Brief about me
Tracy Jonsson-Laboy is an interdisciplinary artist using craft as resistance and play as survival. Her practice includes a jester’s visual art, material and artistic research, practice-based research, permaculture farming, and a “life as medium” starting point with a phenomenology of being alive, with the weaver community role, as her main inspiration.
She platforms connection interweaving community, activity, creating and observation through collaborative music making, sound design, game-making, storytelling, craft sit-ins, cuddle puddles, harvest-days and other ways of being together with an emphasis on slowness, nowness and bridge-building.
She uses storytelling, craft textiles, looped vocals and instruments, custom games and interactive prompts to create experiences enhancing the now.
Jonsson-Laboy has as a goal to achieve and share methods for community, food and fiber sovereignty through planning, design, architecture and “slöjd” embracing her family lineage of survival and adventure. In her current line of exploration she’s embraced permaculture as a strategy, joy and craft as alternative modes of reality-making, and models of repair as thematic research projects.
Jonsson-Laboy has a master’s degree in Historic Preservation from Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, and a art and culture degree in craft, design and sustainability from Hemslöjden i Östergötland.
Check out Deepa Iyver’s Building Movement Project, find your community role:
"Laugh when things fall apart; laughter is difficult to police." -
The jester's priviledge
Tracy Jonsson-Laboy embraces the community role of weaver and calls on the tools of the jester in her work.
Traditionally jesters were sent into enemy territory to share messages, convey demands, and share unwelcome news. They were effective communicators in the face of adversity. They represented their community and served important bridge-building purposes through their mastering joy, humor, play and interactivity.
As we enter increasingly difficult times the jester becomes more necessary. A person dedicated to being the conduit of fun. A master of disguised opposition. The jester is the enemy structured, oppressive environments. They are restorers of energy and of peace in times of sustained resistance. Some necessary questions in rough times are:
How do we create moments of rest and recuperation between battles?
How do we connect with each other during times of emotional disstress and what strenght does this lend us, collectively?
What story-telling and cultural tools exist for diversion (dance, touch, song, jokes) that allows us to meet the challenges ahead of us?
The jester is a creative force sharing ways of accessing joy and recuperation in dire times, while also embracing their own capacity to use performance, fantasy, storytelling, and their own physical action to dismantle foes often flanking both sides of their work.
The song "Riot, I'm blowing your cover" speaks to the power of the jester.
aesthetic of absurd control
historical aesthetic; medeival times
“I am particularly interested in the aesthetics of medieval Europe. There is so much to marvel at there; the aesthetic of domination; the nascent control of land, people, identity, and the naming of an entire time-period after the experiences of a small sub-set of human experience.
I feel something about the contradictory demand for piety in the face of depravity from above. Sometimes that feels very current. The rquest comes with no offer of freedom, joy, or sovereingty.
Not to mention that the illustrative style, perhaps the vibe of the time on its own, produced visual works meant to be horrifying or religiously meaningful that, in the end, feel like part of some secret inside joke.”
-Tracy Jonsson-Laboy