2022
Black Sound Symposium, Indexical, Santa Cruz, CA
The Black Sound Symposium was a 4-day event full of concerts, talks, workshops, screenings, and interdisciplinary dialogue rooted in Black sound and Black sonic space. The symposium aimed to create and sustain community; to celebrate curiosity, wonder, disobedience, collaboration, and play in artistic work; to expand anti-racist and activist pedagogy and methodologies in and outside of our institutions; and to honor the long and rich lineages of Black virtuosity that have been diminished and erased from artistic canons and social consciousness.
Including talks, panels, and workshops with: Gabriel Solis, Nicol Hammond, DeForrest Brown, Jr., Madre Guía (Stephanie Hewett), Carolyn Jean Martin, Aaron Samuel Mulenga, Akwasi Abrefah, & Mark Lomanno
And evening concerts by: Anthony R. Green + Bill Solomon, DeForrest Brown, Jr. + Madre Guía (Stephanie Hewett), and Speak for Change with Thomas Sage Pedersen and Madre Guía
Black studies and anticolonial thought offer methodological practices wherein we read, live, hear, groove, create, and write across a range of temporalities, places, texts, and ideas that build on existing liberatory practices and pursue ways of living in the world that are uncomfortably generous and provisional and practical and, as well, imprecise and unrealized. The method is rigorous, too. Wonder is study. Curiosity is attentive.
Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories
Kira Dralle 