He who opens a school door,
closes a prison.
Victor Hugo
Art that actually fucking means something: it doesn’t happen in galleries with wine and cheese and people pretending to understand what “liminal space” means. It happens in a bookstore that’s half-collapsed into its own beautiful chaos, where the shelves lean like drunks and the floor creaks with the weight of ideas that matter.
It happens because someone like Nathalie Brilliant understands that curating isn’t about arranging pretty things in rooms, it’s about creating the conditions for something real to ignite. She’s orchestrated this happening through MAPP, turning The Mission into what it’s supposed to be: dangerous, alive, uncompromising. But here’s the thing, Nathalie doesn’t just stand outside the work pointing at it. She played Chantal in The Balcony. Chantal. The revolutionary who becomes the symbol, the woman who walks out of the brothel’s illusions into the actual revolution, who gets devoured by the very image-making machinery she tries to fight.
You wanna know about real? Try teaching inside San Quentin. Try directing Genet, Genet who didn’t write for graduate seminars (though they love him there); wrote from the guts of the machine, from cells and street corners and the places where society dumps the people it doesn’t want to look at.
Then Nathalie takes my photographs and hangs them on the walls of Adobe Books, not some sterile white cube where collectors come to invest, but a real bookstore, the kind that’s become practically extinct. She creates the whole circuit: performer, curator, revolutionary in the truest sense. That Victor Hugo quote isn’t decoration; it’s the whole goddamn point.
This is what art looks like when it refuses to be domesticated, when the people making it understand they’re supposed to be inside it, not above it, when it remembers it’s supposed to be dangerous and true and connected to actual human beings rather than market trends and institutional approval. It’s not polite. It shouldn’t be.
MAPP is a community and a series of arts, music and activist events operating in The Mission for over 14 years. Their events are happenings in common places within The Mission that include live music, Spoken word, Performance art, Film screenings, BBQ’s, garage sales, and unorthodox conversations.