DEALER BOOK SERIES

LAST HERO — 2018 (ongoing)

The drug dealer, in public spaces, crystallizes modern fears, temptations and desires, becoming a universal folk-devil. Over their bodies rage often deadly struggles to shift the limits of control and solidarity, from Manila to Berlin. LAST HERO began as an imagined future ruin in Holmquist's Berlin exhibition The Third Wall and Last Hero. It evolved into a proposal to the city for a monument. In 2019, his LAST HERO statue was first shown in the Vienna exhibition DEALER POSES and its circa three meter version was installed in Görlitzer Park, Berlin, for the art action, 24-HOUR PARK DEALER SOLIDARITY SIT-IN.

LAST HERO info PDF
Other Homelands — 2017 to 2018

The most widely debated art show in Berlin and Germany at the end of 2017, Other Homelands was an exhibition and research project about park drug dealers. It triggered a national debate over artistic freedom in public institutions and the moral versus legal issues of drug sellers in public space. For over a generation, African-origin immigrants have become the public face of illegal drugs in Berlin, as well as in other cities across Europe. A central feature of this work was a series of public forums that included the involvement of German anti-racist activists and leaders like Tahir Della, director of the Initiative Schwarze Menschen Deutschland, and Josephine Apraku. Two of the three forums were not permitted by the exhibiton's host museum. This submerged censorship, and efforts in the district assembly to stop the show before it opened, heightened the array of aesthetic and political tensions within German press coverage and the physical encounters — and trajectories — of individual black bodies in space between Europe and Africa that Holmquist sought to engage.

otherhomelands.website
andereheimaten.website

Humboldt Area Peoples Archive — 2016 (ongoing)

Holmquist's focus in this project is the rescue of local histories of counterculture-related art, activism for peace and the environment, as well as of back-to-the-landers' and cannabis growers' lives in and around Humboldt, Trinity, Mendocino Counties, (California, USA). Local public institutions, like Humboldt State University, have been neither able, nor, at times politically willing, to take on such collections, in part because of decades of crippling budget cuts, but also because of their loyalties to legacy industries like logging, and fears of being associated with the region’s largest industry for nearly half a century, cannabis. The Archive was founded in early November 2016 by Holmquist and retired Humboldt State University archivist Edith Butler. They were later joined by Southern Humboldt community leader, Douglas Fir, Arcata-activist Richard Salzman and geographer Dr. Dominic Corva. HAPA became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in late 2017.

haparchive.org
Genocide and Vendetta — 2012 (onging)

In 2012 Holmquist began working to bring a suppressed book back from its early grave. Genocide and Vendetta: The Round Valley Wars of Northern California (University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), unpacks one of the darkest chapters in California history: the literal genocide of Native Americans by European Americans in Round Valley, CA, in Mendocino County. In 1987 the publisher destroyed the copies of Genocide and Vendetta remaining in its inventory and withdrew it from publication. Since then the book has been reproduced illegally and sold and distributed as contraband. Its withdrawal was the result of settling a suspicious charge of "unintentional" plagiarism that inspired a variety of conspiracy theories.

genocideandvendetta.com
Low Tide Archive — 2011 (ongoing)

Low Tide is an art and archive project assembling and disassembling a comprehensive survey of visual Humboldt Bay (California, USA) histories for public re-presentation and preservation. As an act of preservation, this work is against the delusion that everything will be online. It is also an experiment in representational decomposition, dreaming of magical outcomes that reveal, or hint at, an utterly decolonized geography.

lowtidebook.com
chronic freedom series — 2006 (ongoing)

The series of five artist books, chronic freedom, dirt, light, 3 books and Big Drug Factory – Unfound, represent a single work and unified attempt to survey, collect and interrogate traces of the histories comprising the back-to-the-land and marijuana production worlds as they evolved in Southern Humboldt County, California, from the late 1960s through 2010.

chronicfreedomseries.com
Blind Eye Projects — 1999 to 2003

With the blind eye projects Holmquist assumed the persona of an invented media revolutionary, willy mal, who sought to make and promote art and media that would not only deflect the interest of any audience but actually subtract net ambient stimulation. Work that proposed nothing less than to completely reverse the historic logic of communications media and art. As willy mal, Holmquist wrote a manifesto that incited the what he called, "The most important failed art movement of our time."

blindeyeprojects.com