Visible Conversations: Fran Bittakis Part 2 - Advocacy & Representation
Fran Bittakis is the founder and Creative Director of Joop Joop Creative , a radical creative agency and talent management for multidisciplinary creatives of color, womxn/nb, lgbtqia2s+ and their accomplices in Portland, OREGON since 2019. Join Fran and the Beauty Shop team for part 2 of Fran's interview.
A conversation with the Visible HQ Team
Jen: Tell us about some projects you’ve been working on with Joop Joop, and who’s a part of your team?
Fabia from She Shreds is in a band called “Sa Vi La(sp)?” and she plays guitar and Bappi from Brisk plays the drums and Brisa Gonzalez is the singer in the band. I’ve known Brisa the longest, but we’ve just reconnected over the last couple years. And Fabia is this 27 year-old CEO, such a badass person, and just has all the fire. It’s just really great to see someone that is so young, and a queer Latinx woman to be able to be like I’m taking up the space. I’m doing the damn thing. And her mom is really really supportive, but the cool thing about this project was it’s a music video for their song Sa Vi La and they invited their moms to come.
Fabia’s old roommate Noel, who own a vintage store in New Mexico, came up and styled the whole thing, and that was really amazing. And then Brisa really loves theater and has been collecting costume pieces for a long long time. Brisa dug deep into her collection and then her friend Maria painted the set for the PICA shooting day. And Evan James Atwood who is an amazing photographer came and shot portraits.
It was really cool and really special to be working on a multiple day project: one day, filming at PICA and then two days out traveling to John Day and the Painted Hills and the fossil beds. At PICA when we filmed, they had the moms play the musical instruments that they play. And Papi’s mom got behind the drums and was like a one, a two, one, two, three… and we’re like are you in a band!
I also spend a lot of time advocating for my friends I feel have a lot of talent. My friend Alberta Poon is this amazing filmmaker. As a DP, she can shoot, she can edit, she’s writer—she can do so many things. She’s been doing this for a long time and she has a really hard time getting her foot in the door, or getting paid what she’s worth.
At the same time, I was co-producing a video for Maarquii and they are just an amazing talented person who is making music through a lens that really doesn’t exist. I don’t know of any other black femme rappers in a way that she’s presenting herself. It was a huge crew, there were 7 dancers, 2 location days. It was a lot of work to pull together—2 stylists, 2 producers, and we’re all just pitching in to help Maarquii get her music video together and none of us are getting paid.
And the thing is that when you all see this video and you see that there’s literally zero dollars put into it, and everybody putting together their efforts to make it happen—and it’s not ideal because all of us work so hard, and being a producer, you’re spending hours and hours planning everything and if you think about it. So right now, it’s a thankless job, but maybe one day when Marquii gets really big, she’ll remember to hire me for another job in the future, but as of right now, it’s just because we all really believe in her—and when you see the video, you will not understand how it was made for zero dollars.
I also ended up hiring Naquisa who does Meals for Heels, and she makes really healthy meals for sex workers and strippers and can deliver. I think it’s like Friday and Saturday from like 9pm to 2am. So that’s the thing. I see Naquisa doing a thing, and I’m immediately like how can I help you. That’s real community. That’s doing the work. You see somebody doing the thing and you’re like what can I bring to the table for you? So we’re brainstorming and I’m like, oh, maybe that means a food styling session, product shoot. I could make up a crazy idea for how to promote her business, but then I’m like maybe we should talk to someone that is a food stylist and see how that could look. How do people that have restaurants or catering businesses really get themselves on the map. How do we transmit that information out into the world. Is it going to be completely wild for people to know that there’s a healthy food delivery service for sex workers in this town. Could you imagine?
Julie: It’s a niche. And I think in this town more than any other town it makes sense.
Fran: Yeah, because we have the most strip clubs per capita than anywhere else. So it totally makes sense. You can’t eat bar pizza for the rest of your life.
“I have people being like, “well how do I get in touch with that community?”…and it’s like, start showing up”
Jen: It’s really popular right now for agencies and creative studios to consider reflecting diversity in their work and express it as an internal value. In creative work/design, does it move things forward to represent people that aren’t really there?
I basically was going to throw in the towel with Joop Joop after Design Week [2019] because there were so many agencies that were just willing to push out [Joop Joop’s] website, the logo, the identity. We can do work that is thoughtful, and can actually raise awareness for organizations that are doing good work. That is the surface level, because then, we’re talking about that them, people still can’t figure out that you have to include the folks that you’re raising money for as a part of your process or as a part of your team. Because then otherwise, it’s just some savior syndrome stuff that is really harmful. You’re deciding for a whole group of people what you think is best for them. It’s just really harmful. And so, that’s one of the things I’m worried about right now. I came off of Design Week [2019], and I’m like, I don’t have a fighting chance! I don’t have a website, I don’t have any of these things. It’s going to take me how many jobs to save $10,000 for a website before I can actually get [Joop Joop] out on the table. I’ll never be able to keep up. And so I just think unless if I’m able to communicate this to all these other agencies, like hey, that thing you’re doing is really cool but it’s really important for you to have someone that’s a part of that community be a part of the planning process. It’s not ok for you to decide what’s best for someone else. But people really need to think about it: do you like your mom deciding for you what you should wear that day? It’s as simple as that. You don’t want your husband to dress you. I don’t want my husband to dress me.
Liz: My husband dresses me. Every time I get an outfit compliment, it’s his.
Fran: Really?! Well then I’ll have to ask him to dress me. But you know what I mean. It is as simple as that. And just being able to spit it out in that little digestible quip, that’s all it is. I have people being like, “well how do I get in touch with that community?”…and it’s like, start showing up. Start sending those people money. That helps. And also, we talked about how compensation doesn't have to be money. That’s really important to realize. In some ways, even with Visible being pro bono, there are brown and black folks that do have a little bit of money or some money, and to just assume that they don’t have the money to pay for that, that’s a problem. Maybe another option should be you can pay a person of color to do this work, versus just doing it for free. And actually changing that narrative. I really, really hope that companies and corporations and small businesses and whoever they are can understand that part. You can’t decide for other people what’s best for them. And then make sure that you’re doing the best that you can to incorporate those folks into collaborating with you. And not always just even hiring them, but making them part of the team. That’s even more important.
I’ve had conversations with activist friends who are like, you know, I see you posting you should go to this class, or that class, or you should sign up for this person’s workshop or whatever, but do you feel like that’s a good thing? Who made all of those people the authorities on that subject. And it’s like, well, they’re doing something. If 65,000 people signed up for the “Me & White Supremacy” workbook, obviously they found a way to give that information to people in a digestible way that they can understand. That’s a good thing. It’s just trying to figure out where everybody’s coming from and meeting them where they’re at, and that’s hard because sometimes I feel like I can only talk to X amount of people that really understand what I’m talking about. I think luckily I’m able to navigate speaking to people and at least navigating communication that’s at least palatable for y’all to sit a listen to me talk.
Liz: Being that personality that can make people feel comfortable while making them uncomfortable is really rare, and that’s something that you bring that someone that’s a good writer that can organize information may not be able to bring.
Fran: The other thing is that I can do this work to a certain point, but then, I’m not a white person so, sometimes I feel as a brown woman that this critique is not going to come across to you as well as it can from another white person.
Liz: White people have to be saying it to each other.
Fran: Exactly. For a long time, I had a rule where I was like I’m not inviting white people to my house for a year. I just straight up just couldn’t do it. I remember the first time that I did do it and I invited all my close friends over that I hadn’t seen in a year, and I was coming out of trying to find a different community and when I went back to my original community, I realized how much I had changed.
That’s why I want to do the work that I’m doing, because if it is true that I navigate white spaces well then, fine. I’ll do it. I’ll do that work. But at the same time, a lot of the work that I do, I advocate for indigenous folks, black folks, trans folks, I’m kind of like, well shit, I don’t really do anything in my own community of Asian, Pacific Islander, Thai, Southeast Asian…I don’t really focus any of my work on that specifically. I don’t know what that means and why I’m not doing that work, and that’s the kind of stuff I talk to my therapist about—unpacking my own identity as this person and living in these white spaces for such a long time, and I remember verbally saying out loud when I first moved here that sometimes I would walk past a window with all my friends as we were walking down the street, and kind of forget that I wasn’t a white person. That’s really deep and really hard to acknowledge that you’re just around white people all the time that you don’t even realize that you are the other person. I know that most of the time, 99% of time when I walk into a space, I’m going to be the only plus-size Thai woman in that room.
Liz: And because there’s white supremacy layer, and then there’s also the layer that people think they’ve done the work, there’s this weird two layer thing happening.
Fran: The idea that a lot of these companies are run by white men and can keep putting up content over and over again that is so similar and so the same and the idea that you don’t actually want marginalized folks to come in and give you all these different lenses so that you can start pumping out all this different points of view is so mind boggling to me. Why would you want that? What I see happening now is that I see all these folks in town that are feeling this way and are splitting off from these agencies and trying to do their own thing. Doing this work for this long also means that I might just be four or five layers down into my work, and everyone else is now just starting or half a layer deep or one layer deep.
I have a lot of conversations with women of color who can react as extreme as white lady tears or white fragility, you know, that vibe…And they’ll react to me with, I’m a woman and I’m a person of color, so like, what? And it’s like, you haven’t dealt with your anti-blackness or whatever it is that we’re trying to navigate. You have to do the work regardless of who you are. That “Me & White Supremacy” workbook is supposed to be for white people. I’m doing it anyways because I’m not a black or Indigenous person, so I think just getting other people of color to realize that that’s work that you need to do too. But trying to have that conversation with another person of color that doesn’t see themselves that way, it’s like “well I’m a person of color, so I’m good,”. And that conversation is doubly hard to have, more so than having that conversation with a white person. I don’t know, it’s very layered and very complicated, but what I do see now is for the next five years, there’s going to be a cluster fuck of people trying to do the work, or do the work without having that foundation. It’s going to get real messy.
Everybody thinks that they’re on the path to the other side and there’s no being done. It’ll never be done. And that’s the thing. I get people that are like, “All lives matter. Chicken Soup for the Soul, if we all just loved each other and cared for each other…all this stuff,” and I’m like y’all are thinking about some utopian situation that I don’t see in my lifetime or even in the next five generations and in that time. So you just do what you can and you hope for the best, and you just do what you can. Try to make it work, and also try to not get swallowed up in the darkness. That’s real too. We can get it done. We can make it happen, we just really really have to open ourselves up. It’s really vulnerable work. And I do realize that it’s everybody in their own way. Everybody at their own pace. Everybody at their own time. And it is that…I want everything to go fast.
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