With Reverence: Ritual, Performance, and Sonics in Collective Formation

• In Event: Seeking New Suns: Murmurations on the Visual, Affective, Geographic, and Sonic Possibilities of Collaborative Liberatory Methodologies

Abstract

This presentation is about a web-based ensemble of art and performance that was generated from an inquiry about the public pedagogies of creative collectives. Specifically, our inquiry took the form of a co-decolonizing participatory research project where we invited members of Black and Indigenous creative collectives to assemble together for one year and reflect on how they enact radical forms of togetherness through speculative, ancestral, and embodied practice. In the traditions of Indigenous visitation (Miner, 2014) and minor experiments in Black Study (Harney & Moten, 2013), these reflections among collective members -- as a collective method of data generation -- took the form of skill, strategy, and solidarity exchange sessions.
We understand collectives as groups who self-organize to envision and enact conditions that allow them to thrive beyond systems of oppression, including education systems. Collectives in this spirit derive from many heritage, political, and activist traditions. These include Black solidarity economies (Nembhard, 2014), Black feminisms (The Combahee River Collective, 1977), worker/anarchist traditions (Haworth, 2012), and more. In this project, Forms of Freedom, we grew to conceptualize our collective of creative collectives through an abolitionist impulse of formlessness, unleashed from the determinism of colonial, capitalist, and imperialist structures in favor of "an assembly of our obligations to one another" (Ruiz & Vourloumis, 2021, p. 8). Forms of Freedom began in 2020 and our work was surely informed, influenced and affected by the pandemic.
In this participatory project, the desire to create, make, and share artistry was the earliest and sincerest question collaborators asked of us, and also the earliest and sincerest answer to our initial questions about radical forms of collectivity. During this project, participants (and us, as scholar-artists) created beadwork, wrote ritual scripts, composed orchestral pieces, produced sonic compositions, made sound art, designed images, produced videos, and held an on-site studio session open to the public. At the conclusion of this project, we assembled our artistry into a web-based ensemble, an apparatus of movement suspended in time by digital space (Blaisse, 2018) as yet, one more form holding us together.
In this presentation, we open up, pull apart, and offer up this ensemble as a meditation on radical forms of collectivity that resonate and are aligned with emergent strategy (brown, 2017), holding change (brown, 2012), and witch work (brown and brown, 2023). We attend specifically to two practices of scholar-artistry in this ensemble: ritual scripts and sonic tune-ins, both extensions of Black poetics and Black feminist sonic performance traditions (e.g., Blacktronika Archives, 2021; Ellis, 2021; Brooks, 2021; Brown et al., 2018). These ritual scripts and tune-ins were made by the presenters through an intuitive and iterative process of thinking-feeling-creating with the archive of materials generated during this research project (e.g., 15 hours of exchange session conversations, video footage of studio sessions, etc.). In offering up this ensemble, we address the joy, practicalities, and process of scholarly collaboration and creativity and also the divergent, incommensurable, representational, and non-representational dimensions of academic (and more) contributions.

Authors

• Ruth Nicole Brown, Michigan State University

• Emery Marc Petchauer, Teachers College, Columbia University