MEMBER SPOTLIGHT: JOSHUA VANA
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Could you tell us who you are and what it is that you do?
I'm Joshua Vana, Director of ARTivism Virginia. We provide a supported connection between artists and activists in the fight against new fossil fuel (primarily fracked gas) infrastructure in Virginia and the region. My best attempt at distilling who I am is that I'm a musician who happens to be a justice issues person, and so I try to lend my skills to advancing the efforts of folks fighting the Big Machine in its myriad of forms. With ARTivism, we try to take those types of individual efforts and coordinate them so that there's organized help – a network, or better, a community – to strategically assist campaigns to fight projects like the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), for example.
So across mediums, with the help of a bunch of different artists, we've been working primarily on supporting the coalition fighting MVP (year nine of resistance, year five of unfinished construction to 56% completion) and its Southgate Extension project (year five of resistance, unconstructed), whether through messaging strategy, tactile visual arts, film, music, event production, a little graphic design, etc – a lot of the things that need a bit of a boost when your coalition partners are working so hard to cover all the other bases, playing offense and defense at the same time. ARTivism, having started out as a labor-of-love project of Kay Ferguson here in the Charlottesville area, is entering its sixth year of coordinated effort, and this year we've been really blessed to begin a working relationship with Virginia Organizing as a Joint Plan of Work group. MVP hasn't been our only focus though, and working in our lane with a priority on advancing environmental justice efforts, often with frontlines folks in the region, we've also helped defeat the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, Chickahominy Pipeline and Power Station, the C4GT power plant and other not-so-brilliant ideas of the fossil fuel and finance industries.
What do you love most about the work?
I really like being part of a community of fighters (they're lovers, too, you could say) who are looking out for each other and making a better future happen. I love to see these folks grow their power, see the fruits of their labor, feeling good about it – seeing the threads of new community and power building come together in a fresh and beautiful patchwork.
I also love watching the pins get yanked out of the machinery that's abusing people and then witnessing that machine start to bury itself in dysfunction and the muddy mess caused by its own design flaws. It may be the opinion of others that sharing this is in bad taste, but I'd be lying to ya if I said this didn't provide a little confidence-building fuel and satisfaction. I take no small amount of pleasure in the visible astonishment on the faces of the cogs of the Big Machine (lobbyists, consultants, politicians, financial managers, those weaving in and out of the public-private revolving door, etc) when they realize that because of their failure to ram through their pipeline or compressor station or whatever, they now have to consider the fact that their ill-conceived plans were not inevitable, that they do not control everything, that they are not the masters of us. I mean, I'm guessing that might be what eventually goes through their heads. Maybe not. Maybe it's wishful thinking. Whatever's going on in there, there seems to be some amount of surprise when grassroots community organizing and advocacy wins.
I get to work with a ton of fearless, kind, badass folks who I look up to, and who are changing things in no small way. That helps. I've heard a number of friends in our work say that it sure would be nice to not have to fight multi-billion dollar corporations to protect communities, homes, wild places, the planet, etc – but – you just meet the best people. That's true for me and I know it's true across other communities brought together in pursuit of some kind of justice. This year in particular, I've had the great pleasure of meeting folks from all across stolen land, from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast to the Great Lakes and further, learning about their awesome work and culture, how similar our struggles are, and how close we are bound by those struggles.
If I'd have to sum up the better parts of the work, it'd be the feeling of solidarity. Remember solidarity, y'all? The Big Machine hasn't just yet stamped all that fire out.
How did you arrive at this position / point in your career? What's your backstory?
I've mostly been a working musician and a small collective restaurant worker and worker/owner in the Shenandoah Valley. Around 2015 when I caught wind of the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline project (rest in pieces ACP, 2014-2020), I started to get connected with folks in Augusta & Nelson Counties and elsewhere who were organizing against it – which led me inevitably to learn about MVP and the folks further West/Southwest fighting it. Two evil-cousin, 42" fracked gas pipelines totaling more than 900 miles was not gonna fly, in my opinion, and I learned there were hundreds of others who shared that opinion. I had started to become aware of the worst effects of the so-called Shale Revolution and did not want to see its infrastructure buildout come through the mountains and valleys and rivers around us and destroy everything in its path. With the help of my friend Lara Mack, who was the Pipelines Field Coordinator for Appalachian Voices at the time (and others of course), we started a solidarity group in Rockingham County through which I learned a lot about advocacy and my role in it. Still learning.
Juggling that activism, being away on the road playing music professionally and restaurant work eventually became too much to balance, so I decided to try and meet the moment and stick around my own neck of the woods in hopes that I could find ways to support the ACP/MVP fighting coalition on a more consistent and sustainable basis. Shortly after making that change, I was invited to participate in ARTivism's SUN SiNG Collective project, and things gradually progressed from there into further opportunities for me to plug in, take a leadership role or two, and support Kay's concept of healthy creative advocacy. I co-directed ARTivism with Kay from 2020 to the spring of 2022, and was handed the baton this year as Director when Kay took a well-deserved bow after years of hard-driving direct coalition support.
What values drive your work each day? How do they play out in what you do?
I think when my former Co-Director Kay was asked this question, she said, "love, justice, and service". Brevity can be in good service too, and acknowledging the length of my previous responses, we'll stick with this wise distillation. We try to prioritize listening to what frontline organizers need and then propose ideas that go with the grain of their efforts, and compliment and amplify the work of the larger coalition, often asking how we can welcome more folks into the work and provide that supported connection mentioned above.
What are you currently working on, excited about, looking forward to?
Lots in the works here at ARTivism HQ. We're reflecting on our first six months as a Joint Plan of Work group with Virginia Organizing and planning for what it might take to help beat MVP and MVP Southgate in 2023. We recently held a block printing workshop with awesome artivist and wonderful collaborator Jan Burger here in the Gallery at Studio IX, and we're hoping to build upon that learning and ready those materials and more for whatever opportunities arise.
We're also doing our best to support our growing coalition in a "search and destroy" mission – cue Iggy & The Stooges at considerable volume – to defeat the next iteration of Joe Manchin's Dirty Deal (first attempt bill killed in late September), which would weaken environmental protections throughout the United States, throw frontline communities under the bus, provide lots of disgusting handouts to the fossil fuel industry as if more are needed – in addition to using congress to legislate a magic parachute for the criminal MVP and its joint venture partners by essentially reinstating all its illegal permits and insulating it from any further judicial review. Isn't it nuts that the some of the most powerful sectors of both major political parties want this? Plenty of them claim the climate is very important to them, and they want your money, by the way.
I'm looking forward to building new relationships with artivists in the Charlottesville area, continuing to create and/or support programming and projects that revives the long fighters out there and welcomes new energy, and – hopefully in 2023 – witnessing the incredible and inevitable cancellation of the big, bad, boondoggled Mountain Valley Pipeline and its Southgate Extension. A congressional rescue party signals desperation, and we want safety and health more than they want their precious profits. So approaching Year Ten of resistance, you can bet we're ready to win. Probably more ready than we know.
If you could take one book with you to a desert island, which would it be?
Well that's a tough one. You're gonna probably be disappointed by an answer lacking in creativity, or failing to nod to the finer works, but us "creatives" can be practical too. I'm sure there's a book out there that sufficiently outlines How to Survive On a Desert Island, and I'll go with that. There are probably dozens at this point. I'm not gonna check. I pride myself just a little in having some tiny manner of self-sufficiency, but assuming this desert island scenario involves the typical "it's just you and you're a thousand miles from anywhere in a beautiful but dangerous tropical paradise providing no shelter from the elements and where threats to survival constantly lurk" features, I am in no way sufficiently prepared for that, and I'd be perfectly satisfied to rely on the tactics provided in the text to eventually return alive to a place where I can read all I want. While I'm out there on the desert island I can make up some songs and stories to keep me creative company, and also add notes to the book in the margins that I can be hired to employ in the Survivor's Choice Edition. Upon my return to so-called civilization and during my tour of morning TV spots and late-nite talk shows (if they're still around), I can plug the that second edition while also suggesting some of the ways in which we can help ourselves not turn our own island into a giant desert island where nearly every single person is saddled with the burden of individual survival. This is sounding closer and closer to describing our society in the era of the Neoliberal Scam so I'll stop before this gets too real.
Anything we missed that you might care to share (closing thoughts)?
I don't know if everybody else out there's feelin' it, but doesn't it just seem like crises are coming from all sides these days? That's why that solidarity (remember solidarity, y'all?) is so important. The burden gets spread out and it feels like we all need that. Less burden per individual. More collective effort. As one of my heroes, Mavis Staples, will sing, "You are not alone". "I'm with you", she'll say. We got big fish to fry, friends. Let's get organized and stay organized. Anything is possible.