about Difference is a Field, and they have a lot of interesting experience with that too. Here in Berlin it’s very parallel to the US—there’s a very scary threat of the far-right getting a lot of power. The elections are coming up in a few weeks, and it’s unclear what is going to be happening with that. All the parties are being very anti-immigrant. Similar to how Democrats are in the US, all the parties took a right wing turn.
Lou: What do you feel is the role in this moment of such intense political division of talking to people who have different opinions from you? What use do you think it has now? Or maybe you’ve changed your mind about that and it doesn’t have a use.
Lo. I’m not sure! I’ve thought about this a lot, yeah. And is it politically useful or just like a personal special interest that I have?
And I don’t think you can change people’s minds. I think what people get out of these beliefs is a sense of purpose and belonging and community that are very powerful. I think the ways to counteract that would be also building spaces of belonging and community that aren’t harmful to other people. I don’t think people see leftist spaces as something that they feel welcome in, which is reasonable because a lot of their ideas are not.
I think we’re at a moment where people are really asking these questions. Maybe shaming people isn’t the right strategy for building solidarity across all different demographics and actually being for working class issues.
That means maybe not policing people as heavily, and being welcoming, but then how can you do that and make sure that people feel safe if you are vulnerable? And can you actually do all of those things?
Lou: Totally.
Lo: What do you think about this? Yeah. What are your thoughts?
Lou: It’s so hard. I don’t quite know how to say this without being a total asshole, but I want people on the left also to have a larger capacity for conflict or discomfort. Because while it is absolutely a bummer and harmful when people misgender you for example, speaking from my own experience, it’s not actual violence. There’s actual violence happening in other ways, so how can we resource ourselves to respond to those moments of discomfort? And have a larger capacity on the left for people who fuck up, and for people who say they’re wrong. More resilience, more skill building around that.
Lo: Yeah. That’s a great way to put it. Like a larger capacity for conflict. I think a lot about that also. How do we do that? A lot of people whose perspectives I don’t like and who I disagree with about other things have been saying this for a long time. We need it strategically and emotionally, so people don’t take everything in and get hurt by everything for themselves.
Lou: We all need more awareness of when we need a stronger boundary vs when we might need to dive into something and get honest.
Lo: When I was working on this project everyone was like, “I don’t know how you can talk to these people and listen to the horrible stuff,” and I don’t really know either. I don’t know why I have a fascination with it instead of horror and disgust.
And I have those things too, but it’s not like the primary emotional response.
I don’t know. I don’t know why that is.
Lou: What is your somatic experience when you’re talking to people like that?
Lo: I was really nervous, like shaking, like anxiety. That’s also why I don’t think I could counter what they are saying very easily. But that’s my experience in general when I meet new people. I always have a lot of anxiety about social things. It was like that, but just more extreme.
There was a professor at PSU that has since quit that was hosting these far right events. Peter Boghossian was his name. He was a philosophy professor—he’s like my nemesis. He was introduced to me as someone who is trying to do the same kind of project that I’m like doing, but I’ve tried to reach out to him so many times and he’s never responded. I would love to have a conversation with him. He doesn’t actually want to have conversations with people. He was like, “I want someone in the women’s studies department to debate me,” and, saying things like Black and Indigenous Studies programs shouldn’t exist. Just all this really offensive stuff.
I went to this event my friend had told me about, where Boghossian was doing these debates about stuff. But then it was like all the far right internet people there. And I had never encountered a lot of the QAnon stuff, I didn’t know that there was a reactionary bubble about genders, men and women— that was the first time I encountered stuff like that. Now it’s the law of the land, but it’s grown from a stupid, internet troll conversation in 2020. It’s crazy.
A lot of these people that were involved in this event, they’ve gone on to advising policy, they’re like helping write these laws. It is a small circle of intellectual, horrible people that have so much influence and power and they know how to use media.
There’s so much more infrastructure for their media. So much more funding, dark funding. Collecting money from all sorts of scary places. But I remember after that event there were a few interactions I had that made me feel really uncomfortable, and I went and cried in my car afterwards. It was just too much.
I think I’ve become more numb, but I was very sensitive at the time. But I’m doing it anyway. And I’ve always had a fascination with transgressive stuff too. What are these lines that people hold, not that thinking that it’s good or bad, but I’m interested in dissecting it.
Yeah. What else are you working on? Or any other projects?
Lou: Yeah, I’m hosting a sing along to the droning hum of the Lloyd Center Mall’s basement, where they have some mechanical constant tone that’s between an A sharp and a B. And with my classmate Simeen, we have a pop up song circle singing resistance songs. Some musical things to balance out some of the difficult emotional things.
Lo: That’s what I do too. I got really obsessed with karaoke, So that was my like, counter. I work at a karaoke club here, it’s really crazy, and I love when people sing revolutionary songs, and at protests people sing it too.
Lou: Are you a KJ? Is that the term?
Lo: Yeah, I somehow made my obsession into a job. It’s like this giant queer club, like I’d never worked in nightlife really before, and it’s wild. So fun.
Lou: Well, I really appreciate you taking the time.
Lo: Yeah, likewise.
BIOS
Lou Blumberg is an artist, facilitator, and educator with ties to San Francisco, New Orleans, and Portland. With a belief that a better world is possible, their deeply personal practice deals with conflict and its impact on our relationships and lives; surveillance and safety; and joy in despairing times. They are part of the MFA Art and Social Practice program at Portland State University.
Lo Moran creates interdisciplinary projects that are often socially engaged, participatory and collaborative. They aim to experiment with and question the systems we are embedded in by organizing situations of connection, openness and nonhierarchical learning, working towards accessibility and reimagined ways of being together by investigating community support and belonging. They are currently working on a comics and audio series documenting personal experiences with current political and cultural divides and live action role play (LARP) projects. Lo has also been involved in creative projects within disability communities for the last nine years. They try their best to embrace fluidity and chaos to contribute to emergent futures and radical approaches.