When To Leave
06/19/20
By Christy LeMaster
Stay-at-home logic has seemingly collapsed under the weight of emotional fatigue, economic desperation, and the onset of summer, and so The Quarantine Times winds down as many American cities stumble back into tentative states of open. Plus for many Chicagoans, including myself, the recent protests against white supremacist police brutality snapped time back into the present, and we were in the streets again. And The Quarantine Times, envisioned as a responsive tool, had the ability to expand suddenly and respond to a different (and inter-related) set of concerns.
What quick-moving and productive chaos it has been to adapt collaborative processes to the virtual frame in real time. I am so grateful to all of the artists who agreed to work with us on these tight timelines, and so impressed by the immediate and open-hearted work we have generated. I have loved seeing their creative responses alongside practical measures like mutual aid funds, recipes, and impact surveys. To me, this 90-day collective diary looks like the cultural centers I have always wished for, and what I hope museums could be: art, politics, and organizing all in one space, finding affinities and differences, economies and discourses intertwined. All praise to Public Media Institute and the Co-Prosperity Sphere for dreaming this up and finding the money and the administrative muscle to make it happen.
Performers Hunter Hooligan, Trillnatured, Kotic Couture, Rovo Monty, and Uni Q. Mical at VIRTUAL VERSION, a queer dance party in Baltimore.
At the start of this project, I wrote that "a grand concert of adapting is underway," and it has proven to be true in almost all quadrants, including my career. In that first post I shared a video I made at the Nightingale, the microcinema I founded my first year in Chicago, over a decade ago. In a few weeks, I will move to Baltimore to be the Artistic Director of the SNF Parkway, a 3-screen cinema that is home to the Maryland Film Festival. I have in fact already started the job. Tonight, I virtually produced my first queer afterparty in Baltimore using some new tech skills I honed on the job for QT. The staff of the Parkway turned the lobby into a social-distanced Twitch studio so that VERSION could throw its first dance party since March, the DJ table set so the “DEFUND BPD” billboard across the street would be visible in the frame.
It feels terrible to leave during quarantine, like I am sneaking out on the city that built me. My understanding of social justice and anti-racist work developed here. The people of the Chicago cinema community taught me my artform here. I became a real queer girl here. In other times, I would spend these last weeks dragging my friends to my favorite places, making sure I made it to all the shows, and organizing a farewell screening of my most beloved films. Instead, we will have to pack up before things are really open again, before the protests stop, before it is safe to hug our loved ones goodbye.
I am gonna miss Chicago from the center of my chest.
Thanks for reading and contributing to QT these last months. Thank you especially to Diddle, Darling, Raul, Zakkiyyah, Angela, Ariel, Gina, Nick, Nell, and Monica.
See you soon.
Edited by Mairead Case.
Christy LeMaster is the Quarantine Times Friday editor. Christy is a Chicago-based moving-image programmer, educator, and producer interested in collectivity and collaborative processes. She founded the Nightingale Cinema and is a beloved character in Chicago’s art communities.
Christy worked on this piece with Mairead Case, the Quarantine Times Thursday editor. Mairead published her last piece for Quarantine Times yesterday, June 18, 2020.