Casa Goofy International is about community.
It’s about art and humor as bridges between ego and reality.
And about art and humor as bridges and interfaces between
human communities, and between the human and the natural community. Bridges and interfaces that we need because?
Because the natural community is the enduring community and
we’re just transients, just passing through, packing up and moving on (at least
since we got here).
Because OUTWARD is the primary principle of the universe and
the intelligence of nature (at least since the Big Bang & possibly even
earlier).
And when we invest in that enduring community we can endure
all the losses of ego that flesh is heir to, because all flesh is grass and all
grass is dirt. And therefore art is dirt.
And so the emphasis on Art-In-Nature.
And so the emphasis on crossing borders to build the real
community, the invisible community of those who care about the earth but who
may never see each other
It’s about creating interfaces between the human and the
natural communities through art, art-in-nature and intensive gardening methods,
interfaces, (art and culture and gardening methods) which can give people in
cramped apartments in cities, and even the homeless, the same sense of
entitlement to the community of nature as those who have inherited farms and
ranches.
And so we’re about creating a third world gallery circuit
with an emphasis on art-in-nature____________because there is a need there for
recognition that art becomes most real when it pauses and then begins again
like a child, improvising, working beyond the illusions and stresses of
recognition, the structures and anxieties of traditional esthetics and their
abstract commodity and speculative and investment based systems of value that
flock around people and things that are “special” like teenagers on Facebook.
Au contraire we’re about community and investing in community that recognizes no
such mandate in anybody to be judge and jury over the ultimate value of any
being, any work. We’re about seeking and
building community that cares about essences instead of appearances.
Therefore we’re about reinventing the old International Arts
Center that used to be here in the old Y before the gentrification steamroller
smashed it down under the inevitable injustice of money (because money is an
abstraction). We’re about reinventing it
as an investment in community and common ground instead of big buildings with
money targets on their butts.
How would that work?
It would work like student exchange, and Couchsurfing and WWOOF USA only
it would be an international exchange of art and artists who are like those
hardy souls above, born to look and move OUTWARD because they were born knowing
that we are community before we are individuals, that we are the earth beneath
our feet so we can never be lost, and the common man, the common person is
common to us.
I enjoy having a house I built beside the road, I enjoy
hosting and being a friend to these transient people and I enjoy being part of
a larger conversation than what occurs in board rooms and university seminars,
a conversation made of dirt and rocks and plants and written on the living air
between us. I have been overwhelmed by
the largesse of those who have nothing, and underwhelmed by the betrayals of
big shots who have enough to worry themselves to death with the fear of losing
it.
Physicists are now telling us reality is just information,
and law books are telling us truth is just an arbitration. Dude like whatever floats your ego, I’m just
glad to be a nobody in nowhere representing the little guy, not with much hope
that any of us can survive the feedback loops of global warming, but with a
grain of faith the size of a mustard seed that shitty as life with others gets
sometimes, this much is given to us, that we can hold dirt and water and seeds
in our hands and look up at the stars.
And once we get to a place that’s not a place but a process,
a process that’s real made of things and dirt and rocks and plants, we have
nothing to fear except those constructs of mind divorced from nature, those
things that aren’t things at all, those things that like money and drones can
kill without conscience or feelings, those things which we call abstractions
because they are abstracted, i.e. taken from something more basic and
real. But all language is an abstraction, every word is a
leap of faith, so?
So ya gotta have a sense of humor. And therefore: Casa GOOFY International.
But what are we about in more concrete terms? We’re a program under the non-profit, Artfare
with six ponds and six greenhouses almost at the point of being an off grid
aquaculture system, a sculpture garden, 17 units of housing about 25 percent
converted to artists’ live/work spaces with workshop/studio/greenhouses
attached. Two units of free bunkhouse housing for volunteers onsite, two units
of offsite bunkhouse housing for volunteers (and maybe, just maybe an atrium
gallery as one station in a Third World Gallery Circuit) at the Artfare Hotel in the hotly contested
and not quite totally broken heart of downtown Tucson
We bring the music and art and gardening (natural science)
hour to children of low income families Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3 p.m. (or times like this when the funding is
low, WHEN WE CAN) right after their naps, so they’re not totally cranky and
impossible to control. We’re pursuing
solar water heating, solar electric generation, waste veggie oil processing,
biodigestion for methane and fertilizer, parking shades with unisolar roll out
photovoltaic film, and all other mechanical sustainable permaculture
contrivances that might help our cause without costing too much money during
the start up chaos with the inevitable 98 percent failure rate for most
inventions.
And what in particular will we do with two thousand dollars
if and when we get it? The West side of
the pond/greenhouse complex is finally ready to rumble with solar charged
Caterpillar batteries running pumps that circulate water between all the ponds
and from the lowest to the highest pond.
The water then flows down through siphons back to the middle and then
the lowest pond. That’s the basic pond
system. Here’s how we add the greenhouse
system to the pond system:
A pair of larger solar powered pumps pump a greater volume
of water to the top pond where it comes down through a larger siphon into a
hydraulic ram pump made from common plumbing parts which uses only the energy
of a large volume of falling water to pump a small volume of water, 30 feet,
three times as high as the fall, to the top of the highest greenhouse where it
will trickle down through troughs made from salvage sheet metal duct and
eventually arrive back at the lower pond.
In these troughs are “grow boxes” made from junk food
coolers with slots in them so plants can grow out the sides as well as the
tops. The food coolers have wicks in
them which wick up the pond water into the soil so the plants can use just as
much as they need with minimal loss to evaporation and so that no soil goes
back into the ponds.
Meanwhile heavy duty steel shelving frames over the top
ponds repeat this kind of cycle for outdoor planting and some of the lower
shelves in these frames have vermiculture tubs in them where kitchen scraps are
used to feed worms for the fertilizer.
In the back of the greenhouses where there’s less sunlight are
mushroom beds and storage of gardening supplies.
Two thousand dollars would buy us enough supplies, expertise
and skilled labor to repeat the hydraulic ram pump application on the East side
of the pond/greenhouse system.
This completed system with the addition of living fences
made from recycled pallets, intensive raised bed gardens, a stock of fingerling Bass, Tilapia, and
Catfish, a stock of small livestock and birds will turn us from an experiment
into a working farm and art-in-nature laboratory for international exchange
artists to use and for children from Los Amigos Childcare and children of all
ages to tour under shade cloth and tree shade to protect them from the
merciless Southern Arizona Sun that’s soon to get more merciless under the
stresses of global warming.
But more importantly are we having fun yet? Are we there yet? How will we know when we get there?
We’ll know when we complete the giant turtle out of shade
cloth stretched between poles which can be seen from GOOGLE EARTH, just to tell
those illegal aliens from outer space to come on down, but just be aware that we
don’t care....
....WHAT some silly bunch of intergalactic bureaucrats think
our purpose here on earth is, we’re all about the native Americans’ concept of America TURTLE ISLAND
