THE DVAA BLOG

Practicing Imperfect Sustainability

A Volunteer Spotlight Q&A with Lara Bros

by Sara Mae Henke

This past April, we held our 2024 Everyday Futures Fest. This month-long sustainability festival would not have happened without an incredibly hardworking team of volunteers. We wanted to spotlight one of our great volunteers (and DVAA members!) who made the EFF possible. Meet Lara Bros!

SM: You're an artist member with Da Vinci, do you feel like your practice is intertwined with community involvement?

LB: I think it has to be. Art is always political, and mine especially is - I carry many politicized identities, I'm queer, I present very femme, I support queer and trans folks to ensure they have reproductive autonomy. I think that part of being an artist and sharing your work with the community is to open it up to people projecting their own experiences onto your work and using it as a tool for their own interpretation. My current practice in collage relies on found media, on finding the beauty or artwork in materials that are discarded or not typically seen as art. I think my whole practice is a love letter to my community, especially with my current tarot card project. I am finding what is sacred in my own community, in the people who are alive with me right now, and honoring them. 

SM: What have you done for this festival as a volunteer? And what did you enjoy about the experience?

LB: I flyered a bit around Philly, and volunteered at the block party and for the t-shirt tote bag workshop with South Philly Yarn & Craft! I loved the workshop - being in that space gave me motivation to work on my textile based projects, and meeting folks who work with the same mediums is always wonderful. 

SM: How would you describe the DVAA community?

LB: I haven't been a member of DVAA very long, but I have to say it's been particularly reaffirming as an artist. In the past few years, I've been feeling a lot of creative burnout under capitalism, and it's been difficult to work on my practice and make things that I am really proud of or that I feel are connected to what I really want to be providing commentary about. Really quickly after joining, I was asked to participate in two shows and was kind of surprised - as an artist, it takes out the hierarchical nature of showing your work, of having to "prove yourself" worthy of showing your work or feeling like you need to create pieces you don't really connect with in order to be taken seriously. Because my most used mediums are collage and textiles, which are deeply connected with feminized labor and forms of craft, I'm often hesitant with showing because the medium I use is often demeaned as "craft," and it's assumed because of the medium, I have nothing interesting to say with my work. My experience has been that DVAA, particularly the staff, have been very welcoming and supportive, and I feel like that's given me space to create pieces that I genuinely love and know they will be taken at face value. 

SM: You had a particularly thoughtful response to what sustainability means to you when I asked for the volunteer training! Are there any of those thoughts you'd like to share here, to give people a sense of how to approach or think about the larger sustainability festival, Everyday Futures Fest?

LB: lol yes. I shared that I grew up poor, and by nature of that, you're kind of forced to be sustainable - to use everything to the last drop, to reuse things and mend things again and again. I'm a tiny bit more stable now than I was growing up, but I keep those same ideas close. It's important to me to not take the material objects we have for granted - they all "cost" something to make (and often cost our earth something to make). I think that by practicing imperfect sustainability by using what I have and seeking alternatives (like thrifting cookware or dishes and clothing), I'm more connected with the larger natural world around me, and I'm honoring it by taking no more than what I need. Even if it's imperfect, doing things like making your own recycled paper or learning some sewing skills (huge gamechanger, honestly, when you can tailor your own clothes!), do make a difference, even if it's just in your life, and it fosters a larger sense of community collaboration. We are going to take care of each other, even if it just means I'm passing the same glass tupperware back and forth between friends every time we share a meal together. Sustainability feels so incredibly unfair sometimes, especially when the onus should be on the corporations and people who profit from them that are using and destroying much more than their share, but the individual actions of sustainability you can engage with do feel almost spiritual.

LARA BROS’ WORK IS ON VIEW NOW THROUGH SUNDAY, MAY 19, 2024 IN OUR SPRING MEMBER INVITATIONAL “ROLLING RESISTANCE”

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Sara Mae Henke (They/Them) is a genderqueer writer raised on the Chesapeake Bay. Their creative writing and research orbits around horror and the surreal as it contextualizes gender. They are a 2023 Big Ears Music Festival Scholar and 2022 Tinhouse Summer Writing Workshops alum. Recently, they were a finalist for the Loraine Williams Prize and have work forthcoming or published in Passages North, the Georgia Review, the Offing, and FENCE. They write music as The Noisy and received their MFA from UT Knoxville. They are currently an Adjunct English Professor at Drexel.