Vision of Black Spatial Arts

dod.deca.hedron is:

Through my spiritual growth and development, I have been in touch with the lessons of the dodecahedron. The dodecahedron is a 12-sided shape that symbolizes protection, ascension and the element of aether, or voidness. (Pomegranate seeds, for example upon close examination are 12-sided irregular dodecahedrons.) Astronomers teach us that cosmic voids in the universe literally hold space for the expansion of matter and life. The dodecahedron is composed of 12 intersecting pentagons. It has 20 vertices and 30 edges. Each vertex of the dodecahedron is where three edges meet, meaning each point is connected to three other points, making the dodecahedron a great way to model and think about bringing people together through those who act as bridges between groups of people, resources, and ways of knowing. The geometry of the dodecahedron is a model for how to inhabit and create space in a way that is in touch and in tune with the Black demand to free the land. My vision for this land is for it to function like a dodecahedron: to be a form that holds the space for protection, ascension, and expansion.

Healing Black Relationships to Land and Power

Black people have a paradoxical relationship to space and power because in Western world views and practices, space and nature are that which is appropriated by Man, who has the agency and reason to organize nature and space to serve him and his interests. Modern life hinged on rendering Black, indigenous and colonized people as a part of space and nature, not as agents, but as chattal, in order to rationalize the capture of our ancestors' labor and life force to produce capitalist value systems. Black peoples paradoxical relationship to power is supported by knowledge systems that position Black people outside of space and time: no history, no homeland, no father, no where on the map, no known point of origin.

Healing Black people's relationship to space looks like creating a container for the Black imagination and Black ways of knowing to literally take up material space in the three dimensional world.

Healing Black peoples' relation to land looks like holding space for reweaving the multi-ethnic knowledge systems and world views that compose the Black radical tradition.

Healing Black people's relationship to power requires an experiential recalibration of where power comes from. How can we build power when we do not feel power or understand where it comes from?

Values

We value the Muscogee, Creek, Hitchiti, Miccosukee and Oconee people as the indigenous stewards of this land who resisted European settlers in what is now known as the US state of Georgia. We value the Mississippian and Swift Creek cultures, the mound builders whose architecture has survived hundreds of years of colonial desecration and enclosure.

We value Black people and Black spatial knowledge. Black people and Black spatial knowledge are inherently valuable. Capitalist geographies try to negate Black geographies through the exercise of racism, theft, violence, in an attempt to squelch alternative models of spatial development that are antagonistic to the property relation.

We value Black queer, trans, intersex and gender non-conforming / non-binary people and our contributions to the Black radical tradition. We insist that Black gay, lesbian, queer, trans, intersex, and gender non-binary people be respected, protected, cared for, and valued within the social life of Black liberation.

We value Black lesbian feminist thought as magic. Black lesbian feminists have consistently modeled for us how to build infrastructure and support for the most marginalized people by the most marginalized people.

We value our ancestors and their continued healing.

We value multi-racial solidarity. Racism is deadly real and race is a deadly fiction. We value deepening practices of solidarity across racial categories. We invite well resources people within the existing power structure to engage in redistribution of resources.

We value collaborative learning and shared labor. We value emergent strategy as the collaborative practice of being adaptable so that we can shape change rather than become victimized by it.

Interests

Protection is preparing ourselves for certain change. It is planning for and responding to threats to our personal and collective well-being and survival. This space is already offering protection by providing no-cost housing for Black people and serving as an evacuation point for loved ones in hurricane prone areas in the US South. We prioritize the protection of those of us who are under constant attack: Black and indigenous people, Black and indigenous people who are women, poor, queer, trans, gig economy workers, gender non-confomists, femmes, thems, migrants, unemployed and under waged scholars, and activists and organizers. We invite more and well-resourced people into this work of tending the grounds for our mutual growth, personal and collective transformation, and shared labor by supporting financially.

Ascension is the ability to imagine and see what has not yet materialized, to go beyond imposed / 3D limits. The long-standing challenges of enslavement and racial capitalism have always been met with an attitude of ascension: the imagination that there should and could be something better and more just than what was being held up as normal, legal, and status quo for Black people, indigenous people, and poor people in a plantation society. Ascension is the work of the Black radical imagination. This space supports ascension by honoring Black radical imaginations, re-weaving Black and Indigenous cosmologies, practices and technologies. In prioritizing ascension, we do the work of healing our relationship to land and with our ancestors, undoing the property relation and figuring out how to move through challenges together.

Expansion is growth. We have been inculcated into a colonial growth model that equates expansion with conquest, ownership, and property. We are often forced to value these things in order to have control over the quality of our lives. We prioritize a model of expansion that focuses on expanding into freedom, growing out of a racial capitalist mindset that is conditioned by surveillance, displacement, containment, policing, and settlement. We offer expansion by providing residence, by learning how to act in better relationship to the land and the elder land stewards of this area, and by building relationships with people across categories of social difference.

Principles

Abolition: To quote Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Abolition is presence." Abolition is not simply the absence of domination and carceral power, but the creation and generation of radical presence and power. Abolition is the active participation in the work of our ancestors who resisted colonization, capture, containment, and ownership. Abolition is about generating a presence that crowds out the social relations of racial capitalism and colonialism with systems and relations that reflect how we want to live. The social relations of racial capitalism require hierarchies based on categories of difference: race, gender, class, sex, sexuality, age, ability, and capacity. We work to think, act, and imagine beyond these systems and categories while attending to their traumatic and death-dealing impacts.

Pachakuti or "World Reversal": Pachakuti is a Quechuan concept that, throw the lens of Dr. Geryll Robinson, describes the reversal and undoing of the dominant world making paradigms of colonization, racism, rape culture, binaristic gender, and enslavement through the re-weaving and re-membering of Afro-indigenous cosmologies, spiritual practices, and earth stewardship technologies. We support world reversal by holding space for the arts of Afro-indigenous healing including shamanic work, grief ritual, herbalism, body work, ancestralization, and divination.

Freeing the Land-Free the Land! Is the radical demand that intertwines the work of enslaved Black and indigenous people who resisted plantation capitalism and settler colonialism. Enslaved people and indigenous people both have demanded to free the land, including themselves, from the extractive techniques and processes of plantation agriculture rooted in the paradigm of ownership and the geopolitical container of the nation-state. Racial capitalist development has always treated nature and land as a resource to be extracted from or as a nuisance to be abated, contributing to many of the environmental imbalances that most often impact Black, indigenous and poor people. We engage the demand to free the land by creating a space and time to reconnect to our plant and soil allies, to be allies to plants and soil, and to heal our relationships to land. We will interrupt the property relation by moving away from an inheritance model and we will scale new construction at the pace of minimal soil disruption.