A Culture of Possibility Podcast #41: Nati Linares on Artists and the Solidarity Economy
NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 41st episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 21 June 2024. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
I first met Nati Linares years ago, when she was working with the New Economy Coalition and I was Chief Policy Wonk of the US Department of Arts and Culture, but I learned for the first time on this podcast how many different hats she has worn and how many different worlds she’s engaged with. Here’s a tiny bit of her biography.
Nati’s father was a Cumbia musician from Colombia and her mother was an actress. “So my parents were artists, and I never really got that story until I was older. Then I would start to peel the layers and would hear how they left those those artists’ dreams to pursue the American dream, that immigrant dream of providing for your children, owning your home…. I got very interested in working in music after college, I was throwing concerts in college, and was seeing the innards of that system, like how you have an agent and how you book a musician and how you put on a show and how you market the show. So I was getting the real insides of that. I experienced this power of bringing together all the different students that always saw themselves as separate, because of whatever class difference, racial difference. So I got the bug there in college, doing concerts, and that led me on a journey working on a record label in Los Angeles. I saw the insides of the music industry throughout my 20s, especially being a woman of color. There wasn’t a place for someone with intelligence who really had a passion for the power of music and its power to bring people together. In the early 2000s, there was this culture in the industry of an anti-intellectualism, gross misogyny. People wouldn’t just take your brain at face value. It was very shallow.
“I wore a lot of hats at the record label: contracting, hiring people, I was responsible for the logistics for touring. I saw how the numbers and the math worked and how the artists were always getting nickel and dimed at the end of it. My husband now, we were friends in our 20s. He happens to be an economist. We would meet up and he would be like, ‘You’re doing great, you’re working with bands that are on NPR, that are on MTV, that are playing huge festivals. Why am I having to pay for your lunch?’ I would have to tell him this is not what it seems. As an economist, he would educate me a little bit on how capitalism worked. I remember him telling me the music industry is just like any other industry, it has the same kind of exploitative qualities. That really flipped something for me, because I had always thought that it was this special, magical place where that stuff doesn’t happen, and if enough black and brown or political artists win, things can really change. I witnessed firsthand that was not the case.”
As her knowledge grew, Nati was learning about “artists who were always fighting for economic justice. As all of those things are coming together, I was feeling way more empowered, and feeling more confident that artists, indeed, have always been at the center of economic justice fights, and we need to talk about that more. I think it’s important to note that working within the new economy movement, or the solidarity economy movement, sometimes I witnessed that artists were not included centrally in those spaces. Maybe they would do a poster or do a concert. Artists being the original gig workers — the starving artists myth — how come we’re not including artists centrally in these fights for economic justice? Little by little, I would find artists that were. One of those artists is now my partner in work, Caroline Woolard, a sculptor doing a lot of work around permanently affordable housing for artists in New York. She was the first artist I saw call herself a solidarity economy artist.
François and Nati had an interesting conversation about hip hop, which started as a collective practice and in some senses evolved into a more individualistic one. Nati pointed out that when she was coming up in the late 80s and early 90s, people didn’t necessarily learn about the roots of the music or the social conditions that catalyzed it. She spins a very interesting account of hip hop’s Bronx roots in rent parties and other spontaneous gatherings at a time when Occupy was responding to a period of peak neoliberalism in a bankrupt New York.
Nati explained the idea of the solidarity economy. “It comes out of movements in Latin America, and also in Europe in the late 80s and early 90s. It’s a post-capitalist organizing framework for those that truly want to see a systems change in our political economy. How do we own and manage everything that we need to survive? That would include your housing, your labor, even your artistic practice, like how you get studio access, for example. There’s a great website called Solidarity Economy Principles that goes into the entire framework. I really encourage folks to check that out. Solidarity economy is probably least developed in North America. It’s much more developed in other parts of the world, Brazil, throughout Europe. There were times that I didn’t feel like solidarity economy was speaking to artists. But I knew that there were artists cooperatives, galleries that were operating in more of a collective as opposed to a top-down way. The way that we’ve talked about it is how do we build an economy that puts the people and the planet over profit?”
Nati called our attention to Solidarity Not Charity, a report that she and Caroline Woolard wrote in 2020, commissioned by Grantmakers in the Arts. “There’s a wheel in our report that illustrates the solidarity economy, how you think about exchange, how you think about production, about surplus allocation, and under that are all these different mechanisms. Maybe some of your listeners have heard of a worker cooperative, or a producer cooperative, or a grocery cooperative. Or in housing, a community land trust, or a limited equity housing cooperative, or different ways of how we do finance, as opposed to a big corporate bank investing in fossil fuels. How can we think about community banks in our neighborhoods that then lend money out into projects that we want? Art.coop is a generational project. I don’t think we’re gonna succeed in the next 25 years, but how can we plant the seeds of this vision of a solidarity economy?”
François said he completely supported the vision, especially since so many artists are facing real difficulties as funds are cut back. He and Nati agreed it is a huge challenge to change the very basis on which resources are distributed. She talks on the episode about some essential steps, such as “more popular education with the artists that are at a loss: why is it that I can’t afford my rent? Why is it that I can’t get studio space? A big part of solidarity economy is this framework of resist and build or fight and build. Perhaps solidarity economy is more on the build side with these prefigurative cooperatives, land projects, finance experiments, but the fight part is also really important.”
Nati offers many examples, such as groups educating musicians about the shift to streaming and control by monopolies and actually got some response from Spotify. We talk about cultural policy, including basic income and a new WPA providing public service jobs, how foundations and public funders affect the picture, and how artists might build the structures needed to join with advocates for cooperatives already in place in Washington. We talk about how the cultural sector can be defensive and shrink itself to an art world. There’s a lot to learn and a lot to pique your curiosity in this episode. We hope you’ll tune in!
Gil Scott-Heron, “I’ll Take Care of You.”
