Surface
“How do we sustain this intellectual and creative labor? How do we figure, bear, and carry it? How do we practice freedom inside the enclosure? How do we hold and sustain each other? How do we create a future in which it is possible to live unbounded lives?” - Tina Campt
[1]
We wish to be co-conspirators with Harriet Jacobs, Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, and all Black feminist scholars in search of their own loophole of retreat. We are in conversation with the Loophole of Retreat exhibit and gathering held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2019.
[2]
We know change happens in small and large ways, and that small acts have large impacts. We know collaboration is key to our survival. We know that change is inevitable. We are guided by adrienne marie brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and other emergent strategists who chart a new path for our species.
[3]
We offer a grammar of refusal and a language of freedom for the humanities. We offer an invitation to draw new lines over, under, and through to claim new relations.
[4]
We gather in the Taller, workshops, or incubators, to create futures beyond the academy and within the communities.
[5]
Accountable to our communities, we are guided by Tina Campt’s keywords from Loophole of Retreat: vessel, surface, touch, formation, and insurgency.
[6]
This Fall 2023 and Spring 2024, we embrace the keyword SURFACE: “the outside part or uppermost layer of something
(often used when describing its texture, form, or extent);
to rise or come up to the surface of the water or the ground.”