So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. I recognized the feeling in a passage from Gilles Deleuze in "Negotiations": And although I felt a bit guilty about how incongruous it seemed-beautiful garden versus terrifying world-it really did feel like a necessary survival tactic. This wasn’t exactly a conscious decision it was more of an innate movement, like a deer going to a salt lick or a goat going to the top of a hill. But after the election, I started going to the Rose Garden almost every day. I live five minutes away from the Rose Garden, and ever since I’ve lived in Oakland, it’s been my default place to go to get away from my computer, where I do much of my work, art and otherwise. But I had also realized that the garden encompassed everything I wanted to cover: the practice of doing nothing, the architecture of nothing, the importance of public space, and an ethics of care and maintenance. I did that partly because it was in the Rose Garden that I began brainstorming my talk. After that, I decided to ground the talk in a specific place: the Morcom Amphitheatre of Roses in Oakland, California, otherwise known simply as the Rose Garden.
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