Forms of Freedom: The Art and Design of Black and Indigenous Creative Collectives

"Forms of Freedom" was a two-year participatory research project that explored how Black and Indigenous creative collectives evolve to sustain themselves over time. To explore this question, we invited members of three collectives to assemble for visitation, reflection, skill, and idea exchange sessions over a nine-month period, and over Zoom, due to the global pandemic. These collectives were Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths, Fire in Little Africa/The Space Program, and The Aadizookaan. Months later as the pandemic resided, we reassembled these collectives for a People's Sound Studio collaboration in New York City. The People’s Sound Studio was an opportunity to create together in person, practicing in public how we move, sound, organize, and collectivize in the now. Our assembly was held by care and familiarity among us as convenors and among our collaborators, sharing genuine desire to strengthen existing connections, deepen the love, and expand solidarities across new relations. We understood this assembly as a minor experiment in Black study (Harney & Moten, 2013), one that emphasized aesthetic performance. This exploration generated a shared archive of materials from participants and ourselves as artist-organizers: ritual performance scripts, sound compositions, conversation recordings, voice memos, video montages, in situ practices, photographs, and beadwork. We assembled these creations into an ensemble, an apparatus of movements suspended in time by digital space (www.formsoffreedom.com). This ensemble provides multivocal, incommensurable performances propelled from the initial research question.