Our life has been a rather wide search to bring home the values we believe in, equality and social justice for everybody, and this follows through in our collaborations. Every community we seek out to work with has unique strengths and needs, but they all share symptoms of larger social and economic injustices. Discrimination, poverty, malnutrition, preventable death and violence all violate basic human rights.

Ongoing Development
+ Jan 20 Luke wants to build a play well in the Ntulya school yard (Africa Schoolhouse) for irrigation of the organic school gardens.


+ Dec 20 We started a collaboration with AImmee and Mark Bessire to document and design for Africa Schoolhouse to bring socially conscious learning and the needs
of the Ntulya community together. We'll develop the website of Africa Schoolhouse further to tell the ongoing stories and evidence of change in the lives of the Ntulya community. We'll also start a local Engineers Without Borders site for PSU students, and post the project on Architects for Humanity.

+ Dec 15 We started a collaboration with Leon Johnson to design all print materials for BLUE HAMMER: A Trans-Historical-Burlesque Dinner Theater. A performed future at Whitney Artworks, BLUE HAMMER conjures a virtual theatre of reclamation in the wake of the waning shadows of empire, remade and dismantled by the forensic potential of new communication technologies. The heart of this project unfolds in a small-town television studio in the Midwest, where an actor of a certain age, who professes to have theatrically toured, and exploited, an imaginary Africa now hosts a late-night show for television called Blue Hammer. His name is Vin Pays and he believes there is a vivid connection between the Jacobean classic, The Dutchess of Malfi, Hammer horror movies and his fabulations of Colonial Africa. The piece features real-time projected GPS analysis of colonial expansion in conjunction with Google Map orchestrated by collaborators in Cape Town. A secondary media stream features recreated video excerpts from Hammer horror films. In the midst of this mediated context the primary action unfolds as a live taping of the television show BLUE HAMMER. Throughout the “show” specters from the past participate via live “call-in” conversations and reckonings. We are committed to having the developmental stages of the work available to audiences via a “fan-site”. We expect to deliver initial content in intimate performance spaces that can double as real-time television/media studios, live-feeds and delivered online through the official website and through YouTube, etc. Live performances and a tour will follow, workshops, discussions, ultimately a distributable digital video, and a book-DVD archive of the process of the piece.

+ Dec 14 We will be mapping the development of the Convivial Symposia, a series of public dinner conversations to inform and sustain networks of creative production + collaboration at the Berwick Institute in Boston.

+ Nov 08 Michelle received a grant to develop a series of workshops, in which we will collectively fabricate smart costumes, play and perform our unique voices, document the performances, and edit and publish the Untold Narratives. The smart costumes will sport soft electronics integrated in the textiles, in combination with small printed circuit boards. Flexible solar power sources are suspended from the costumes on piano wires to energize the costumes and produce sounds. And we will play. Through body movement each of the performers unique voice can be explored. Through adjustments of the electronics in the costume and choreography we can let our personal sound grow into a concert of voices performing together, reacting to each other and developing music.

+ Nov 08 Luke started working on a longterm project collaborating with the students in the Design Department at Portland State University and Charity:water to build a well in a school in Africa. Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of all sickness and disease, and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Of the 42,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation, 90% are children under 5 years old. To help us donate some money towards the well this xmas you can go to www.charitywater.org/pages/lukasbertus/

+ Oct 08 Michelle traveled to Vietnam this week and brought James home with her from the Social Protection Centre No. 2, Hoang Giang commune, Hoang Hoa district, Thanh Hoa province. Thanh Hoa Province is the biggest province in Vietnam except for Hanoi and HCMC. The province consists of 636 communes of which 102 are considered very poor and receive government assistance while 139 are poor but do not receive government assistance. There are 27 districts and a population of some 3.7 million. About 1 million persons belong to 8 different ethnic minorities. Some 12 percent of the province’s population lives below the poverty line. The province ranks 47th out of 64 in terms of standard of living.

+ Oct 10 Luke is starting a new CNA job at "Our House of Portland". Since 1988, Our House has provided housing and specialized services for people living with HIV/AIDS. It is a good place to be at. Also, the new recoder came in the mail and we're trying it out on the kids before we'll make silly of ourselves in public. We'll be starting our Bergwear small run sound publications soon.

+ Sept 18 6.30 PM Michelle will show "Make the Patterns" at the Sisters in Cinema. 934 SW Salmons Street Portland OR. Women filmmakers hosted by the NWFilm Center School of Film.

+ Sept 08 Having something is hard to keep. We started the P:ear volunteer training and it's a lovely beginning of new things to come.

+ Sept 08 We went to see Anthony & the Johnsons with the Oregon Symphony. It was just beautiful. chillingly beautiful in between tonations, simplicity and a still space. This is Antony & the johnsons + Cocorosie Live @ Le Lieu Unique - Nantes 2004.11.17



+ Sept 08 We moved our studio to Portland Oregon, and hooked up with P:ear
P:ear builds positive relationships with homeless and transitional youth, ages 15 to 23, through education, art and recreation to affirm personal worth and create more meaningful and healthier lives. Each year our programs serve more than 350 homeless and transitional young people.
Together we will create a documentary form narrative project focused on empowering through collecting and publishing the stories that express opinions and perspectives nobody ever asks for. Working on paper, and through sound and motion we will create an archive of personal voices of the students of P:ear.

+ August 08 We started gathering/documenting narratives. Most have to do with gender, since Luke transitioned from a female to male sex (see the Lucky blog for all trans links). But some have to do with fear, some with war/death/refugee and it's influence on an art practice. Maybe we'll keep it in documentation form, maybe it will be books, maybe both. We're not sure about those details, just about that this work seems increadibly valuable to us.

+ July 08 We started conversations with leon johnson and the CMG NOMADIC INSTITUTE; Nimble in its movements and fluid in its boundaries between business and art, advertising and activism, the Institute will be breaking down traditional and limiting barriers between design, concept, performance, and product.

- No name is yours until you speak it; somebody returns your call and suddenly, the circuit of signs, gestures, gesticulations is established and you enter the dialogue, your person-hood, your shared life, your telling, cannot be denied. - CMG NOMADIC INSTITUTE STATEMENT














+ 0708 Luke works for 9 months as a Certified Nursing Assistant at the Cardiac Interventional Care Unit at Maine Medical Center. 'I learn a lot about caring for people in a stressful medical environment. I enjoy working with patients, I learn, I am careful, respectful and gentle with people I don't know at all. I see more ways of dying than I imagined'.

+ Winter 08 AImmee Bessire gets going serious with Africa Schoolhouse and starts the Ntulya school project where they will build a primary school with 15 classrooms, teacher housing, a kitchen, and a medical dispensary.
We are committed to building sustainable school communities for children in underserved areas of Africa. Our goal is to aid the progress of learning using modern technology and environmentally conscious methods while safeguarding the traditional teachings of cultural heritage. This is when they hit water while drilling the well.












+ Fall 07 Imagine our educational institutions as a third space, inclusive, equal, outside the rules of our social power structures, holding great potential to play. A space where we can perform and raise questions about ourselves, our narratives, our visual representations, as well as our wider social/cultural context. And create art.