Through this platform, we will create ABUELOS, a cultural centre with accommodation, as a site of radical hospitality and artistry. This is not speculative. Working closely with visionary and brilliant collaborators, from our community, to the design team, to artists-in-residence, to legal, finance and governance partners, we are excitedly embarking on the next phase of the journey to materialise this space and are looking for co-conspirators to organise with.

How do we prepare for a community space in which culture, radical hospitality and architecture are crafted to meet the moment?

What is the moment?

We are at a critical juncture, facing compounding global challenges which manifest differently across localised settings. Climate breakdown, rising temperatures, war and the cost-of-survival crisis are some of the symptoms of a deep-rooted set of problems, in which life is made collateral damage for private gain and profit. We acknowledge this, not to become immobilised by overwhelm, but to recognise the layers of what is to be transformed. At the root, we live in a cultural context engineered towards supremacy, domination and control — violence, genocide and isolation are just some of the strategies deployed to maintain this culture.

Among many things, this engineering has facilitated the extraction of wealth, land and materials from colonised nations via the exploitation of Black labour. The British Empire’s systematic theft, violation and ‘property’-making of Black bodies, labour, and life through enslavement and colonisation directly accounts for the accumulation of British wealth, in which land and property ownership are the key tenets. This exploitative system is not only the basis of Britain’s current economy, but has continued to devastate the lands and communities from which resources and lives were extracted.

“The injustices experienced by Black people and people of colour today are historically linked to the theft of land by Britain, colonial expansion and the exploitation of former colonies through the creation of systems of capitalism and racism. These systems continue to shape who has access to material resources and whose belonging matters on this land today.” — Land In Our Names

In the UK, this historical injustice has manifested in the ongoing decimation of cultural, civic, social and domestic spaces, particularly for working-class, Black communities. Spaces which are crucial to our resistance, self-determination and possibility are constantly under threat, disinvested in, policed or diminished.

The deliberate dismantling of Black spaces in Britain is a continuation of the colonial system, perpetuating cycles of dispossession, marginalisation and enforced movement. And this isn’t disconnected from a planetary-scale story. Globally, whether climate migration, war, racialised economic disparity or developer-led urban regeneration, the impacts of insecure tenure have generationally detrimental impacts on Black life.

In Birmingham today, we’re seeing loss at an unfathomable scale. In 2023, Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, filed a Section 114 notice, effectively declaring itself bankrupt. What proceeded was an escalated selling off of assets, largely in inner-city neighbourhoods, a process which was catalysed under previous governments. As the largest landowner in the city, the impact of these state-sanctioned sales for the benefit of private developers has devastated already vulnerable communities. Take, for example, Ladywood Unite, who are currently campaigning to “protect the community from displacement and corporate profiteering”, in the wake of plans to demolish between 2000 and 6000 homes as part of a major regeneration scheme, which is likely to price out residents forced to move elsewhere.

We know these stories are widespread across the UK: urban renewal projects, gentrification, and discriminatory housing policies have systematically displaced Black, racialised and working-class populations, eroding their homes, cultural spaces and community strongholds.

Spatial justice, through the land ownership layer, is central to our struggle, acknowledging land as key to self-determination and property ownership is where the concentration of wealth in this country is accumulated and held. el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz notoriously emphasised the crucial role of land, declaring “Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.” His words resonate deeply with the current struggles for Black spaces. In inner-city neighbourhoods across Birmingham that have long faced periods of managed decline and divestment, communities are competing with the pace of the private sector who are constantly looking for the new sites likely to yield high returns. The managed decline of working-class communities, which drives down values that can then be hiked later, make these prime locations for development.

Important to mention, that when in financial crisis, the local authority sells assets deemed unviable for its own investment as part of austerity measures. These assets are typically in the inner-city neighbourhoods of racialised and working class communities; infrastructure like libraries, learning centres and community hubs, meaning residents shoulder the burden of lost essential spaces and services.

That there are so few Black-owned organisations owning land for the community to do this work securely is part of the generational devastation. Today, we bear witness to the Harambee Organisation of Black Unity who are working to try and revive the Marcus Garvey Centre in Handsworth, for Black education and cultural preservation. We also celebrate Legacy Centre of Excellence in Aston, whose team had to compete with other for-profit bidders to acquire the space, when the council put a tranche of assets (including the former Drum Arts Centre) on the market years prior to the Section 114 filing.

This is testament to the importance of establishing community-owned social, cultural spaces, that are futures-facing and historically grounded at the same time, where land can be held in perpetuity for Black thrivance, with communities dignified by the agency of permanence.

If the challenges are widespread, why the focus on Black life?

“I have never worked on race and ethnicity as a kind of subcategory; I have always worked on the whole social formation, which is racialised.”
— Stuart Hall

Black life offers a necessary portal to understand the human condition. In our analysis, we acknowledge the liberation of Black people from the entrapments of capitalism and supremacy (including categorisations like ‘Black’) would necessitate a dismantling of all systems of oppression and therefore, profound freedom for all life. This is because the current systems of oppression we live within require inequality, which is preserved or enshrined by racism, to paraphrase Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

The struggle for Black liberation, as interconnected with other movements for justice, requires a fundamental reimagining of our economic systems, moving away from extractive capitalism towards models that prioritise collective thrivance and environmental stewardship. It would require a shift in our social paradigms, replacing hierarchies of oppression with frameworks of reciprocity, dignity and self-determination for all life.

The work of Black liberation, therefore, cannot be confined to the work of Black people and requires that we all play our part.

*”The word “thrivance” is a direct reference to intersectionality. Thrivance theory asserts that the solutions and responses to interlocking systems of oppression must be interlocking systems which lead to holistic thriving.” — Dr. Destiny Deguzman

These interconnected crises currently unfolding necessitate a radical reimagining of our social, economic and political systems, emphasising the need for collective action and transformative change. This is cultural work. And there is a resistance taking place, led by those working across fields, industries, places and contexts, engaging culture-making as a transformative practice.

What is the role of culture in this time?

As Aisha Shillingford says, culture is the foundational layer of our “beliefs, ideologies, values, assumptions, myths, behaviours, structures, systems, institutions, identities, workplaces, hobbies, economies, and more. Culture is what underpins our political and economic systems. It is also the manifestation of our political and economic decisions. Indeed, culture is who we are and what we do.”

“If culture is all that we believe, value, do, and create, then cultural power is the ability to shape what we believe, what we value, what we do, and what we create. It is the power to decide what imaginary shapes our society.” — Aisha Shillingford

As artists and cultural workers, we know how to give form to ideas, how to craft narrative and texture, how to create meaning, story, nuance. Our vocation is to make vision tangible, experiential, sensory and witnessed. So, at MAIA, we started getting curious about how we could make the vision of a world towards liberation tangible. As a community, can we engage our creative skills and capacities to materialise the worlds we’re longing for, in turn, creating a new cultural context engineered towards love, life, power-with, dignity and interdependence?

If this is the role of culture, and artists are to make this type of revolution irresistible (as Toni Cade Bambara incites), what does it mean in a city in which culture is used as the marketing strategy to appeal to global investors for urban development, while decimating independent cultural spaces, divesting from arts institutions, under-resourcing artists and disintegrating 100% of arts budgets, as if the decade prior wasn’t brutal enough?

Here’s what we know: Resistance always surfaces from the underbelly. The infrastructures we need will emerge from the grassroots and set precedence for the future of cultural life. For this to be a sustained, structural shift in power, what resources and infrastructures do we need to grow and build? How can this cultural power be rooted in and held across a community, rather than being used to leverage individuals? How can our contributions as artists and cultural workers transcend symbolic, identitarian work that, while often a beautiful gesture, fails to invoke collective, structural change?

ABUELOS as a Proposition

In 2017, we started reflecting on the radical precedents from which we wanted to envision these types of sustaining infrastructures, to resist the recreation of institutions that have extracted from and excluded us.

As a Black-led organisation, acknowledging the lifetimes of displacement of African descendants under enslavement, imperialism, colonialism, the violence of Empire and developer-led regeneration, thinking about spatial justice through land ‘tenure’ is fundamental to our livelihoods and culture.

What became really clear was that our definitions of what we’re sustaining are expansive. ‘What sustains us’ invites us to think about:

• the reparative land piece, to reclaim land, to nourish and be nourished by; how long-term stewardship enables capacity-building, community rootedness, healing and Earthly reconnection
• financial sustainability and the material realities of keeping a space operating and how we circulate resources, with the climate reality
• environmental sustainability and how the design, construction and operating of what we build is in some semblance of harmony with our climate, environmental and ecological assessments
• spiritual sustainability, in which we gather, are held and honour in reverence to Source — a seeing of life in all life.
• organisational care and what labour histories, Disability Justice frameworks and radical hospitality have to teach us about work in a 24/7 infrastructure, such as a hotel

Could we establish a space-based proposition that centres these layers, speaking to the reclamation of Black space, the centring of infrastructural hospitality and care, as well as the long-term investment of artists and cultural workers oriented towards transformation?

In community, over the last decade, we’ve been reflecting on where we’ve accessed this kind of radical hospitality, care and infrastructure before. Throughout the years, we uplifted the generosity of community workers, the fluidity of youth centres, the preciousness of the Caribbean front room, the storytelling lineages of the elders and the communal organising of post-Windrush migrant workers within a hostile Britain, in which a humble home or shopfront becomes a collective resource. As we established YARD (2020), and set about organising ABUELOS, the practice of upholding and learning from these precedents continues.

Iteratively, we started practicing the sanctuaries needed to grow cultures of abundance within the hostile environment of the 21st century — places and resources to stay, convene, grieve, grow, make, share, play, laugh, organise, build…

The idea for ABUELOS was born — initiated as a cultural centre with accommodation, reimagining hospitality and the hotel model, in the abundant spirit of Grandad’s house. Like the radiating embrace of los abuelos (the grandparents), this is a place where the armchair is a stage, where debate is meaningful and mobilising, where laughter echoes through corridors adorned with art and artefacts, where the walls are exhibitions of those we love, where the lush gardens produce vegetation to nourish our bodies, the stories shared nourish our souls, and where wisdom is passed down through generations. The cultural centre pulses with the rhythms of Caribbean life, hosting events, performances and gatherings that testify to a culture worth preserving; where bedrooms are private sanctuaries, each designed to feel like a cherished corner of Grandad’s house.

Organising ABUELOS

ABUELOS is more than a building. It’s a right to stay, to declare our terms, to orient towards what we care about and to collectivise in order to sustain it. Organising for ABUELOS therefore offers an invitation to reimagine the layers of the infrastructure we need — to think about its economics, ownership, architecture, hospitality, culture, operating model, land relationship, governance, and much more.

But this is not a speculative exercise. The choices that we make today are going to form the material basis of ABUELOS and the land-stewarding entity at its foundation. For this, we need to be in communion.

‘Organising ABUELOS’ is a programme running 23–26 October 2024, in which we invite our community, peers and those we have yet to meet into a collective enquiry that informs how ABUELOS becomes real.

What do we build with?

Who do we build with?

What do we acknowledge in the process?

What do we reimagine along the way?

Through this collective enquiry, we will gather in intentional space to:

• Connect ABUELOS to a longer arc of mobilising and organising with others doing culture-making work, asking what lineage we want to be in and who we want to work alongside in materialising this space
• Situate within a wider local resistance against cultures of domination, extraction and control
• Surface contradictions that emerge in responding to compounding crises, informing how we build
• Amplify the many forms of knowledge, visions, practices around us
• Explore how ABUELOS could serve as an infrastructure to recirculate resources to invest in radical hospitality and culture-making
• Find and mobilise peers to materialise ABUELOS with
• Recontextualise the role of culture within value-making contexts, recognising that those who create cultural and social value in a place should be able to share in that abundance

ABUELOS is a living testament to the Caribbean ethos of making much from little, turning scarcity into abundance through collective ingenuity, community, reciprocity and love.

‘Organising ABUELOS’ invites us to connect and consider how our labour, skills, visions and experiences can build what dignifies, uplifts and affirms us, instead of what depletes us. This is space for our culture.

Organising ABUELOS: 23–26 October 2024. Takes place in Ladywood, Birmingham, with some events being made available virtually. For full details: bit.ly/ABUELOS2024

We recognise and extend gratitude that this work is being generously uplifted by folks in so many ways, including by people unable to attend this event. If you are looking to support the project with skills, resources or advocacy, please email Amahra Spence at as@maiagroup.co. If you are curious and want to know more about ABUELOS, please email Mariam Aslam at ma@maiagroup.co.

We were deeply honoured to be joined by: Sage Stephanou, S Aisha, Toni Lewis and Joon-Lynn Goh, alongside illustrator Sharonjit Sutton. Here, we share Hazel’s reflections on the learnings, tenderness and tangibles that emerged from our time together, accompanied by Sharonjit’s illustrations.

For the Plain Language version of Hazel’s reflections, click here.
She has also compiled a Resources document, linked here.

This blogpost is for you. This is a collection of lessons and reflections for disabled organisers, present and future. That includes you. We are all in dialogue with disability, sickness and illness, some of us transiently and some of us permanently. All of us will visit disability at some point in our lives. For those of us committed to liberation, it’s imperative that our movements, our relationships and our selves take on the wisdom, grace and complexity of disability justice movements. As part of MAIA’s journey towards this, we asked a question — “What can disability justice teach us about the pathways to collective liberation?”. This blogpost summarises how we tried to answer that question, over the course of 4 workshops with disabled, chronically ill, sick & crip artists and leaders. We hope it’s of some use to you x

Reflection #1 — Extraction & Performativity

In our first session together, we explored the question — “What does a space need to feel like in order for you to accept support?”

We asked this question knowing that for many disabled people (in particular black & brown queer women) it’s often easier to offer support than it is to accept it. This question let us dive into the weeds of vulnerability, hope, grief, and the ways we have been let down by people professing to make space for us.

As well as a laundry list of things which make us feel safe (check out the Resources page), we shared how rarely we felt supported in self-professed “progressive” spaces. Someone shared approaching another disabled artist at a conference, who said “Nobody has spoken to me for 45 minutes”.

Just because an event meets our basic access needs doesn’t mean it values us once we’re there.

In our ableist society, many people are carrying extremely harmful, almost eugenicist beliefs about the value of disabled people. We are continually told that to be valuable means to be independent, productive, passionate, intelligent, eloquent — and a host of other flawed, often racist and patriarchal terms. When this shows up in organising, it means people with visible needs and disabilities are assumed to have nothing of value to offer — and conversely, that if you are clearly adding value to a space, that you aren’t disabled. For many in our group, this meant making choices about how we wanted to be viewed — as disabled, or as valuable. Can I deal with the extra pain of ignoring a need for 30 minutes, because I know my point will be heard as more valid by the people in the audience? Can I deal with being infantalised by venue staff if it means I’ll have the support to stay and hear that last talk?

This was just the first example of a theme that kept emerging throughout our workshops — our desire to be seen as whole people. We can be both valuable and disabled. We can both offer support and need support. We can be leaders and still need to step back.

In our experiences with other artists & organisations, this wholeness was almost always missing. Non-disabled people are often flustered, impatient, almost desperate to be seen as providing visible access needs, but weren’t treating disabled & sick folks with care and humanity once those basic needs were met. As one group member said — “If people are not doing the work of undoing their internalised ableism, it doesn’t matter what work these venues/spaces do.”

We went deeper into the grief, isolation, boredom and tiredness of dealing with people whose commitment to liberation & justice is skin-deep. We talked about the confusion of organisations using language we’ve been building for years, only to realise none of the practices or values we expected to be in place are there. We talked about companies asking for access riders but not reading them — of offering opportunities for disabled artists without having clear resources, budgets or policies set aside to meet access needs (and some very helpful ideas for how to protect yourself in those negotiations — check out the Resources page).

In cases like these, where there is only a performative commitment to disabled people, a lot of extra work ends up falling onto disabled artists to be funding their own needs, sourcing interpreters, educating venue staff, looking over draft policies, and the delicate relational work of advocating for ourselves & other disabled people without putting ourselves at risk. On top of these external demands, there are internal forces pressing on our bodies. The demands of being expected to work beyond our limits, of holding stress and tension, of hypervigilance and compromise — all to provide value to organisations and people that don’t truly care about us.

Reflection #2 — Martyrs, Heroes, Leaders & People

Another common thread throughout our sessions was feeling tired and isolated within community and mission-led work.

Running an organisation, a workshop, or a space that strives to centre accessibility brings with it a strong sense of personal responsibility. We know how valuable our spaces are to people who have nowhere else where they feel safe. We also know how important it is for disabled partners, artists & staff to feel seen and held in their wholeness, to not work past burnout or have their needs ignored. But as vital as those needs are, meeting them often isn’t the true, deeper purpose we created spaces for. Balancing those responsibilities is often a fraught exercise with guilt on both sides. People shared stories of projects delayed or cancelled because of funds or time being redirected to support individuals or extend a vital space — and how that felt right and important, but also how hard it was to deal with the feelings of frustration, guilt and grief of ideas going unrealised.

The hardest thing was how alone people felt in making those decisions. In its own way, the structures of our organisations and project management created similar dehumanisation as we felt in spaces run by others. Working as leaders and managers meant contending with capitalist, ableist ideas of leaders as individual heroes and martyrs — of captains who sacrifice continually for the good of keeping the ship afloat. Again, the space to be seen as a whole person — capable of mistakes, of needing room to grieve hard decisions, to be held and supported was missing.

If this was a talk at a conference, this would be where someone mentions mutual aid networks and interdependence as vital for sustainable work. But we rarely get to talk about the messy realities of what those terms mean. What are the limits for how time and financially poor communities can offer support? What does it mean to interact with and use systems which are actively violent, but we haven’t built alternatives for yet? How does a recognition of individual power and capability have a place within arguments against individualised solutions to supporting disabled people?

We tried to answer these questions by discussing how we’d offer support to a newly disabled person — who we called Emmett. Our fictional Emmett was an ambulatory wheelchair user, trying to grapple with familiar challenges for most disabled people — managing pain, feelings of shame asking for support, confusion around benefits processes, isolation & resentment in old friendship circles and relationships.

This is where we acknowledged the pressure towards martyrdom and heroism isn’t just being pushed on us from outside. It’s something within us already. A reminder guiding us was — the systems we’re fighting don’t just exist outside of the room, they are in the room with us (and in our bodies with us.) We all had so many Emmett’s in our lives, and the urge to rush in to protect and help was always there. Yes, talking about sustainable, reciprocal, interdependent support meant talking about big, structural solutions — but it also meant discussing deeply personal, small solutions for overcoming the expectations placed on us. In a room of majority women & nonbinary folks of colour, we talked about how our sense of personal responsibility came from the complicated interplay of being raised as caregivers, feelings of value & self-worth, and watching support for our communities being eroded over decades of austerity, privatisation and hostile environments. We didn’t have easy solutions. Just a sense of deep compassion towards each other, knowing that setting boundaries is something we try to do, sometimes fail, and always comes with complicated emotions even when we do succeed.

It’s with that mixture of compassion and boundaries that we imagined talking to Emmett. We talked about the importance of allowing Emmett to tell us what he needed, and to move at his pace. It might be the wrong time to offer tangible support if all Emmett really needs is a space to grieve. When he’s ready, we talked about two different kinds of support — skills & knowledge about navigating systems, and developing internal resilience.

Of all our conversations, talking about internal resilience left me feeling the most unbalanced and naive. As someone relatively new to openly identifying and organising as disabled, every part of me still clenches at the mention of personal, individual responsibility for managing illness. After all, it’s one of the main arguments that’s been used to dismantle benefits & services, to prop up health & wellness industries and bolster the well meaning friends who are certain that if you just drink more water/go outside/exercise/go gluten free you can take complete control of your body. I still clutch uncritically to the idea that mutual aid is infallible and perfect, if we just get enough people to believe in it. It still is a vital part of how I imagine liberation, but it’s not all there is.

When we talked about internal resilience, we were really talking about individual power. People shared how often newly disabled people are stripped of their power in their own lives. The only power they are permitted or encouraged to use is the power to reach out, to plead, or to manipulate the guilt of non-disabled people into offering support. This is the effect of endless charitable ads on TV and bus stops; of the language of “overcoming”, “struggle”, and “battle”; of government depictions of benefits scroungers. It’s the societal script of what a disabled person is, and when someone becomes disabled and has no experience of anything else, it’s the only tool available to them to find support and control the outcomes in their lives. When talking about individual resilience, we are talking about fighting against this. Fighting against the idea that the only power we have is to use feelings of guilt or pity to keep us safe. To varying extents, we still have power to influence and control our lives. We can meet some of our needs on our own. We can call on our disabled siblings for support, joy & community. For those needs we can’t this way, we have power to communicate needs and ask for support in ways that do not depend on performance and emotive stories. We have the power to advocate for ourselves.

We talked about how to guide Emmett towards this different perception of himself, his disability and his power. We asked “How are you showing up for yourself?” We talked about how one of the most valuable types of support is just being an example of a different way of being — of being someone who communicates needs and asks for support out loud, without feelings of shame and guilt. We talked about needing to face the reality that there is a certain level of additional work in your life now, and not all of it can be carried by community or by systems. But that there are still boundless opportunities for joy, love and connection (for your own dose of that, check out the “Finding Community” section of the resources page.)

The other half of our discussion was about navigating benefits & support systems. Here we really focussed on resisting the myth of scarcity. Yes, there is less budget and less resource than there used to be for a lot of government support for disabled people, but in a lot of cases it’s simply been made harder to access. The support is there, it’s real and you do deserve it. This is also where internal resilience and navigating systems start to work together — we have systems designed to demoralise, to make it seem like your chances of receiving support are so slim it isn’t worth asking for it. Believing in yourself & your experience is a tremendous resource to draw from when you are advocating for yourself.

It’s also helpful when you’re caught in the precarious work of performing up & down your disability, and not losing yourself & your reality.

Because of widespread ableism & ideas of what “real” illness looks like, our systems often imagine disability as unmoving and tragic. There is no room for variable symptoms, for remission & flare-ups, or for joyful experiences even when our symptoms are at their most severe. This means there will be times when you will feel you are performing illness or health just to keep some control of your life. If your mental health starts to spiral downwards but right now you’re still coping — you might struggle to get the support to stay well without playing up those symptoms. Or if you’re an inpatient who still needs support, but your environment is making things even worse for you and you need to be at home with people you love, performing health might be the only way to get those needs met.

Community is helpful in all of these spheres. The systems we interact with to receive benefits or mobility aids or treatments might not be interested in involving you in decisions, and certainly not in your wholeness. It is up to you and the people you trust to have conversations about what a good 5 years looks like to you, what you need to move forward in your life, and what real help looks like for you right now.

Connecting all of this back together — what did talking about Emmett tell us about how to resource support for each other, fight burnout and build movements, projects & organisations with more reciprocal care? For me, the biggest takeaway was that developing our own and supporting each other’s internal resources is an essential part of interdependence. When we see community organisations and the individuals leading them as our sole sources of support — and when leaders offer unboundaried support without strengthening those around them, we recreate the systems of dependency and charity we’re fighting against.

Reflection #3 — Ancestors, Abundance & Joy

So far I’ve shared our discussions about challenges facing our disabled communities — how organisations working with us fail to treat us with wholeness and care, and how forces of internalised and systemic ableism hamper our efforts to support ourselves and each other. But peppered throughout everything were moments of resistance, joy and incredible tenderness. I think it’s rare to find spaces where that happens, where deep grief and vulnerability can sit alongside joy and hope without feeling glib or dismissive. I wanted to close this write-up by focusing on those moments, because they were also some of the most instructive for me in imagining a life more centred in disability justice principles.

Starting where we ended, our last discussion was the only time we talked about how deeply spiritual this work felt to us. We’re a group of varying experiences of faith. We talked about spirituality as a deep connection to something beyond, before and bigger than ourselves, and letting that guide our being and actions. For many of us, that connection was to our ancestors and those we will be ancestors to. When we discussed isolation, boundaries & how to make decisions about when and how to say no, many of us drew from the certainty of what our ancestors would want for us. Queer ancestors, disabled ancestors, black & brown ancestors — ancestors fighting oppression & injustice, ancestors by blood or just through the kindred lineage of resistance we understood ourselves to be a part of. Connecting with those people, however we did it, provided a powerful reframing of the (often manufactured) scarcity and urgency we felt in movement work. Understanding our historical context — the immense resourcefulness of what our ancestors faced and prevailed through, allowed us to take a breath, pause, and be certain in the knowledge that more opportunities would come beyond the present moment. It allowed us to sink into a more abundant mindset.

I talked earlier about the extractive nature of relationships between performative justice/liberation organisations & individuals, and us as disabled artists & community workers. In our final session, we discussed how the consequences of that extraction, coupled with relentless urgency, are being a major disabling force in itself. It makes people exhausted, it makes us sick, and ultimately it kills us before our time. Holding abundance & ancestors close to us helps us to resist those forces, and can also guide us towards making conscious decisions to live and work in slower, smaller ways. Often it is not in service to our communities to be trying to do everything, all the time, all at once. It is the work of disability justice to support each other to make choices within our capacity, to be sustainable and deep in our endeavours, and to trust in the abundance of our communities that we individually are not the only ones capable of offering support and solutions.

I want to close by talking about my favourite moment of the labs — where I felt both abundance and joy in a way that allowed me to loosen control as a facilitator and trust in the wisdom of the people gathered in the room. In our third workshop, I set an exercise for people to create something for their younger self — with the prompt “I give you permission to”. It was an exercise I myself struggled to even start, and it turned out to be the wrong exercise for most other people as well. There wasn’t enough time to honour the emotions coming up, or enough safety in the room at that moment.

I was flustered and tried to push through with some alternative exercises, when one of the group suggested we share why we’d found the exercise difficult instead. What emerged was one of the most insightful and vulnerable conversations of the whole project. Trying to answer the question threw open how unsafe many of us had been as children, and the frustration of being asked to give permission to somebody who didn’t simply need permission, they needed agency and power and care from the people around them.

Once again, I didn’t know how to proceed from the emotional place the group had arrived at. I took a moment, and somebody else in the group asked “I’m just curious, what moments were in your childhood to carve out moments of joy?”

Immediately, someone shared a moment of pretending to be a hairdresser while cutting grass. People shared stories about running model trains along bed frames, holding hands and smiling in the Sun. Everyone laughed. The space was transformed, everyone was lifted. It hadn’t been about avoiding the grief we’d shared, somehow the laughter was about honouring it instead. It was about remembering the wholeness of our younger selves, and witnessing each other’s joy. I felt immensely humble & grateful for the people I was sharing space with, who’d been able to hold the space in a moment I couldn’t.

There are resources, knowledge & possibilities I can’t imagine in every room I’m in, even (especially) rooms where I’m holding power. Learning to trust the wisdom of disabled siblings, to give when I can and step back when I can’t, is a lesson I’ll carry forward.

From all of us in the Disability Justice Labs,

We wish you abundance. We wish you interdependence.

Jaz, our Associate Artist, used her residency to consider the Black British cultural identity, resistance within the wider community to be labelled as such and Black British coming-of-age ceremonies.

Meaning ‘first principle’, the Arkhe is a semi-tangible embassy and vessel for Black Brits. It will first ‘dock’ at MAIA’s Yard Art House, before making visits across the country.

An Afro-Speculative project, the Arkhe is the first morphological Black British Institution, designed to equip British-born Afro/Black people with:

1) historical and contextual education;

2) intentional, foundational Black British culture-building staples and rites;

3) and ways to gather, celebrate and organise despite limited access to space. These are Jaz’s reflections.

I was initially very nervous and overwhelmed at the expansive potential of the Arkhe. I felt that although culture-building may have some foundational factors, it can ultimately span across various proposed events, activities, observances, and rituals. Also, coming from a specific lived experience and not feeling at all like an authority on existing Black British culture was a palpable factor in how I approached and engaged with the MAIA team. I wanted them to take one of the reins and help steer the programming, but retrospectively, I admit this led to very little in terms of formulating the language around the Arkhe.

My pursuit of collective authorship led me to take a bit of a backseat to shortlisting contributions, which I regret. Although I’m still very happy overall with the Arkhe’s first collection of texts, experiments and artefacts, we ultimately did not accept every commission. I feel like I should have had some kind of introductory meeting or conversation with each artist — the Arkhe is my “brainchild” after all.

I should have been on hand to answer any questions and provide any needed clarity on our goals. I also wish we would have kept the open call commission for a Ladywood-based artist, and in retrospect would have done so by inviting in fewer contributors.

As time passed, I felt more comfortable suggesting specific intentions and outcomes for this project. It was useful having to re-explain my ideas to new audiences and collaborators — I began to find a preference for how I wanted to talk about the Arkhe and culture-building, and this had a stronger bearing on the language around the project. These conversations broke the concept of the Arkhe down into something more familiar and accessible, while reaffirming that its speculative quality had not been lost. The Arkhe was taking shape, and I could finally see that MAIA had been holding onto the logistical and operational reins. From here I was able to have conversations about making the programme as accessible to the community as possible, considering who should be prioritised during programming. This included events having BSL and captioning, having a mixture of online and offline events, and other access standards.

A culture-building project is expansive and needs to be able to reasonably scale up. A series of experiments can only ever be a snapshot of this potential, and this was felt during the planning process. It was a bit of a challenge to decide on what to prioritise this time around, even after taking our time frame, budget, and accessible space into consideration. But I received quiet reassurances from contributors who ‘caught the spirit’ of the Arkhe, producing its foundational affirmations and provocations; I was moved by how they infused the programme with complementary themes informed by their own identities and experiences. This reminded me that I didn’t need to know or do everything; and that as long as the Arkhe remained transparent to the community, they would always be able to give to and receive from it. Conversation, collaboration, and community defined the Arkhe’s maiden “docking”.

Throughout March, the Arkhe felt like a Black space — a place where you can access other Black people for social purposes; where you can learn about Black Britain and the Diaspora; where signposting to Black services is available; where provocations and calls-to-action can be announced to the wider community; a space for Black spirituality via guided meditations, prayer space, Capoeira, and proposed rituals; a gallery to show off the ‘artefacts’ of its people; a public house to share beverages, break bread, and casually discourse; a progressive site of mutual aid, dialectical materialism, resistance and protest; a fledgling library of speculative fiction, poetry, and educational material; the “bush” we retreat into for respite, coming of age, and rites of passage; and ultimately a morphological Black institution that encourages Pan African values, and disallows space for the Othering of marginalised identities. The support from the wider community and non-Black comrades, particularly at the Embassy Launch, has been exciting and promising.

I spent a lot of time reflecting on the financial and technical accessibility of various tools designed to bring communities together. I think this is what really made me push for a need for a manifesto or code of conduct for gathering — something I’d like to continue to develop in the future. Tamara Jade Kaz’s gorgeous visual notes from the FUBU Manifesto Session will aid in this. A proposed ‘social contract’ for our gathering spaces and events can be a sustainable foundation for forging new culture, building new sites, and occupying existing institutions.

My time in reflection has also organised my culture-building research prior to this Lab. Although this research is still expansive, I now feel so much more clarity on my next steps.

My future artistic goals almost wholly surround this culture-building effort. I’m trying not to take too much ownership of this because if done properly, the Arkhe will outlive me. It is not my legacy as I don’t care for that; Buju Banton reminded us in 2020: ‘You think I sit here in Jamaica and think about a thing named legacy? If history has taught us anything, it’s that a tall man must die, yes?’ Rather than legacy, this work is my duty as someone born in my context:

‘We are not interested in how it is to be an artist, if the artist is finally interested in fooling around with paints and brushes or in perverse juggling with words while he contemplates his next royalty cheque or how he is going to mesmerise his liberal patrons at the next exhibition or book party; we are interested in how it is to be alive.’

‘And what or how is it to be alive today? Fascist tyranny and barbarism is a reality that even the most limp-minded need not be reminded of. To be fired with the spirit of freedom, to be determined to fight and destroy that tyranny, to usher a new chapter of life where there is peace, progress and happiness — this we see as our mission; our duty; our ultimate responsibility.’
- Keorapetse Kgositsile

The Associate Artist Lab didn’t necessarily imbue me with an arrogance that Black Brits should uncritically adopt experimental suggestions of culture… But I am more confident to propose (and co-propose) subversive ways of being, to help us navigate the post-apocalypse of Maafa.

In the future I want to collaborate with Black Historians, Researchers and Archivists to consolidate a Black British Timeline, starting in the 1500s when groups of Black people were first recorded migrating to and settling in the UK. Alongside educational materials, I hope this will also result in more Black British imagery — new emblems and symbols and folklore tailored to our positionality. It would be great to explore ‘Grieving Room’ or ‘Meditation Bus’ concepts and further collaborate with Camille Sapara Barton and Tesha Murrain-Hernandez.

Over the past year I have made connections in the wider Diaspora, introducing to them this Black British culture building project; many are interested in experimenting on Pan-African, Afro-Speculative and Dialectical Materialist hybridities that can unite us across borders, ethnicities, and Empires. And lastly, I hope that the Arkhe’s engagements lead to more ‘Ambassadors’ and supporters of the culture-building effort.

All photo credits in this piece are credited to 3rd Eye Photography.

How do we situate care in the work towards liberation? Care is complex. Not least because, for many oppressed people globally, the very idea of accessing care is wrapped up in fear as a conditioned tendency following generations and centuries of being criminalised, incarcerated, abused, of losing human rights and being killed. The choice of care as one of MAIA’s four foundational values (alongside access, justice and joy), is far from incidental.

Care is not just about making people comfortable or responding compassionately to significant life events. Care is political. To paraphrase Mariame Kaba, care provides a necessary antidote to the violence and neglect built in to the current social structures, and seeks to acknowledge and address the impact of that upon successive generations trying to survive whilst swimming within the toxified waters of the current system.

Over the last 11 years, we have explored many different operational tools and technologies to embed care within the system of MAIA, beyond personality types and good intentions, into structural behaviours built practically upon those values. Examples we’ve attempted to codify within our internal organising include: wellbeing days and budgets for individual team members; therapist support for our events; changing contractual language; abundant team learning and recalibration time together; go-see funds to nurture interests and connections; Caregiver ‘role cards’ for projects and team; facilitated ‘Empty the Bucket’ sessions for team members to surface tensions and difficult feelings; Manuals of Me for sharing our needs and preferences, and ‘F*** Ups & High Fives’ Nights for celebrating successes and failures. All of these — and the many other strategies engaged — sit alongside the very function of our public programme, the heart of our learning and our relational and capacity-building infrastructure — in which we’re also creating shared and communal spaces for deeper study, culture-making and practice, rooted in care, access, justice and joy.

This work requires constant skilful and attentive adaptation as approaches become obsolete, undesirable, or urgent in changing landscapes, and the discourses around care change as context shifts. For example, 10 years ago, having care and access budgets within the workplace to cover a range of needs that centre how these differ across racialised and disabled people, was a radical intervention we explicitly fought for for years, while being delegitimised and labeled ‘naive’ for the assertion. We joined many other movement leaders, cultural workers and campaigning groups to make the case for structural address that resulted in care and access budgets (along with higher pay) becoming a culturally-accepted norm across sectors. By the time resource at scale is unlocked to adequately meet just immediate material needs alone, in recognition of structural (not just individualised) violence, the specificity of the needs of the people and earth have shifted substantially. Strategies and responses would become redundant quickly if we didn’t nurture our capacity to adapt as a core tenet of emergence.

“We cannot work unless we are dedicated to our ongoing learning. The reciprocal nature of education demands that in order to move towards collective liberation, we must remain students.”

— Sage M. Stephanou

Yet, we have observed how the proliferation of tools, processes and roles can begin to obscure something more foundational. Under the gravitational pulls of capitalism, consumption logics, a preoccupation with ‘self’hood and the conditioned tendencies shaped by sustained and structural violence, it is easy to drift into care and caring as transactional endeavours, as something that you are either the provider or the recipient of, rather than reciprocal and abundant flows of exchange.

We could see how the emphasis on ‘providing care’ for the individuals that make up our team was one-directional in practice, affecting our ability to care for our mission, practice, wider relations and the work that we were trying to do together. In this paradigm, our collective approach to care work was also enacted within a human-centric ideology, in turn affecting our ability to widen the scope of our caring beyond immediate human-to-human relationships to the more expansive entangled network of more-than-human, animate / inanimate stewardship relationships that we know that we are in kinship with.

“Too often self-care in our organizational cultures gets translated to our individual responsibility to leave work early, go home — alone — and go take a bath, go to the gym, eat some food and go to sleep. So we do all of that ‘self-care’ to return to organizational cultures where we reproduce the systems we are trying to break.”

— Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

Centring care within an organisational context is an endless balancing act. How can we retain the emphasis on the political and structural nature of this work when the demands of the world around us pull us towards the transactional and the superficial? If we only think about care in a fiscal sense, as in “what can we pay for?”, or transactionally, as in “what do I get for this?”, we are simply furthering the neocapitalist logic that has created a wellness industry, responding to an ideology of ‘care’ that escalates the very systems that produce social and ecological breakdown.

In many ways, the compounding effects of the ‘polycrisis’ also facilitate intra-personal and community relationship breakdowns, leading to a loss of resource beyond the financial. How do we really show up to the task of reciprocal care when forced into postures of isolation, scarcity and individualism? How can we tend to one another’s needs and wounds so that we can sustain ourselves within the work? If we are to grapple with the real scale and depth of needs within our community, how can we sustain as an organisation in that context without being swallowed by the challenge? If taking care of individualised needs is the sole focus and not in service of collective liberation, we will not make any progress towards the structural shifts that we want to see, which, after all, is the reason for us coming together in the first place.

Furthering this, individual organisations cannot be tasked with fixing the entirety of systemic failure. Nor can they be blamed as though such a capacity is possible. This does not negate accountability or imply our efforts are wasted in care work. The point is that at any given moment where collective liberation is a North Star, we use what we have to do what we can, hoping that the care practices and relationships we engage in afford the grace, dignity and patience needed. That can only ever be one small piece of the stack of interventions and approaches required for the infrastructuring of care. This is why robust, diligent partnership and practical solidarities become essential for this work, as sites we contribute our collective capacity and capabilities to the work of transformation.

It was in this spirit that our team began our year in dialogue with some beloved peers and collaborators to explore the provocation: what does it mean to grow an organisation as an infrastructure of care?

Care Work Constellations

Being in intentional co-learning relationships with others has always been key to our practice. Bringing a range of perspectives, practices and ideas into the conversation felt essential to move us into greater depth within our care work. So for this phase of deepening into our care practice, we brought together a number of peers whose work has inspired us to explore the question with our team:

• Emily Bazalgette’s work has long been an inspiration to us at MAIA, but her recent explorations and insights around chronic-illness informed organising (as shared during a brilliant School of System Change: Constellating Change session at the end of last year) made her an ideal collaborator and facilitator for this dialogue.
• Healing Justice London have walked alongside us for many years and their embodied, abolitionist approach, engaging politicised somatics as a tool for capacity-building and transformation, has made a deep impression upon our analysis of care.
• Our neighbours CoLab Dudley have an organising philosophy inspired by permaculture, biomimicry and seasonality, which they write about beautifully in their blog
• Our therapist collaborator, Karen Dhalmini, who has been working with our community and with our team over the past year.

In addition to the voices in the conversation, we have also been inspired by the work of other peers in our ecosystem that put considerable energy and care into this work, particularly Dark Matter Labs, whose wise and generous Beyond the Rules work gives us a solid foundation to build upon. We also move in the lineage of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective and Civic Square, who each shared the idea of ‘pods’ as an organising method (see below), which is proving to be a critical part of our infrastructure. This period connects with the frameworks and practices of those who have shaped our analysis and politics of care long-term, including but not limited to Cara Page and Erica Woodland, Mia Mingus, Staci K. Haines, Susan Raffo, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and The Black Panther Party.

What do we mean by care?

Care is a word that serves many purposes: from simple physical acts, to internal emotional responses, to services provided, to more holistic principles and philosophies — the concept of care can shift depending on context, positionality, value system and many other factors. Developing a shared understanding of what we mean when we talk about care was essential in our conversations.

When we started to unpack this, we found that we had multiple overlapping responses that we all identified with.

• Care involves belonging and connection — being supported to notice / be aware of ourselves and the roles we play.
• Care should be reciprocal and multi-directional. It shouldn’t be standardised or transactional, and certainly shouldn’t be seen as something that ‘trickles down’ within a liberation-oriented organisation, but something we make for one another.
• Care allows us to show up with our mistakes and feel held.
• Care is a regenerative practice and it requires us to act.
• Care isn’t easy.

Tianna, MAIA’s Communications Lead, offered a moving description of care that we all gravitated to:

“Some people talk about poverty as being a thousand petty humiliations each day — what if we saw care as offering a thousand tiny dignities every day?”

— Tianna Johnson

Emerging from our conversation about care came a related conversation about accountability. It can often feel uncomfortable speaking about care and accountability together as though they are somehow in opposition — where ‘care’ might need to do a lot of heavy lifting in our language, ‘accountability’ undeniably comes with a great deal of heavy baggage. But when we consider whom or what we care for, this connection becomes clearer. It is essential that our conception of care is not limited by thinking only about human-human relationships, it can, and should, be so much wider than this. Emily shared the following definition that she is drawn to:

“Care is a deep concern and tending of the self, us, the others and the bigger field. It can strengthen relationships, promote systemic sustainability, and lobby for just practices and policies.”

— Lana Jelenjev

If we see accountability as one of the ways in which we exist in our dignity and show care for our team, for our shared purpose, for our ancestors and for future generations, what does this make possible? Exploring this further, we surfaced that:

• Accountability is a pull from within, it should not be punitive or imposed from the outside
• Accountability is a discipline, not a fixed destination; it is found and crafted in the process
• Accountability to our mission (and its wider context) is what enables autonomy and agency
• Accountability is boundaried vulnerability and honesty, where we understand our entanglements and can walk beside one another (at different paces if needs be)

“We talked a lot about how care requires an in-the-moment sensing of need — I think accountability requires something similar, the in-the-moment sensing of boundaries.”

— Emily Bazalgette

Themes, ideas and synthesis

There were a number of core interconnected ideas that we returned to in our conversations across the day that felt fundamental to our emerging approach:

• Discernment: how do we get better at noticing our internal in-the-moment reactions and expand the moment that allows us to pause and choose how we respond in a way that serves us? Many of us have developed or inherited survival strategies that have kept us safe in other contexts but may no longer be necessary, appropriate to the context, or may even be harmful to ourselves or others around us. How can we learn to differentiate and sense between feeling uncomfortable and feeling unsafe and gift ourselves the time and spaciousness to choose an appropriate response?
• Resilience: how can we build our muscle for doing hard things, having hard conversations and sitting with discomfort? This is resilience as anti-fragility (as Nkem Ndefo describes it), and sits in opposition to the harmful ways in which the notion of ‘resilience’ is often weaponised against marginalised people, to absolve systems, structures and history of any complicity in harm and suffering. Resilience is not about expanding our capacity to endure the status quo! Embodied resilience is a kind of flexible strength to meet challenges, inviting a re-connection of the mind-body as a guide and companion, in order to shift systems.
• Consent: how can we widen our field of vision when it comes to practicing consent with one another? How do we practice consent with ourselves to be able to effectively show up in the work? Where are the opportunities to practice that conventional ways of working may encourage us to overlook?
• Boundaries: how do we get better at noticing, setting and holding our own personal boundaries in order to create practices and relationships that we can sustain for the longer term?

“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”

— Prentis Hemphill

We also reflected how the work that is required of us here is personal work done in community. That is, it requires us to commit to individual ‘inner work’ upon ourselves that can only be practiced and realised in community with other people. This principle has been a golden thread running through MAIA’s programme across our ten years, where the line between ‘external activity’ and ‘organisational development’ is often intentionally and generatively blurred, offering opportunities to build the sustenance, resilience and capacity of our internal and individual practices together.

This was further reaffirmed and strengthened by the reading we had been doing as a team over the winter break, as we started reading Healing Justice Lineages by Cara Page and Erica Woodland together. The book is an incredible drawing together of the learning from 20 years of organising in the US, and of the history of struggle that preceded that period. They talk about healing justice as a mechanism that seeks to transform the trauma, pain and grief that inevitably emerges during movement work, transforming it into community rooted practices that build care, respect, dignity and protection in our work towards liberation. In Tamika Middleton & Cara Page’s chapter ‘Conjuring the Roots of Healing Justice in the South East’, they outline three principles of healing justice:

Principle #1: Collective trauma is transformed collectively
Principle #2: There is no single model of care
Principle #3: Healing strategies are rooted in place and ancestral technologies

— Tamika Middleton & Cara Page - Healing Justice Lineages

Just as we cannot heal from collective or intergenerational trauma alone, we cannot grow our internal capaciousness for having hard conversations, or develop the ability to discern the roots of our own reactions and the appropriateness of our responses, without a community of others who are willing to support us as we practice and hold us when we misstep. In this way, care is a collective endeavour — it needs all of us to participate.

Another theme that came through in our conversations was how our practices at the small scale might inform our practices at the organisational scale and beyond. How might care be fractal?

‘When we speak of systemic change, we need to be fractal. Fractals — a way to speak of the patterns we see — move from the micro to the macro level. The same spirals on sea shells can be found in the shape of galaxies. We must create patterns that cycle upwards.’

— adrienne maree brown - Emergent Strategy

When our most recent team members joined us at the end of 2023, we adopted the idea of ‘pods’ — small groupings of 3–4 team members who would act as buddies and peer support to one another — following study of The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective’s pod mapping and a conversation on the practicalities of embracing this approach within an organisational setting with our friends at Civic Square. What becomes possible if we see our pods as micro-infrastructures of care? How can our learning at this scale inform our learning at the organisation scale?

Over the last 8 years, MAIA has been seeding the concept of ABUELOS, a relational infrastructure of care at scale, demonstrating radical hospitality at every layer. As we grow out the hidden wiring and infrastructure that enables this capability, learnings at this stage are informing how we codify and embody care within the large scale project that reimagines a hotel as a cultural, civic infrastructure as part of a long-term strategy for building possibility for radical culture-making, community imagination and wealths.

Finally, as mentioned above, any conversation that seeks to connect and integrate the concepts of care and accountability inevitably causes some discomfort. After the session, Emily reflected:

‘..the team are more clear and more comfortable in the space of care than accountability. It’s also clear that there’s some deep wounds around accountability (fear of judgement, experiences of weaponised accountability, etc). Which is pretty normal — our first experiences of accountability are our families and our schooling, and we don’t often get good role modelling in those environments! I’m left wondering: how might you heal your relationship with accountability?’

Emily Bazalgette

This provocation is powerful, inviting us to find liberatory capacity, joy and intimacy when practicing accountability with one another. This feels like a rich seam of enquiry that we would love to explore further.

Our commitments to practice

Alongside these discussions of concepts and principles, we also made some commitments to working practices that we want to rehearse together over the coming months. We are sharing these to invite dialogue and also as part of our organisational accountability practice — we will share our reflections and learnings later in the year.

• Training in politicised somatics, embodiment practice and embodied resilience: these are practices that help us to recognise and transform our trauma responses, to hone our discernment, to build our resilience and, overall, to be more comfortable moving through the world as our integrated, embodied selves. Amahra deepened her politicised somatics training by studying with Staci K. Haines at an abolitionist somatics retreat for movement leaders, generously hosted by Healing Justice London in summer 2023. We would like to extend this learning to our team and eventually to our wider community as our skills grow. More information about Staci K. Haines here: https://www.stacihaines.com/ and another avenue for learning here is Nkem Ndefo’s Resilience Toolkit: https://theresiliencetoolkit.co/about/
• Pods as micro-infrastructures of care: we established our pods in November 2023 and, so far, they are going strong. We initially built in ‘pod time’ at the start of each team meeting but our pods are now self-directed and groups are agreeing between themselves how they would like to support one another. We agreed to create an opportunity for review, reflection and sharing learning between the pods in spring or early summer.
• Building our skill and capacity for hard conversations: alongside resilience training, we talked about a number of possible ways we could go about this — might we get into the habit of holding regular ‘maintenance meetings’ focused on surfacing and resolving interpersonal or operational issues? We started to practice something along these lines last year with our ‘empty the bucket’ conversations facilitated by our therapist, Karen, to enable everyone to share feelings and feedback. We’re keen to explore other avenues of practice too, such as role playing or contact improvisation, to help us to build this muscle and are developing a resource of different approaches and methodologies we could consider. We might also need other ways to bolster our confidence in approaching hard conversations, such as developing a ‘First Aid Kit’ of tools that we can use when we make mistakes or when things don’t go as well as we hope.
• People risk assessments: team member Jodie described how, in a previous role, projects would include a ‘people risk assessment’ alongside the usual health and safety risk assessment, considering care and access needs for participants and team members to ensure that all stay well during the course of the work. Jodie is going to provide some team training so that we can create our own version of this.
• Adopting and embedding chronic-illness-informed ways of working: inspired by Emily’s Constellating Change talk, in our (Re)Orientation week, we agreed that we wanted to work towards developing a ‘continuous handover’ style of working i.e. what would we need to do / document / put in place to ensure that someone else could pick up our work tomorrow if we are unwell? We’ve made steps towards this, making as much use of Notion for documenting and planning work as possible and setting up a team ‘kanban’ board for tracking our bigger tasks and making progress visible to others. We really acknowledged it takes time to design effective processes and recalibrate to new operational flows, particularly when capacities are already stretched.
• Wellbeing check-ins and care plans: in previous times, our systems for individual check ins blurred the lines between supporting wellness and supervising work — team members would have a single 1–1 conversation that tried to cover all bases. This made it difficult to make the right sort of space for either conversation, and often reinforced a parent-child dynamic between those holding responsibility for organisation-wide co-ordination and those with a focus on specific activities. From March this year, we have commissioned Karen Dhlamini to provide quarterly wellbeing coaching sessions with all team members (including the co-ordination team), focused on supporting people to develop their own individual care plans. These care plans will consider the factors that might affect our wellbeing and the strategies and support we need to have in place for when things are not going well (inside or outside of work). Critically, the care plans will be confidential between the individual and Karen, allowing deeper considerations and reflection, with the individual deciding how and what to share with others.

If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other? How do we learn to do this love work of collective care that lifts us instead of abandons us, that grapples with all the deep ways in which care is complicated?”

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

Hesitations, concerns and further questions

So we have plenty to get into over the coming months, and in the weeks since our conversations in January, and particularly whilst writing this piece, other questions have arisen that we might want to reflect upon as we move through the next few months. These might shape how we manifest the initial commitments we have made, or maybe sow some seeds for the next phase of the work:

• How can we design for circularity in our care and accountability practices and make them regenerative, across flows of power and presence? Put another way, how do we hold ourselves accountable to our accountability processes and ensure that the ‘outputs’ always feed the next stage of learning?
• How do we continue to embed these learning journeys within our community programme and relationships, as well as preserving team-only time, without creating premature notions of ‘expertise’?
• The commitments to practice we have made this time around have been concerned with the human-human relationships that form the core of our organisation. What could it look like if we widened the scope of our care practices to radically centre more-than-human relationships, in which we move beyond the subjectivities of “human” supremacy?
• We’re a neurodiverse team with varying experiences of disability and chronic illness, considering how to pay deeper attention to the specificities afforded by Disability Justice in the practice of care. We do this while also recognising many embodiment framings still have a way to go regarding Disability Justice praxis and for those for whom reconnecting with their bodies is painful. To further reiterate — there can be no singular approach to care work when we centre a Disability Justice analysis, the tools to practice and strengthen personal discernment may be very different for someone who finds interoception (the ability to notice and interpret internal sensory signals) challenging, or those who experience alexithymia (difficulty identifying and expressing emotions), as many neurodivergent people do. How can we be present with how ideas of discernment are framed, embodied and practiced — providing multiple routes into participation while staying attuned to the spectrum of ways people process information?

We’d love to hear from anyone on similar journeys who has learning to share or questions to ask. And we look forward to sharing the results of our rehearsals, our work-in-progress, later on in the year.

Why accounting?

Accounting is a process to help businesses consolidate, track and keep data. Cardiff University’s International Study Centre articulate one of the biggest advantages of accounting as allowing “businesses to keep a systematic record of their financial information. Having up to date and accurate records is crucial to running a successful business. Without this information, owners would not know whether they are making a profit.”

Traditional organisations are created around such value propositions, typically concerning profit maximisation, economic growth or charitable objectives. Traditional structures and governance models are then designed to facilitate ‘trickle-down’ concentrations of power which sustain these objectives — yes, even the charitable ones — in which a system is dependent on somebod(-ies) being at the bottom of the value chain to function. In this context, the role of a Board or a group of Trustees, for example, is to sustain the organisation by any means. Even (often) if this means completely dehumanising people or extracting from the Earth. We are living in the consequences of a society engineered upon such a violent hierarchy.

Within this context, accounting makes no room for the multiple ways organisations like ours want to understand ‘value’, never mind how we document or disseminate that.

At MAIA, as a group of people trying to use the tools, knowledges, resources and configurations we have to the best of our ability to imagine and build conditions for a world towards liberation, we know that the life-affirming systems and structures we need for that horizon are not going to emerge from these archaic conditions.

“With these norms of governing and organising, we lose accountability to the communities we set up to serve; to the planet that we rely upon to deliver it; and to the future generations that will inherit what we create.” — Dark Matter Labs

MAIA sits within many contradictions — principally in acknowledging a legally registered organisation is not a liberatory form, nor is it the best form to do liberation work in. But it is a critical form that can accommodate the scales of organising and resource needed for liberation movements.

Within this form arises the due diligence that comes with being legally accountable to entities that require we share declarations of our financial information (HMRC, Companies House, the CIC regulator and funding partners, for example). And herein lies more of the contradictions that come with being accountable to a fundamentally broken system. What we are expected to count, measure, record and report often feels reductive, part of the problem or even oppositional to the values, principles and intentions our work is grown from.

As an organisation situated within a broader transition, conspiring for — but not yet in — a liberatory paradigm, our work at MAIA is focused on designing and building cultural demonstrators and prototypes that make our vision of a world towards liberation one that is tangible, tactile and interactive; one that prioritises material shifts and works to create openings so that more possibilities can manifest. We take the same approach to our internal work, seeing our organisation as a site of imagination and experimentation. In fact, we also understand organisational design to this end as a critical part of culture-making.

And here is what we know — even fiscal accounting is storytelling. As an organisation that tracks two data sets across two different time periods — one that aligns with the seasonal rhythm we originated in, the other tracks the standardised April-April tax year that correlates with some of our funding partners’ rhythms — we know that at any given moment, our different spreadsheets might be telling two radically different stories about our financial health. And this is still only a microcosm of the story of what we are. So if accounting is a representation of narrative, a fiction masquerading as fact, what are the more generative stories we want to tell about the effectiveness of our work, in a way that doesn’t entirely negate legal compliance? Could accounting be an intentional cultural practice? Could the Black imagination offer portals into this enquiry?

From conceptualising to materialising

The intention started as a speculation, imagining ABUELOS, the cultural infrastructure we’re building and the systems that will underpin that. Drawing back, we sat with what it takes to have the capacity to hold both the technical requirements of finance, data collection and management with the ability to transform our day-to-day for something more liberatory. Could we instead grow a wider values literacy across more people and invest that capacity in aligning what we measure with what we care about and are actually trying to be effective in?

“Structural change requires structural tinkering.” — Jack Ky Tan

As much as we might need to track how much money is in the bank at any specific time, we might also want to recognise ‘solidarity economy’ tangibly on a balance sheet. While it might be necessary to account for how many people came to an event, we also want to talk about how love was present in the room. Or how our values are alive in a budget. Yes, we could talk about our carbon offsetting targets, but can we account for our commitments to the more-than-human in a way that affirms life and recognises spirit? What are the data systems for our future infrastructures going to be modelled on?

Exploring the many tensions of organisational contradictions with interdisciplinary artist Jack Ky Tan, he introduced the Quipu, a beautiful knotted tally system used by the Inca people, as an example of Indigenous accounting. Jack then posed the question: ‘What would accounting in the Black imagination look like?’

This prompt led to a research residency, delving into Indigenous and diasporic accounting methods. Seeing the ways in which the collation and sharing of data sets in our Afro-Indigenous lineages has always been a creative, cultural endeavour offered a new (and ancestral) lens — from the forensic accounting of the hieroglyphs, to the subversive cartographies of African braiding techniques.

From there, sparked the design of a 6 week collaborative residency, in which we would reimagine the ancestral technology of accounting for the 21st century, that continues this legacy: if Black imagination presents opportunities for expansive forms of storytelling, can we become the griots for our organisational “data”?

More about the origins in our previous reflection: Black Imagination and Organisational Praxis

What is GRAFF?

In 2023, GRAFF was birthed. We collaborated with educator, designer and strategist André Anderson who created the framework for GRAFF, which we defined as:

• A practice at the intersection of art, design, evaluation and accounting
• A method that encourages us to be specific about what it is that we value
• A way of measuring the tangible and intangible elements of our work
• A verb still being defined by our community

“This is more than a residency. This is the early stages of creating a new vocabulary, a whole new language. It’s important we name it, document our process and put energy around this bigger practice we’re rehearsing into being.” — André Anderson

Designing the methodology, André encouraged us to start with a basic set of measures, framed around three different elements:

• The Work — what we do, which includes our public programme, prototypes and demonstrators, concept development and consultancy
• The People — who does the work, which includes our staff team, governance ecology, artists, freelancers, community and other collaborators
• The Resources — what we need to do the work, which includes money, space, materials and knowledges

In our first iteration, we defined four example measures for each element, ensuring that we had both tangible or quantitative measures, as well as intangible or qualitative measures defined, to give us a starting point for experimentation. For example, one tangible measure in The Work element was ‘the number of events delivered within a given year’. An intangible measure was ‘how much did our work advance the Black imagination’.

To co-create GRAFF as a verb and to build out the vocabulary of this new language, we invited four phenomenal artists into practice with us: Janet Douglas, Kassessa, Sipho Eric Ndlovu and Courtenay Welcome; artists whose emergent, interdisciplinary, porous and diverse practices offered a generative way of building a new language.

Throughout the residency, our attention turned to designing prototype tools, games and artefacts that would allow us to remember, make visible and interact with the tangible and the intangible, the quantitative and the qualitative. Prototypes developed included a board game to help us track how we advance the Black imagination and a sensory interactive reimagining of the dice.

You can read more about the residency here.

At the end of the residency, we hosted an exhibition to share the prototypes and open up the GRAFF methodology for our wider community to play with, develop their own value propositions and prototypes and offer critical feedback to the continuous process.

“We turned accounting into a world building practice; a demonstration of what we believe. Reconnected spiritual and ancestral practice with our current value systems. Returned accounting to art.” — Amahra Spence

At the end of this phase of our GRAFF process in 2023, we wanted to prioritise operationalising GRAFF in our day-to-day activity, which meant working with a prototype that allowed us to interpret and chart MAIA data in real time.

In January 2024, we began a deep dive into the next iteration of GRAFF, noticing the practice of GRAFF encouraged a breaking up and resynthesising of the measures we began with. In this way, GRAFF becomes a tool for accounting as much as evaluation — inviting us to critically question and assess what we want to be effective and its purposes, while allowing the ability to track the data that measures that effectiveness.

Ababu

Ababu was one of the prototypes created by artist Kassessa, using the ancient knowledge and Black imagination of ancestors from various African regions the ABABU aims to create a new ancestral tool for our descendants.

Starting with how we can explore data without primarily recreating a spreadsheet, ABABU felt the most feasible way to begin exploring tangible and quantitative data sets and measures. With the many interconnected components of ABABU, the prototype allowed for repeated measurement over time and included a mechanism for documenting and comparing between different points over time. We started exploring how different elements of ABABU could track predicted data and ‘actuals’ in different ways.

Holding the question of what we deem valuable, within the context of accounting in the Black imagination, felt integral to working with the ABABU tool. With so many possibilities in front of us, we chose to stick to data that we already had, from recent events that were fresh in the teams’ memory. This allowed us to familiarise ourselves with the ABABU and begin working with our hands and out of our minds.

Starting with how we can explore data without primarily recreating a spreadsheet, ABABU felt the most feasible way to begin exploring tangible and quantitative data sets and measures. With the many interconnected components of ABABU, the prototype allowed for repeated measurement over time and included a mechanism for documenting and comparing between different points over time. We started exploring how different elements of ABABU could track predicted data and ‘actuals’ in different ways.

Holding the question of what we deem valuable, within the context of accounting in the Black imagination, felt integral to working with the ABABU tool. With so many possibilities in front of us, we chose to stick to data that we already had, from recent events that were fresh in the teams’ memory. This allowed us to familiarise ourselves with the ABABU and begin working with our hands and out of our minds.

Using a recently completed project — (Returning to) Black Frequencies, a Radical Imagination Lab, curated by inaugural MAIA Fellows, Daniel Oduntan and Adéọlá — we decided to start with the event data using the following questions:

• What was the total capacity for the event? (a measure of Potential)
• How many people booked a ticket? (a measure of Commitment)
• How many people came? (a measure of Connection)
• What depth of connection was created? (an intangible measure that would be assessed by questions asked of participants and team — we didn’t have live data for this so we made an estimate)

We had to then decide on which parts of the ABABU we could use that would hold the information we were inputting. Seen in the image below, we decided:

• Each block represented an event within the Radical Imagination Lab
• The sticks represent the 3 tangible questions above
• The beads represent numbers
• The position of the block represent the depth of connection (the further out they are, the greater the depth)

It was necessary at this stage, to create a coding card, that would exist alongside the tool and be used to decipher the information. Using beads, we coded them with numerical meanings by colour and size and worked our way through the 6 main events that happened during the Radical Imagination Lab.

During this process, we held the knowledge that the potential, commitment and connection data sets as mentioned above, may not be what we (always) hold to be most valuable. We talked through questions and thoughts such as:

• What we value and wish to account for may be different for each event, based on the intention and who we wish to reach at any given time
• If we use the ABABU as a predictive tool, what do we want to predict and how will this hold value in our accounting and evaluation practices?
• Even if we ended up using the ABABU as a replacement for a spreadsheet — what is it about physically building something together, that adds value to our ways of working?

Although we didn’t have all the materials we needed, with some retrofitting and creativity, we were able to successfully translate the data from the 6 events into the ABABU tool. The next step would be to translate this information into an ABABU tablet — a clay print with the sticks and beads becoming decorative markings, and the blocks making different depths of print — and that this will create a story and an artwork of the information collected from each event.

Collective building and accounting during this session felt like an active antithesis to individualised, gatekept accounting methods we see too often within organisations and institutions. Building and using ABABU together holds space for reflection and accountability.

While we coloured in beads and added them to sticks, we were also reflecting on the preciousness of having even one person attend an event. We could see attendees as more than numbers, but beings whose energy impacts the space and overall vibe of an event — the knock on effect of small interactions that contribute to depths of connection felt in a space.

While we pushed and pulled at the ABABU blocks and attempted to calculate depth of connection, we were also reflecting on the purpose and intention of each event. We could hold space for accountability — recognising if the intention and outcome were misaligned, or went in a direction that was not anticipated.

With collective work, comes the value of knowledge that each person brings. When building ABABU based on the Fellows’ Radical Imagination Lab, we naturally delegated tasks in a way that aligned with our interests, learning styles and modes of working. This further amplified the intention of an accounting tool that works within the intersection of art, ancestral technology and accounting. It is honouring how our rhythms can align toward a mutual goal and what gems we can take from the process and not just the final product or assortment of data.

GRAFF as Evaluation and Accountability

What became clear along the journey is that GRAFF has also become a practice to open up core questions about our purpose and evaluation strategy. We invited collaborators CoLab Dudley and Talking Birds to join our process, as peers and collaborators across our ecology who are also reimagining value, accountability and what it is to be regenerative, learning infrastructures.

Our beloved peers Jo and Lorna at CoLab Dudley introduced us to the Principles-Focused Evaluation (PFE) framework, developed by Michael Quinn Patton. Jo describes PFE as “a form of evaluation that uses collectively developed principles and counter principles to GUIDE action and understand change. PFE supports continuous learning feedback loops that enable informed practice, experiment, network and infrastructure iteration”. There were many generative parallels between what PFE and GRAFF both open up. In CoLab Dudley’s reflections, they share how PFE has become:

1. An aid to navigation, orientation and alignment
2. A form of lived governance
3. Instructive in revisiting their purpose as a lab
4. A values based theory of action
5. A practice of shared learning and sensemaking

The exchange and collective, embodied experience we shared prompted lots of discussion and reflection points on how our GRAFF elements and measures relate to our existing organisational values and mission. Could we use PFE as a tool to draw out and activate GRAFF from our principles, instead of what currently feel like transactional elements? Are there more expansive ways of describing the different elements? What would change if we reframed ‘The People’ as ‘Kin’ for example, does that create space for us to consider the more-than-human in what we measure?

The Journey Ahead

In the infrastructure we’re developing, is there a way in which accounting — and all due diligence — could be a practice and demonstration of care? GRAFF reflects one of the ways we are practically growing our organisation as an infrastructure of care, in which the organisation is a site to demonstrate practically a life-affirming system. How is this creating the conditions for the value system that ABUELOS facilitates?

In the year ahead, we’re turning all of our attention to the interdependent layers of ABUELOS, creating organisational portals to demonstrate how we embed care and radical hospitality into the system.

As we look to GRAFF as a model of transparent and accessible accounting in the Black imagination, we aim to develop our coherence around ABABU as a working prototype; using real time data to continue our interrogation of value outside of, within, and beyond legal due diligence. We are aiming to experiment with our own GRAFF prototypes, but also holding space with and for community, to strengthen the muscle of tangible and intangible accounting. With our ‘resourcing the movement’ strategy in mind, and as cultural imagineers, we strive to learn alongside community and extend these questions around value. Returning to ancestral technologies and undoing the notion of accounting for profits’ sake, is integral to how we resource artists, account for the more-than-human and turn towards the full stack theory-of-change ABUELOS embodies with a firmer foundation to build upon.

Alongside this, we’re considering other fugitive tactics for embedding the concept, approaches and outputs of GRAFF in our wider relationships, especially those where ‘due diligence’ is a defining feature. Might we include a Sona map of the year’s journey in our annual accounts? Emboldened by the practical support and showing up of some of our funding partners, we’re now exploring how we’ll bring GRAFF into our reporting? How can we meaningfully engage with those who resource our work to open up the conversations around value beyond that which is reductive, quantitative and easy-to-measure, so that our explorations can inform how they work with other organisations also working for social and ecological transformation?

The structural shifts we need in the swathes of crisis we are witnessing will come from the deep code work we invest in today. Change isn’t always grandiose, rather made up of many small, iterative and intimate shifts. As André says “the revolution might feel underwhelming.” Many of our peers and partners have been co-investing in the practicalities of the boring revolution for decades — we extend gratitude to them as we extend gratitude to the ancestors who knew that the design of life-affirming systems would be embodied, cultural and spiritual worldbuilding portals.

Thanks to Jack Ky Tan, André Anderson, Courtenay Welcome, Sipho Eric Ndlovu, Kassessa, Janet Douglas, CoLab Dudley, Dark Matter Labs, Talking Birds, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, everyone that has GRAFFed with us and everyone who continues to co-inform what this practice is. In particular, thank you to all beings that are building structural shifts towards liberation, past, present and those to come.

From returning to pirate radio and exploring carnival as a site for liberation, to DIY sound system building, mask-making, reading circles, and invitations to dance and heal.

Across the Lab we explored frequencies as portals to liberation and both Daniel and Adéọlá have reflected on their experience curating and facilitating this lab.

Adéọlá’s Reflections:

How do we remember what we forgot to remember?
Dance like Douen

In attempting to recollect the process, the words, thoughts and motivations that led to this artwork, I remember my starting point as a seed.

Literally — on hearing about ABUELOS, I wanted through this fellowship, to gift something that could grow. I was thinking about trees as connections to ritual/spirit, nature/our “more-than-human accountabilities” and all life — what would it mean to nurture something and watch it grow. What would in mean to see, and make, and appreciate space as organism? I imagined a tree bearing fruit — perhaps mangoes (everyone loves mangoes) or a tree indigenous to this land. What would those choices mean? Deeply excited and inspired by the work of MAIA and the vision of ABUELOS, I felt hope for the next generation, for my boys. I also felt some uncertainty around what I could offer to a movement that seemed to already have all that it needed to blossom into what it will be.

Initially my thinking was around a piece of work that could in some way be a part of ABUELOS, something that spoke to MAIA’s ethos. As time progressed, I began to feel slightly overwhelmed, a feeling that the ideas and concepts I was focused on, around ABUELOS were gargantuan. I was struggling to hold on to a thing, from which I could then begin to make work. I began thinking about my practice and what being a part of this fellowship could mean — how could this unique experience inform the work that I do? How could this experience challenge or help me re-look at some of my thinking or ways of working?

One of the core experiences for me, was meeting the team. I saw brilliant bright women holding social justice, revolution, art, community and hope in perfect balance. I thought of care and good health for their journey — I thought again of rituals. In looking at my practice I began to play with masquerade as a concept. Masquerade for me, embracing an amalgamation of pasts, presents and futures through layering, colours, dressing, masking.

I continued thinking about the everyday of rituals. Rituals as key to enabling ways of functioning well. I imagined making costumes perhaps in collaboration with the community and hosting an event where costumes will be worn with music and dancing. I imagined the performers and community members being photographed. I have in the past done projects like this. In the past iterations the images were printed and displayed on billboards or on large windows of disused buildings. Here, I imagined the images could be printed onto slate tiles that could then be included in the tangible visual aesthetics of the building.

Daniel and I were soon to be dreaming the Lab. It made sense to have a performance event as part of the Lab. For this particular idea to take shape, I would have required much more time after the Lab to edit the images and produce printed tiles. I would have had to carefully plan what costumes would be made, what the costumes meant and how much community
input would be required. Time and distance also played a role in not fully pursuing that idea, as well as a desire to do something a bit different to what I had done previously. The Lab evolved to include elements of the performance activity as a silent disco. The other Lab events were like stepping stones to understanding masking as philosophy and practice.

I see my art as broadly occupying two zones: my save-the-world art and my selfish art. The former is usually funded and in collaboration with other artists — performance art, installation, photography; the latter is usually where my painting and mark-making become a language to express and engage emotions and experiences that struggle to be articulated through other mediums.

In looking at masquerade and costume (seven aprons), my sketches moved from the making of panels for a skirt into a single painting. As an offering, the masquerade was looking at themes and colours based on personal interpretations and impressions:

clarity/water/white,
abundance/fruit/purple,
enhancement/salt/blue,
beauty/flowers/green,
prosperity/money/yellow,
sweetness/honey/orange,
honesty/alcohol/red.

These resonated with chakras and very loosely with some deities:

Crown (I understand), white [Obatala]
Third Eye (I see), purple [Orunmila]
Throat (I speak), blue [Yemonja]
Heart (I love), green [Ogun]
Solar plexus (I do), yellow [Ochosi]
Sacral (I feel), orange [Osun]
Root (I am), red [Sango]

The process of making art is like an impulse, it draws you into a conversation that navigates subconscious and conscious spaces. In the subconscious spaces you are immersed in flow. In conscious spaces we make decisions about line or colour, adding something here or
removing that from there. The process is personal. Outside of the conversation the space becomes one of nakedness, vulnerability and criticism. It is the space of demasking (if the painting/artwork itself were a masked subject) — a space that shows you yourself in all your unique fragments.

The artwork is large-scale and made up of 7 figures interlocking arms. Each figure is in one of the colours associated with the chakras. The medium consists of paint, fabric and drawing on linen. The work is something to do with chakras, something to do with ancestry, something to with community and womanhood, something to do with dreams, cycles, patterns and ritual. Here, I embraced an opportunity to connect again with an aspect of my practice within which I had grown insecure. The fellowship facilitated steps to engage thoughts on masquerade and ritual through symbolism and mark-making. What comes out of this piece is both the intentional and the in-between. What I mean by that is, although I played with deliberate concepts in terms of shapes and colours and approaches or techniques, there are also things that may have occurred and may eventually be revealed to me within the juxtaposition of the colour, shape and pattern — through observations by other people.

The Fellowship opportunity was one that allowed for connection to MAIA’s Art School, Lab and other events. Meeting new people from the Birmingham creative community and beyond, getting to know Daniel and being involved in stimulating conversations contributed to an
enriching creative process. I felt supported and I am excited to see what will grow from this experience.

Does this artwork right the wrongs of the world? Not likely. Is it activism? Nope. Liberation? I don’t think so. In relation to ABUELOS my hope is that piece invites conversation, tells a story, offers a reminder and marks a moment in time when a Trinbagonian artist living in Wales had the honour of working in close relation with the manifesting dreams of MAIA. The gift of a seed of a mango tree, is my promise to ABUELOS for the future.

You can read more about Adéọlá and her work here.

Or follow her on Instagram.

To watch the available recordings of the (Returning to) Black Frequencies Lab please click here.

From returning to pirate radio and exploring carnival as a site for liberation, to DIY sound system building, mask-making, reading circles, and invitations to dance and heal.

Across the Lab we explored frequencies as portals to liberation and both Daniel and Adéọlá have reflected on their experience curating and facilitating this lab. This is part two of the Reflections blog post, platforming Daniel’s thoughts and ideas about his experience as a MAIA Fellow on this project.

Daniel’s Reflections:

Has anything shifted in your practice, thinking or work?

Dialling in on the concept of radical hospitality, I think back to all of the times within my personal and professional life that I’ve felt the presence of hospitality as well as hostility.

Most times, hospitality was in the framing of family, friends, sharing, and service-based actions. When thinking of hostility, it was the opposite — the stranger, the unknown, the target, etc. Attempts to create a sense of connection, friendship and sharing were more often than not met with an injustice rooted in biased hostile beliefs. Our beliefs don’t often exist in a silo; they need connection to others to pollinate, a transmitter will eventually need a receiver; and if that connection grows into a community, it often develops into a culture, embedding itself into our environments and our “everyday”. We occupy a time-space fabric, which in many ways is shaped by our beliefs; physically and conceptually, we navigate. For most of us when we feel certain spaces are hostile, we are presented with a dead end, the no-go zone, the glass ceiling, the barriers to entry, the aggression, be it macro or micro — these are all products of design based upon the concept of hostility; and so it becomes increasingly important what design-based methods can create connection.

What have you discovered by exploring this line of inquiry?

Exploring a part of the cultural media landscape of Birmingham helped me to not only see its rich and beautiful history, it’s struggles and dreams but how it’s possible to think out loud and learn alongside others such as artist, Adéolá. How ritual, ancestry and the eternal are vital if not central elements in shaping our physical and systemic structures. It allowed me to think about hospitality in the context of my experiences growing up in London; as well as those of my parents, both Nigerian migrants in the 1980s, attempting to build out lives and careers together but facing personal and systemic challenges. Which, I can’t help but think years on, that a section of my formidable development as a young person has been a counter to hostility. Like a child first becoming consciously aware of self-existence, I explored and began to ask questions of my own communication complex, “why am I”? Why this language and not that of my native tongue? Why am I not residing in the land of my parents? Hospitality within this space and time of diaspora history becomes an exercise in truth-seeking, in the face of empire, and navigation within a western reality. From being old enough to first play outside as a child and having children my own peerage asking where I’m from, and demanding as a slur that I should “go back to Africa”. Living in a city, and knowing my ancestral arrival is not too dissimilar to the “fruits of empire” or “the spoils of war”, attempting to find liberation, sanctuary, and hospitality becomes increasingly perplexing.

What do you want to do next?

We currently can’t avoid the changing winds that find us as a diaspora in the Western reality, disappearing spaces, frequencies and autonomy; will possibly have us asking questions, “has this phase come to a halt?” What transmissions will we create? What broadcasts will we send into space time now? Which frequencies will we tune in to? For myself I wish to consider not only how live transmission can live in my performance work but likewise spatially. Investigating the substitutes and supplemental culture we’ve cultivated within this sixty-plus year post-WW2 experiment.

I reflect on moments where a sense of hospitality is closest for me; which has been a blend between the home space and various Black third spaces, shaping a constant exchange of memories, ideas, cultivation, and media. To think of the family living room and the many third spaces I’ve inhabited as a sort of supplemented response to hostility but possibly a subconscious substitute for ancient life and non western architecture; I’m excited to investigate this further.

In ancient Yorubaland, the closest thing to a living room and third space would be the “ile aye” (Ilé — home; Ayé — life) or “agbo ile” (Ilé — home; Agbo — courtyard), a residential area that typically housed an extended family, comprising various structures, rooms, and open spaces for communal living. Within the compound, there would be designated areas for different activities, including sleeping quarters, cooking spaces, and a central courtyard. The central courtyard of the family compound often served as a multifunctional space, where family members would gather for socialising, discussions, and communal activities. It could be considered the heart of the household, akin to a modern living room, where family members spent time together, shared stories, and engaged in various daily interactions. Constructed in the agbo ile would also be the communal courtyard of the compound, where individuals often gathered for various social activities, including cultural celebrations, ceremonies, music, dances, and storytelling, and while not a direct parallel to a modern third space bar, club (possibly more in common with the “house party”), these communal spaces played a vital role in fostering social interactions, artistic expressions, and community cohesion in ancient Yoruba society; which could serve as an inspiration point for the build environment of today, as Wahab states…

“The methods of building and the planning and use of houses have changed in response to the demands of Westernization, modern technology, migration, urbanization, architects’ craze for complex designs and preference for non-local building materials, and the Christianization and Islamization of the society, and government’s planning and physical development policies. Agbo ile no longer appeals to the affluent and those already exposed to Western ideas, resulting in the decay, collapse, and complete ruin of the age” (Wahab, Waheed Bolanie, 1997).

You can read more about Daniel and his work here.

Or subscribe to his newsletter here.

To watch the available recordings of the (Returning to) Black Frequencies Lab please click here.

By the time this is published, it will already be outdated; perhaps redundant; perhaps inaccurate. We invite you to sit with these words in the spirit of time travel. This is where we were in our spirits and bodies. This is one of the ways we met the call from our Palestinian kin. This is a part of what our solidarity looked like in this moment. May the many revolutions we need in this time thrive and flourish.

We are witnessing a genocide in Palestine take place in real time, through phone screens that have been mined by children in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Each morning, we wake up to a new set of horrors: ambulances and evacuation routes bombed, children being pulled from rubble, survivors queuing for seven hours in the hope of getting one piece of bread. The people of Palestine are being subjected to relentless, merciless violence, as their lives, bodies, land and public infrastructures are being decimated. More than ever, it is clear how embedded we are as British “citizens” in colonial systems of oppression. We watch an American Palestinian in Palestine scream that his taxes are funding the bombs that are being dropped on him and his family. We should all be screaming the same thing.

We are intimately connected to the Palestinian people — far beyond the realm of taxes. And we’re cautious of how people in the West try to fix their complicity by throwing money at it, through well-meaning fundraisers and donations, even when we know that resources are barely getting into Palestine, let alone to the population areas who need it most. As Leon Sealey-Huggins reminds us when examining “reparations” in the context of the Caribbean and climate collapse, when it comes to crisis, there comes a point where money is obsolete. We will not ‘fix’ what is happening by Western tactics, including the comfort of our charitable paradigm. Our responses require much more critical and brave action than moving money around.

As a Black-led organisation, most of our team and ecosystem have direct lineages with colonised and enslaved people. Many of us deeply understand the generational wounds that are inflicted by this type of violence, and the immense grief and shameless erasure which follows. We watch in disgust as the same organisations who posted black squares in 2020, in sheepish support of Black Lives Matter, stay silent on the genocide of Palestinian people. There is no place for this type of erasure or minimisation in any of the spaces we hold. We refuse to bend to the rhetoric that this is a “complex” problem, taking place “over there” — when this genocide is epicentral to the systems of oppression our work calls to dismantle; there can be no Black liberation without Palestinian liberation. The same year that we witnessed the murder of George Floyd, Israeli forces shot a Palestinian, Disabled student for chanting: “Black Lives Matter and Palestinian Lives Matter”. Palestine, in their marches for Black liberation, wrote on banners: “Our struggles are one.”

Free Palestine. Free the people and the land. Free our Muslim and Arab siblings who have been, and will continue to be, subjected to heightened forms of surveillance, interrogation and abuse. Free us from our governments who are restricting what’s left of our rights to protest. Who attempt to polarise us; cutting off public travel and labelling our calls for freedom “hate marches”.

adrienne maree brown invites us to think of organising as a means of time travel: imagining, building and fighting for worlds which don’t yet, or no longer, exist. On marches for Palestine, we chant “Gaza, Gaza don’t you cry; We will never let you die” and tears fall from our eyes. We know that people die as we chant. And yet we keep chanting.

Audre Lorde said “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Our times are far more complex, messy and non-linear than our understanding, current commitments or posture is prepared to tend to.

It should not be lost on us that our world is crumbling. Human-induced warming is escalating us all towards irreversibility. We’re up 1.1°C on pre-industrial era temperature, which spells catastrophic for our planetary and ecological health. Biblical floods and destructive storms are rampant globally, along with chronic heatwaves and multiple pandemics amidst cascading crises. All the while, energy companies are reporting astronomical profit figures at the same time prices are soaring, while inflation forces everything to go up except wages. Civilians are punching climate activists blocking them from getting to work. Twitter is now ‘X’. Aliens are being acknowledged in Congress. Marine mammals are organising a revolution from their now boiling springs. Without a doubt, the walls are tumbling down.

As Bayo Akomolafe teaches us, “the times are urgent — let us slow down.” This slowing down invites, not a slowing of pace in and of itself, but a grappling with depth. Let us deepen our perspectives, our horizons, our analysis, our capacity to be honest. Let us acknowledge that ‘business as usual’ is literally killing us.

What is the role of culture here, amidst such troubling, apocalyptic times? Sure, entertainment is nice and there are individualised wellbeing benefits to engaging with the arts. But in a world that continues to spill, does this not become redundant? Our situating of art and culture could — and must — be so much more expansive than our current framings. Even in the present, we are stifled by how we think about impact and metrics, measuring what makes little sense in an already decaying world. We need more than plasters over septic wounds.

We find ourselves in a context that recognises investment in culture is important for the vitality of places. But what do we mean by ‘place’ in diasporic times; when war, climate collapse, landlordism, mass development and economic crises are enforcing movement, growing a type of artificial, nonconsensual impermanence? The edges are blurring. What if we understood that our places are never fixed, finished or finite? Neither are we. How might we then engage with culture, as though change is the only constant, as Octavia Butler reminds us.

What does it mean to mobilise change when the dominant condition of our field is rooted in the hoarding of power, wealth, land and resources? Or when erasure, classism, racism, ableism and other tactics of ‘otherness’ are the default?

What if we engaged culture as strategy in cultivating a more liberatory paradigm? What if we reimagined the cultural sector as a cultural ecology that orients towards presence, where infrastructures, resources and relationships are layered, dynamic and regenerative?

What would we build?

Maybe we’d reimagine spaces as loving sites of imagination, designed to be regenerative across scales, because we build what we believe. These sites of imagination could be ongoing spaces with play, rest, sharing, connection, pause, collective dreaming, gardening, making, healing, repair and worlding designed into the very fabric. Maybe these cultural infrastructures would be committed and adequately resourced at the earliest stages of development, instead of retrofit ‘solutions’ to ‘placemaking’. Maybe these infrastructures wouldn’t apply short-term ‘solutionism’ approaches to the climate crisis while constantly falling behind in their own environmental responsibilities. Maybe even before beginning to build something, we would understand there is no way of building a regenerative anything, without placing our more-than-human accountabilities at the centre of our spatial enquiries.

And when we say we are accountable to more than the ‘human’, we’d recognise our plant, animal and other nonhuman kin as relatives, rather than commodities, liabilities or nuisances. When we say we are accountable to more than the ‘human’, we’d see how the subjectivity of the term creates supremacies and how few have been afforded the privileges of such a categorisation. Meanwhile, people who are disabled, queer, Black, racialised, poor, asylum-seeking, gender non-conforming, elderly, for example, are actively erased, made disposable, harmed, violated or denied access to even the most basic affordances preserved for the ‘human’. When we say we are accountable to more than the ‘human’, we’d acknowledge the lineages and ancestors cultivating possibilities in impossible times before us, as well as the future ancestors to come. When we say we are accountable to more than the ‘human’, we’d acknowledge the new postures, practices and commitments required for our ecological and environmental responsibility. Perhaps we’d even acknowledge the atrocities enacted in the name of ‘human’-centred design, and sharply pivot to a more-than-human cosmology. We imagine in this paradigm, we might have an altered consideration of what matters.

What would we build?

Maybe we’d redistribute or recirculate our resources to meet the expansive needs of people, in which no one is made disposable. Perhaps we’d acknowledge the material, access, health, artistic and spiritual needs within this expansiveness. We’d see our budgets as an offering of our moral codes, and perhaps we’d reimagine the spaces we exercise our values here too.

To reorient towards this type of reciprocal generosity, perhaps we’d spend time getting intimate with our fears, the anxieties and the scarcity that sits at the base of our impulses to hoard wealth. Perhaps we might even need to create our own language to express the tangibles and intangibles of our work, because the binary 0 and 1 system of fiscal accounting, for example, tells one narrow and easily skewed picture where fiction masquerades as fact. And yet in this type of due dilgience paradigm, we might struggle to talk about other types of impact, so we risk erasing altogether the other, richer narratives of ‘ins, outs and loops’. When we desperately need deeper accountabilities and accountable practices in these times, perhaps we’d reframe what we consider due diligence to be.

What would we build?

Maybe we’d look at our investment in art and culture as rehearsal for who we want to be, beyond the individualised pursuit. Could we see that our programmes, artistic enquiries, venues, activities, partnerships, decision-making and ways of being are not just self-determined as important but rehearsal rooms for liberation, space to work through in all its messy, at-times-painful, heart-wrenching, necessary complexity.

Here, we expand what it means to even be an artist, giving form to new possibilities and narratives of ourselves, in turn liberating culture from its own colonial-imprinted shackles. Here, we might grow our collective imagination and understand creativity as a way to prototype the world that we are dreaming of. For that to be an authentic inquiry, we’d try to create the capacity for magic in the every day, rather than a fleeting, momentary occurrence.

What would we build?

This is not a speculative exercise.

Sometimes the magnitude of what we are yearning for feels too great for us to even begin. We feel like this type of reorientation is so impossible, so grand that we stagnate. But this is not a speculative exercise. We don’t have to get lost in the feeling of starting from scratch. Because we aren’t.

10 years ago, MAIA began as project to unpack how we could create these loving spaces and infrastructures between us as a network of artists, creatives and culture-makers who felt disinvested in or othered by the current system. MAIA began from a frustration that the people with the ideas, passion, commitment, love and ideas for their places are usually the ones most disconnected from resources to make change happen there, but wanting to employ a type of poetic pragmatism against the tide of systematic barriers.

Together, engaging in a systemic analysis of our current paradigm and its harmful, extractive, inequitable defaults, we began co-investing in building alternative possibilities using culture as strategy. We took these guiding ‘what if’ questions and set out to explore what we could build instead. The people of the city got behind us. Over time, those who knew that ‘business as usual’ was killing us — the artists, organisations and fellow poetic pragmatists from across the country — and eventually across the world — joined our mission.

Working to build real-time systems demonstrators of these possibilities, our practice is explored through three mission strands: ‘Sites of Imagination’, ‘Culture x Liberation’ and ‘Resourcing the Movement’, while the organisation itself becomes a testbed for organisational forms, tactics and structures needed to support this liberatory paradigm.

In 2020, when we set out tor raise £2,000 to distribute to artists we knew were slipping through the gaps of infrastructural provision in COVID-19, the people got behind us. We crowdfunded and redistributed £10,000 within 3 weeks. By the end of 2021, we had invested over £250,000 to culture makers by way of hardship grants, funds, commissions, access resources, wellbeing support, and (relatively) secure employment.

In the same year, when we got the keys to YARD, to reimagine a 4 bedroom townhouse into our first Site of Imagination, in the spirit of Grandad’s house, the city got behind us.

Now for context, Grandad’s house is the most convivial, joyful, loving space you could imagine. A house full of laughter, music, food, conversation, soul, Grandad’s house was the neighbourhood’s cultural infrastructure never included in city mapping projects. A pristine front room, covered in a growing collection of plastic-wrapped furniture, ornaments and photos of everybody’s children. An animated living room: debates and dominoes at the dining table too big for the size of the room, a phone call from Sister Francis whose safe return home invites rejoicing from Nana, toddlers dancing in front of the television, Aunties singing their hearts out, the scent of soul food filling the air. Teenagers lining the stairway creating their own sanctuaries. Grandad was the first and greatest storyteller, generations of children joyfully gathering at his feet as he shape-shifted, retold fables and induced wonder. Why would we not build from this spirit?

When we set out to develop an artist-led hotel called ABUELOS, that held the spirit of Grandad’s house and would steer the cultural sector’s extensive accommodation budgets away from private hotel chains and extractive landlords back into Birmingham, the city got behind us. The generosity of the city’s cultural leaders — who shared their budgets, offered their support, gave their time, connected us to resource and advocated for MAIA — seeded a whole new set of possibilities. When cities around the world invited us to come and share our practice, to support place-based iterations

It started with Grandad’s house and the beauty of the every day. That is to say, we need new visions and precedents for what we build and how we lead.

Relational ecology as strategy

This is not a speculative exercise. These loving structures exist all around us. There’s Soul City Arts, consistently showing up in disinvested in Birmingham communities, bringing people together in interfaith, intercultural convening at beautiful scales. There’s BOM, who are actively raising investment and reviving one of the city’s most loved and historic music venues to develop the Digital Centre for Inclusion, while constantly opening doors for other leaders to access opportunity because their director Karen Newman understands that the story of BOM is interdependent with the rest of the cultural ecology. There’s Grand Union who are working to ensure artists — who the cultural sector’s value is built upon but are disproportinionatley invested in — have permanent spaces to grow their practice, make work and access opportunities. There’s Civic Square, who are engaging in everyday acts of creativity as strategy for ecological, social and climate transition at the scale of a neighbourhood. There are already a wealth of collectives, independent artists and many others who operate beyond the constraints of ‘organisation’ who are doing this work. And this is just to get started.

So what will we build? We have already started. We know this work is messy, complex and constantly jars against the normative environs we’ve all been raised in. This is why de-centring ourselves is so critical. In isolation, resorting to defaults in which accountability orients around supremacy is convenient. Collectively, new openings emerge, deeper accountabilities grow.

We consider ourselves within a wide-ranging, interdependent ecology, extending beyond the arts because we know that a single issue approach to change-based work isn’t an appropriate tactic. Our ecology is made up of an entangled network of organisations and practitioners exploring wealth distribution, transformative governance, healing justice, land stewardship, intergenerational learning, community-led development and much more, all of whom hold the compounding, complex crises of our times central while facing a shared horizon. The question is what forms of resistance are we encountering along the way and how can our wider field’s collective leverage be utilised to support the more regenerative, just paradigms we’re calling for? Here’s to facing the task with unparalleled bravery, because this is not a speculative exercise. May we slow down. May we commit to depth.

It’s quite a time to reflect on the brutality of an oppressive and exclusive arts and cultural sector. The tomato soup has barely dried on Van Gogh’s sunflowers and in the aftermath of Just Stop Oil activists glueing themselves to the wall of the National Gallery in the fight against fossil fuels, social media is still debating the personal politics of the artist and the appropriate forms of protest.

At best, this is a sector that operates in an Equality-Diversity-Inclusion paradigm, not even honest about its harm, extraction and complicity, never mind equipped to create structural shifts of power. While simultaneously addressing the positive contributions of the arts, many of our most acclaimed institutions are funded by the same oil companies exacerbating harm, violence and state-sanctioned death.

Throughout history, the art world — whether public sector or private industry — has amassed and sustained significant wealth, land and resources through the colonial acquisition of property, and which continues to distribute resources inequitably. Those who challenge this reality are censored; anti-Blackness and ableism are defaults; and the autocratic hierarchies which govern it are interested in maintaining power, status, and answer only to boards which are made up of the usual suspects: typically white, middle-class, privileged people with “strong networks”. What does it mean to mobilise change, when this is the dominating condition?

The Abolitionist Invitation

What is it to reimagine the cultural sector as an ecology that orients towards life instead of death? At MAIA, we’re inspired by the invitation that abolition presents: to imagine a world free from carceral systems, is to imagine life-affirming ones. As abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.”

“What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons […] therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything, but abolition as the founding of a new society.”

– Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

Grounded in the understanding of abolitionist organising as a creation project, our work is actively imagining and prototyping what the cultural landscape might look like if we were to orient towards a regenerative, liberatory horizon. Instead of sustaining injustice and practices that are rooted in punishment, we’re interrogating how change is ideated and rehearsed, at both the grassroots and broader systems level.

MAIA’s vision is a world towards liberation, in which artists are resourced and mobilised to reimagine its possibilities. Our mission is to grow capacity for collective world-building, where Black imagination and culture are the starting points.

We explore this by prototyping ideas, spaces, relationships and work that situate across three intersecting mission strands:

1. Sites of Imagination: we create physical and virtual spaces, centring economic, healing and spatial justice through place-based prototypes. We also share our practice, working with communities across the world to reimagine public, cultural spaces as convening portals to rehearse the worlds we dream of.
2. Resourcing the Movement: we support the capacity of artists and the communities they’re embedded in, to shape change. We do this by facilitating decentralised mechanisms to meet the various and expansive needs of people — be that financial, creative, access, spiritual or any other — inspired by the invitation of mutual aid.
3. Culture x Liberation: we advocate artists as the designers, practitioners, storytellers and worldbuilders for liberation. Our cultural programmes and residencies draw upon Black scholarship and community practice to explore the role of art(ists) in growing public consciousness, mobilising for change and rehearsing freedom.

Practicing Liberation, Shaping Change

In pragmatic terms, here are some of the ways we’re embedding the abolitionist invitation in our practice.

• [Radical Structuring]

As Grace Lee Boggs said, “you have to transform yourself to transform the world.” If we understand that our large complex systems are made up of many micro relationships and patterns, then we must see ourselves as a fractal of a reality we want to live in. If our wider systems need to transform to make the ‘life-affirming’ possible, then it requires our organisations and our understanding of governance to radically transform.

Over the past two years, we’ve been working with Hanna Thomas Uose of Align, who has been guiding us as we redesign our organisational structure to be in deeper synchronicity with our values, vision, mission and external practice.

Throughout this process, Hanna helped us to develop an organisational structure in the form of a solar system. Instead of a role, like a CEO or Chair in a centralised or hierarchical position, which we know isn’t sustainable in movement work, MAIA’s solar system places our mission and vision at the centre as the Sun. Different roles and relationships have different proximities to the Sun — those who hold MAIA’s mission tighter are more proximate, collaborative teams or assemblages (constellations) form around mission strands (planets) and streams of work (moons). We also acknowledge our mission is interdependent with the missions of those beyond our organisation and understand that we are shaped by, held in balance and in relationship with other solar systems.

The structure is neither hierarchical nor flat, but alive, of organic matter and interdependent with other mission-led organisations orienting towards a shared horizon.

We’ll be writing more on this soon. You can also see Hanna’s reflections here.

• [Life-Affirming Contracts]

Working with Hanna on transforming governance, lots of questions surfaced regarding operations, pay structures, policies and contracts. As an organisation that started from one volunteer, to a salaried team of 8, there have been many steep learning curves. We only became an employer in 2020 and with very few precedents for what ‘good’ looked like in employment practice, we always knew we needed to reimagine working relationships while building the road, when trying to organise for liberation.

To explore this further, MAIA joined a peer-group catalysed by Dark Matter Labs, as part of their #BeyondtheRules work to reimagine employment contracts. In framing contracting as a verb, we saw the full stack of what it takes to ‘relationship’ well.

Our particular interest is in the detail of how we align our legal requirements and due-diligence with life-affirming practice. As a Limited Community Interest Company that abides by English law and reports to the CIC regulator, Companies House and HMRC, we have adopted the many default ways to do due diligence. But these lead to carceral defaults. Language like “probationary period”, “policy”, “review”, “termination” “disciplinary” sit in opposition to life-affirming relationships.

While we started to make iterative changes to our employment benefits to include extensive parental leave, a company access pot, personal wellbeing budgets and paid development days — which was a key part of our fundraising strategy in 2021/22 — we have now begun to also redraft our language and internal practice (policies) to reflect this in employment agreements. We are continuing to interrogate what an abolitionist relationship could look like in a labour exchange.

• [YARD]

YARD is a new typology of space — as a part community hub, part residency space, part work space in a townhouse. Informed by the compounding crises in the age of COVID-10, we intentionally designed YARD’s programme and shared our resources freely to create different types of invitations to be in relationship, and to demarcate a shift away from exclusive and normative arts spaces, into a site of imagination. Part of imagining new spaces involves starting with new precedents. Rather than seeing a white cube gallery as the starting point for designing an arts space, YARD’s journey began with the inquiry: what happens if we start with Grandad’s house? What happens when we start with spaces that make us feel safe, which invite hospitality, wellness, joy, fluidity, and which feel in the same spirit of the places and people we want to honour? And how might these new precedents free up our assumptions, and help us realise more things are possible?

• [Radical Imagination Lab: Life Affirming Infrastructures]

As students of this work, our Radical Imagination Lab is a programme of work rooted in an inquiry that speaks to MAIA’s mission. Our first lab, Life Affirming Infrastructures (May-July 2022), inspired by the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, was a season of learning and making for us and our community. Together, we explored abolition as a creation project, particularly in the role of culture as a visionary tool. From workshops on design fiction as a means of holding complexity, to talks on non-hierarchical structures, to a week-long Cypher where we freestyled on everything from Doughnut Economics to more-than-human accountabilities, we were transformed by so many of the ideas and reflections which emerged across the duration. All of this was deepened by the offerings from our artist-in-residence, Rene Francis-McBrearty, who throughout the Lab responded and contributed to the materials and conversations through their own creative practice, leading to the formation of their land justice project, Star Flower Club.

• [YARD Arts School]

YARD Arts School is a radical arts school built around Black thought and creative practice, Over two weeks, this became an open invitation for artists-in-residence and our community to use culture as a means of exploring MAIA’s inquiries. In doing so, we use the school as an invitation to deconstruct some of the systems and structures which decimate our relationships, environments and ways of being.

The provocation of our first school, ‘Imagine a World Without Prisons’ became a way to explore all facets of the criminal justice system, the insidious ways that policing shows up in our communities, the social prisons and expectations in which we’re confined, and the instinct for punishment which we inflict on strangers, loved ones, and ourselves.

By building a learning space which encouraged intuitive making, which placed ‘play’ at the heart of its curriculum, and created capacity for people who wouldn’t call themselves artists to see how materials and creativity might give form to some of their most complex feelings, Arts School became a reimagining of pedagogy. This reimagining was deeply inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who writes in Undrowned:

‘We are struggling because, over and over again, we feel like we are not good enough family members, but what if we just need to go back to school? Meaning, what if there is no such thing as “good enough” in structures too small for the necessary adaptations of life? What if all those ways we feel like failures in our families are not failures at all, but a pre-school lesson that could teach us to restructure our care?’

Challenges of Seeding New Paradigms

Change does not manifest immediately. In fact, as a team of artists and cultural workers, we understand our work as rehearsing change. We are not working from a place of answers; we’re wayfinding, testing out new ways of working, making and being in relationship with each other. On top of this, the conditions we work in are always shifting and are always precarious. Our communities are experiencing constant and ever-worsening forms of crisis. We are trying to build new systems and structures, whilst navigating the problems of the ones we currently exist in. The challenges of doing all this, inside of tension and uncertainty, while trying to deepen the work and strategise, is inescapable.

Since our origins, we do this work while under-resourced, and with no financial runway. In order to get resources at scale to cover adequate salaries and rising operating costs, we work in partnerships with clashing timelines. Or we have to appeal to funders who often do not understand or recognise our work as something rooted in emergence and tending to conditions, rather than work which has predictable outputs and outcomes. We then have to piecemeal opportunities and finances in order to create good jobs, beyond-bare-minimum benefits and care budgets for people marginalised by systems within and beyond the cultural sector.

MAIA has grown from a single volunteer to a team of eight on payroll, in a short space of time. 2020 was the first time anyone became salaried, after receiving a capacity-building grant. Learning to grow well, learning to manage and be responsible for a group of people, is a complex, difficult and often contradictory process. All of the team come to this work as people who have been harmed, hurt, undervalued and/or erased by other places of work and relationships. These wounds show up in complicated ways. But they also remind us of the urgency of healing justice inside our movements. We can’t build anew without tending to the harm our communities have faced; it will always surface.

We acknowledge this critical need for capacity and healing justice while working in impossible conditions. We are trying to operate beyond normative practice and defaults. There are no precedents for this in our sector; we are bravely stepping into new territories all of the time, and this always comes with risk and learning, which requires patience, reciprocity and mutuality by those we’re in relationship with. Often, this isn’t conducive to people tending to their own urgencies.

Even with Disability Justice as a central framework, we can’t meet everyone’s needs all of the time. While operating in a working paradigm, we are learning to respond to fluidity and to changes of needs, with no adequate resource to actually be able deliver the level of care, options and flexibility we’re dreaming of. But this is an iterative process.

Mission-led organisations who lead boldly with their principles and values are often expected to have immediate solutions for their community’s interconnected struggles, situated beyond any one organisation’s remit. Thus, these organisations are held under relentless levels of scrutiny, expectation, accusations and demand. The impacts of austerity politics and economic crisis means that some needs which should be tended to by community, family, peers, the State, etc, aren’t, due to lack of resource and the decimation of welfare and community infrastructure. In their absence, one organisation can’t do or be everything to everyone, but may be expected to fill various gaps for many people at any one time. It is a challenge to manage this, set clear expectations and hold boundaries when you’re often the only entity or place a member of your community has to go. We often become a placeholder for the frustrations and disappointment of people failed or compromised by capitalism.

Even with new organisational structures, even with setting up accountability lines, even with growing slow collaborations, even with piecing together just about enough resource to make something transformative happen, these things take time to put into practice. This means that risk, responsibility and care often isn’t evenly distributed across the team, which can slow work, evade rigour, result in burn out, and lead to mission-drift.

“If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other? How do we learn to do this love work of collective care that lifts us instead of abandons us, that grapples with all the deep ways in which care is complicated?”

- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

On The Horizon

As a continual enquiry of a life-affirming cultural sector, our next phase of work helps us to deepen our collective worldbuilding practice:

• [Disability Justice Labs]

Disability Justice Labs are peer spaces, in partnership with Hazel Sealeaf, exploring how Disability Justice informs imagination to liberation practice, particularly in how it pertains to space, relationships and resourcing. We begin this process by inviting some peers to go on a journey with us. In 2023, we’ll be going on deeper dives into spatial, relational and resource design for collective liberation, through a lens shaped by Sins Invalid’s ’10 Principles of Disability Justice’.

• [Accounting in the Black Imagination]

Interrogating the foundations law is built upon and detangling the stories we tell around finance, ‘Accounting in the Black Imagination’ is a residency for invited artists-in-residence, using Indigenous wisdom, craft and Black imagination as the lens to explore new possibilities for accounting, data analysis and organisational storytelling. This residency was shaped following a worldshifting conversation with artist Jack Ky Tan.

• [Governance and Structuring]

We’re moving into the next stage of detailed design around embedding solar system governance into practice. The key focuses are: mission stewarding, accountability and relationshipping in decentralised leadership. We’ll share more about this, as we continue to explore bio-reconciliation, informed by biomimicry, in organisational structures.

We’re very conscious, embracing and intentional about our work being experimental, iterative and emergent. We consider MAIA a learning organisation, where we come together with our ecosystem as both students and practitioners, imagining, rehearsing and iterating possibilities for change. If you’re interested in exploring how our experiments align with your organisation or practice, we’d love you to join us or get in touch.