*** For the duration of this exhibition, all related ticket sales include a record release and benefit the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County, supporting communities impacted by anti-immigration legislation and homelessness in South County. ***

As part of the ongoing exhibition The Day That Never Came / El Día Que, artist and organizer Joy Schendledecker presents Common Ground, No Ground, a performative lecture that blends video, song, text, and a zine to explore what enclosure means under conditions of displacement.

The Riverlands of San Lorenzo Park, also known as the Benchlands is a place marked by cycles of erasure and return, carries layered histories: first violently cleared of their original caretakers—the Awaswas-speaking Uypi people, ancestors of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band—then reshaped through missions, ranches, and urban development. In recent decades, the Benchlands became a place where unhoused residents built shelter, relationships, and fragile stability, only to be repeatedly cleared, most recently in 2022, when the encampment was destroyed by police and heavy machinery.

Footage from that clearing—its blunt violence and haunting emptiness—forms a central visual element of the performance. Common Ground, No Ground situates this moment within a longer history: from the English Enclosure Movement of the 16th and 17th Centuries, from colonial land seizure to modern anti-camping ordinances that criminalize existence in public space. In Santa Cruz, as in many U.S. cities, law continues to function as a tool of exclusion—shaping who is allowed to remain, and who is forced to move. This performance is a response and a refusal. Schendledecker frames enclosure not as a past event, but an ongoing condition. Abolition is its antidote: not only the dismantling of harmful systems, but the creation of a world in which no one is forced to disappear.

Joy Schendledecker is an artist, organizer, and educator based in Santa Cruz, California. Her work explores housing justice, environmental entanglement, and the politics of care through performance, installation, social practice, and writing. She has worked extensively in local shelter systems and community organizing, bringing lived experience into dialogue with artistic practice.

The Day That Never Came / El Día Que is a collaborative sound project created through recorded orations by Mace Crowbear, Lisa Bordenave, Julio Lopez, and Sandra Aguilar, interwoven with original sound works by Leshy (Ben Krasner), Briana Marela, Rip Florence, and e-fem.url (Maya Garcia). The project brings forward personal accounts of survival, displacement, memory, addiction, parenthood, and resilience from the unhoused community, forming a layered listening environment of lived testimony. The work unfolds across a quadraphonic sound installation at Indexical's gallery and record release, inviting audiences into the social realities shaping life of people without housing.

Additional elements of the exhibition include The Untitled and Dispossessed, a county-wide mural map illustrating homelessness diaspora by Joy Schendledecker and Ann Altstatt, visual art contributions from Little Giant Collective, and community tabling from the Lived Experience Action Board (LEAB).