Leadership Quote by Joseph Jarman

There is a charming, very musicianly tension in Joseph Jarman's timeline: "by the end of the millennium" sounds like prophecy, then he yanks it back to the mundane reality of "five, six months from now". That snap from grand historical framing to logistical scramble is the whole move. It tells you what matters to an artist-organizer like Jarman: not hype, not mythology, but the stubborn material conditions that make art possible.

The intent is practical on the surface, almost bureaucratic: secure a new location, get "the whole building", allocate rooms, expand programming. The subtext, though, is about legitimacy and survival. Space isn't just square footage; it's autonomy. "The whole building" implies an escape from being a guest in someone else's institution, from sharing time, noise, and authority. It's a quiet demand for infrastructure that matches the scale of the work - rehearsals, performances, community workshops, archives, whatever "all our activities" has had to mean in cramped or borrowed rooms.

Contextually, that end-of-millennium phrasing plants the ambition in a bigger cultural moment: the late-90s/turn-of-the-2000s churn of arts funding, gentrification pressures, and nonprofits trying to professionalize without losing their soul. Jarman, coming from a tradition where experimentation and community are inseparable, frames the move as both hopeful and precarious: "we hope to somehow manage". It's aspiration with no illusions - a future-tense dream tethered to rent, keys, and permission.