Isak Berbic
Isak Berbic
Associate Professor
Brief Histories: Tame the Wilderness?, 2020, community organizing, publishing
Icey Cream Projects is an ice cream selling bicycle cart and the distribution platform for our zine and art projects. In effort to create a self-sufficient model that supports our initiative as well as our collaborators, Icey Cream acts as an economic engine: while Brief Histories Press produces the zine, Icey Cream sells individually wrapped popsicles, which contribute to the raising of funds. From our apartment on Brooklyn Avenue, we take Icey Cream to parts of Prospect Park, streets and buildings around Crown Heights, Bed–Stuy, and parts of Clinton Hill, where our neighbors and the community spend their time outside.
Tame the Wilderness? is a hot flash, a volume of sorts, it arrives after the season, in retrospect, or perhaps in astonishment that things remain as uncertain as ever. The contributions of art, poetry, essays, vocal exercises, survival instructionals, word puzzles, horoscopes, and dream analysis together provide a temperature and way of seeing, and living through, our spiraling conditions.
The summer 2020 issue is the first zine by Brief Histories Press, based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It is a communal achievement, its production is based in collaboration with our community in Brooklyn and nearby. This collection speaks to matters of being together in the world, addressing ongoing issues of colonialism, race, indigeneity, class, and the climate. Not to mention the current global pandemic, and the courageous social justice movements happening in New York and around the world, from Black Lives Matter and beyond.