Hello, I’m Mat. I live in Knoxville, where I’ve been for 15 years. I work with a group of artists and educators who make and tour with large scale pen and ink drawings that are created to be tools for anti-oppression education. That art focuses things like patriarchy, white supremacy, environmental destruction due to crapitalism, statism, transphobia. We go on listening tours to hear how communities want to be visually represented in the drawings so we can make more accurate educational tools based in consent, and actively push back against anthropological extraction. That’s the collective work I love.

On an individual level, I love music and play a bunch of instruments. I’m gender non-binary. I’m exploring the video game music composition world right now for work that I can love.

Let’s see, I try not to be a dumb dumb. I care about people a lot. I like to draw, read, write, paint. I’ve studied Japanese for a while now, I love the language, and my reading comp isn’t too shabby now.

Im hoping to move in the next year and head North. I love cold weather and want snow back in my life! Aaaand once I land wherever it is I do, Im going to build a house big enough to where all my friends and loved ones can come live with me and my family.

I could go on, but I think the “why I’m couchsurfing” section is really more helpful in helping people understand things I care about. Check that out, please! Things in that section may have more to do with you letting me crash at your place/you wanting to stay at mine, than anything I write in “about me”, I hope!

But if you have questions, please ask!

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

I frequently tour with the art I mention above, and I love meeting new friends! Friends that I hope will visit me and stay on my floor someday!

I work with an art/education group called the Beehive Design Collective (we formally dissolved in 2019), but i still tour with the art work, doing educational stuff on social issues, as many “bees” do. This work looks like taking large scale pen and ink drawings having to do with systematic oppression on tour, and using those drawings to help facilitate discussion about complex world issues with the communities we visit. I am not an artist with the group. Instead, my focus is education, and on using the art as a story telling tool to connect people in common social struggle/s. Here’s a link to one of our drawings that we have online. You can scroll through it’s narrative, and/or zoom in on scenes in the graphic:

https://beehivecollective.org/posterViewer/?poster=mr

Right now, I’m getting ready to fundraise so we can get a drawing about reproductive care access that one of our sister groups in Spain made in 2014, printed on a huge banner. With everything going on in the US with abortion ban bullshit, it’s critical to support doulas and reproductive care workers more than ever. I hope to use the drawing to do just that, as we sell the drawings in poster form. Here’s a link to that drawing:

https://projecteuter.wordpress.com/

That link will send you to a webpage in Spanish. if your Spanish is rusty there’s a link if you scroll down that’ll send you to an English narrative.

Interested? let’s talk!

Interests

Music theory, anti-hierarchical education, human relationships, living, dying, the whole thing, ya know?

Music, Movies, and Books

Music: lots of instrumental. Tin Hat Trio, Kronos Quartet, Fugazi, video game compositions (think, Koji Kondo), Fiona Apple, Dead Can Dance, Dandelion Junk Queens, Black Sabbath, the list goes on and on….

Movies: the Big Green, AntiChrist, Maniac, Hereditary, Garlic, Gapped Toothed Woman, Always be my Maybe, heist movies, etc.

Books: Post-colonial works, Sci-fi, anarchist history and theory, music theory, DIY, Japanese manga from time to time, Cakravorty Spivak, Ursula K LeGuin, John Holloway, Black on White, Black Writers on Whiteness, Zapatista works, Kurdish People’s Freedom Movement, too many to mention.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Ive been able to help start and maintain a few mutual aid projects in the Southeast. I feel very great full for the people I’ve met in that work.

Teach, Learn, Share

Share!

What I Can Share with Hosts

Meals. A place to explore town from. Laughs, stories, access to tools. Potentially auto-repair, if I have the time.

Countries I’ve Lived In

United States