Since then, she’s made more than 70 rattles - handheld folk instruments with molded clay tops that are filled with beads, plastic, metal and other noisemaking materials and attached to wooden handles. “I really wanted to create something that would make a lot of noise and that I could use instead of screaming and yelling.” She was inspired, too, by the rich culture of creativity prevalent in protest spaces in Los Angeles - with Aztec dancers, drummers and more. “I have a really quiet voice, it’s hard for me to project,” she said. The first two rattles Mann ever made in 2019 simply said “yes” and “no.” She’d been attending a lot of street protests and felt stymied. ‘Get your bans off our bodies’ Elana Mann’s rattles in action at a rally for abortion rights. It was time to bring out her protest rattles. “As an artist,” she thought, “I can put that into motion.” “He was talking about hope in this really amazing way - hope as action in the face of despair,” she recalled. She remembered an interview she’d seen with activist Ady Barkan earlier in the spring. “I was feeling just so, so desperate,” said Mann, by then an artist and activist living in Los Angeles with two young children of her own. I can feel more empowered in my life,” Mann told me over Zoom. Going to that protest helped her realize “there’s this thing called solidarity and these movements that I can be a part of, and I don’t have to be so scared. The fear that propelled her that day was reminiscent of others she recalls from her childhood - when she learned about the Holocaust at age 5, when she and her classmates at a Jewish day school sang songs for children stuck in the Soviet Union, when they had bomb drills in class. Someone had fashioned a papier-mache coat hanger painted in red that Mann and her friend carried as a prop they didn’t fully understand. “It was just terrifying.”Ī friend from middle school was the daughter of activists, and the family invited her to attend a protest with them in the wake of the attacks. ![]() ![]() “What if I get pregnant and then I try to get help and then I get shot?” she remembers thinking. ![]() 30, 1994 - killing two and wounding several others - Elana Mann was a frightened 14-year-old looking on from the neighboring town of Newton. When a gunman opened fire on two abortion clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts, on Dec.
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