Ground
Works

"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 receded, 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.

From 2009-2011, we worked together at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (Broad Institute, n.d.), building on a study (Lieberman-Aiden & Van Berkum et al., 2009) that made it possible to explore how the human genome, the DNA contained in every cell of the body, folds in 3D. At the outset of our collaboration, our approaches seemed so different as to be, perhaps, incommensurable. The scientists used tools like mathematics, computer science, and molecular biology, whereas the artistic toolkit was focused on the construction of physical objects, with a defined shape, area, and volume. Yet over time, we came to realize that all of these tools were addressing the same goal: making invisible concepts manifest as an experience intelligible to the senses. From the beginning of the project, we worked together creating drawings. Over time, our interactions evolved to become free-flowing conversations while drawing, which became a way of seeing together. Our visual experimentations grew into a body of drawings, paintings, prints, mixed-media artworks, wood blocks, a dynamic video installation, and a suspended wire sculpture (Ranganathan, 2021), and helped advance the scientific community’s understanding of how the human genome folds.