We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nicole Gervacio & Cat Petru. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nicole Gervacio & Cat Petru below.
Nicole & Cat, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
There is little about We Rise Production that isn’t a risk.
As artists and activists from disparate backgrounds, coming together to use our technical, creative skills in service of solidarity and collective liberation is not, per se, a safe business move. But, We Rise was born of rage and care and liberatory visions, and a need to do something beautiful and strategic about it.
There are so many ways to show up in this devastating, challenging, ripe political moment. As creatives, we craved a platform to share out the brilliance and bravery of our loved ones. We needed a space where process is just as important as product, where relationships and visions are tended with respect and care. We aspire to nurture understanding, and inspire connection and action.
It feels like a risk daily, to dream, create, and move toward realities that aren’t a cultural, mainstream “norm.” It is a risk to be anticapitalist as a business, to weave our decolonial, feminist values into this production collective, and to put them into practice when outward influences constantly push and pull at us telling us safety is found in monetary wealth, material accumulation, and adhering to the status quo.
It is risky not to contain our work to one monolithic audience, to constantly code switch, and to create practices for which we don’t have clear business models. In our early formation, we decided We Rise would not be a 501c3, as the nonprofit industry can siphon resources away from artists to overhead costs, and often binds business bottom lines to funders rather than community. As a general partnership, we are able to create our own structures of resource/funding flow so that our work is accountable to our communities.
Conventionally, all of this is risky.
On the other hand – some might argue (our mentors included) that to NOT channel our finite time and energy into visionary art-as-activism is the biggest risk of all.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
We Rise Production (We Rise) is a queer, women-owned Oakland, California-based media production company that partners with artists, educators, organizers, activists, and cultural workers who are at the center of today’s freedom movements to incubate and tell their visionary stories. We collaborate with frontline leaders to create podcasts, videos, art, and educational community events. The contemporary frontline stories we tell amplify local and international feminist movements; work for environmental, racial, disability and gender justice; and struggles for Indigenous sovereignty. In addition to technical production, we also partner with youth organizations, radio stations, and grassroots leaders to offer tools and education on media production. We recognize that telling your own story is vital for social transformation, as well as personal empowerment.
The goal of all of our productions is to cultivate critical thinking and solidarity in our audience. Stories help people to remember their collective capacity for mutual care of our communities across difference – thereby making our work so indispensable at this moment in time. Stories also help people to vision a world in which gender, racial, environmental, and disability justice and Indigenous sovereignty are possible.
As Black feminist scholar June Jordan declared, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” This is what motivates We Rise Production: living into our ancestors’ wildest dreams as visionary artists, resourcing ourselves and our communities through storytelling that inspires imaginations, changes lives, and engenders a professional culture of care.
Indian writer Arundhati Roy teaches, “Another world is not only possible, she’s on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathe.” We Rise seeks to usher in this world by funding the creative, technical, intellectual, and collaborative labor of women and oppressed peoples who are already realizing this vision in their communities.
As Zara Zimbardo, co-founder of Partners for Collaborative Change, and adjunct lecturer at the California Institute of Integral Studies, wrote, “We Rise is a vital greenhouse for transformative community visions, voices, analyses, imagination and dreams.” We want to shift out of patterns of scarcity in our communities by participating in wealth redistribution. Therefore we fund historically un– or underpaid people and positions; ie: women and genderqueer media makers.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
We met as dancers, and the importance of rooting all our work in embodied experience remains central in our business approach. This value of working from a place of embodiment and pleasure is reflected in Black feminist poet Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power”, a text we were introduced to in the grassroots, adult freedom school Liberation Spring. We’ve been participants with Liberation Spring (LS) for six years and counting, and the radical, decolonial, feminist education we engage there informs our guiding values, principles, and practices as business directors. LS deepened our awareness of decolonial feminism, intersectional feminism, Disability Justice, and Transformative Justice: movements and philosophies that center collectivism, collaboration, generosity, humility, reciprocity, relationship, rematriation, Earth defense, antimilitarism, and solidarity. One quote we refer back to time and again that reflects these values and guides our work comes from Indigenous artist Lilla Watson, who says, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Liberation Spring also introduced us to the concept and practice of “cultural production”, which understands cultural work – visual art, film, social media, radio, podcasts, etc. – to have a profound impact on our thoughts and actions. “Making Waves”, a document put forth by The Culture Group in 2014, offers a guiding source of information on cultural production. One artist we look up to, Favianna Rodriguez, says “Culture moves faster than politics.” Toni Cade Bambara, Black feminist writer, says “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” This superpower practice of collaboratively channeling creativity in service of collective wellbeing – cultural production – is the bedrock of We Rise.
Finally, our work is deeply rooted by our ancestors. Our collective members bring wisdom from their ancestors’ cultural and historical knowledge, and we continuously learn from them as we co-create. We Rise navigates our responsibility and purpose as cultural producers with ancestors and future generations in mind.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Our activist and artist communities were called to action at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as many were. There was a surge to bring events, panels, and dialogues online, to organize mutual aid, and a call to spread information and strategies on how to care for each other. Early pandemic was erratic. We were navigating shutdown and safety while experiencing new levels of collective anxiety and grief with so much unknown. This time brought a rise of opportunities for We Rise to work with our community on cultural and media production. At the start of 2020, we were experiencing new growth in our work, completing year one as a budding new business, but the pandemic brought incredible loss and struggle on a personal and a collective level. We recognized this culmination of seemingly demanding work in a time of emergency was unsustainable.
By the end of April, we decided We Rise would take a hiatus from organizing and producing cultural work. We declined invitations to lead workshops, we paused our productions, and we accepted stillness as the world surged around us. May was our month of refuge to move slowly, to be present to take care of ourselves and what needed support directly around us. We called this our chrysalis hiatus because one of We Rise’s sources of inspiration is the lifecycle of a painted Lady Butterfly; each stage– from egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, to pollinating butterfly – offers lessons and wisdom for our own growth, possibilities for transformation, and the ability to care for the world around us. It was a difficult boundary to say no, to break the feeling of obligation to react and take action when our bodies needed to move slowly. We felt the urgency to act, but also realized we were becoming ungrounded and disembodied, and knew this could lead to causing unintentional harm or burnout in ourselves.
In this month-long hiatus, we were able to move through our feelings and find clarity amidst the chaos of early COVID-19 pandemic. Time within a chrysalis is not still or quiet. We spent time reflecting, listening, grieving loved ones, and processing, even birthing a wave of new ideas that would take root in the following months. This gave us spaciousness to better understand what was happening around us.
This moment reflects our resilience in balancing the self and the collective – true self care in order to show up for our collective care.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.WeRiseProduction.com
- Instagram: @WeRiseProduction
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/weriseproduction/
- Twitter: @WeRiseProducers
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvG6k8rlnHaEZ1qoqSCAFbQ
- Other: We Rise Podcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6uxKcBftLv1aOWoNL7UzTl We Rise Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-rise/id1438581667
Image Credits
Sania Elahi, Shapeshifters, We Rise Production