Denniston Hill 2020 Annual Appeal
Radical imagination and practice are what we always strive for
Denniston Hill billboard, photo by Timothy Gerken, for For Freedoms. Photo: Nate Smith (@natesmithphoto)
2020 was the year that extinction defined the horizon of the 21st century.
We are at the beginning of nothing less than what Franco “Bifo” Berardi has called an “Apocalypse”: “a moment of truth in which it becomes clear that the neoliberal economy is incompatible with the survival of humankind” (Berardi 2020). Now, more than ever, we need to collectively develop and sustain a radical imagination to chart a path of escape from extinction.
At Denniston Hill, the spectre of food insecurity, systemic racial injustice, and the effects of climate change led us back to the land and a reappraisal of our responsibilities to it and the lives it sustains. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and throughout the massive political, social, and economic upheavals of the intervening months, we have been studying intensively and collectively to imagine the world, life, and social institutions not as they are but as they might otherwise be. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have pointed out the radical possibilities inherent in “black study” as a mode of thinking with others and we embarked on a multivalent investigation of what it meant to be a collective of radical thinkers and makers in this historic moment of potential extinction (Harney and Moten 2013, 58-69). Our study did not simply result in a dream of different futures, but in the unfolding of a collective strategy to bring those possibilities back from the future to workon the present, to inspire action and new forms of solidarity today (Khasnabish and Haiven, 2014).
Denniston Hill Open House 2018. Photo: Vladimir Radodicic
“Creating platforms for study and sustained conversations where radical acts of imagination can be rehearsed, argued, revised, and re-played.”
We return to the idea of “rooted” that the term “radical” inherits from its Latin etymology. The radical imagination for us is not only informed by an understanding of the ways social, political, economic, and cultural problems are the result of deeply rooted systemic inequality, oppression, and exploitation. It is also deeply tied to the stewardship of the earth itself.
In 2021 we will return to our “roots” in the land by building our first community garden and commissioned artists Eugenia Manwelyan, Landon Newton, and Maureen Connor to build a reproductive justice garden, which will include herbs that have been historically used for fertility, contraception, and abortion. These interventions are continuous with our engagement with the land as both stewards and artists who seek to redefine the relationship between communities and their environments, between the ontological categories of “human” and “non-human” which have structured our realities as people of color in the imperial world. The gardens will serve as a resource and a platform for new programming around land justice, indigenous history, sustainable agriculture, and food education, empowering communities to develop new ways of understanding ecological and agricultural relationships.
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While ideas of decolonization and the necessity for decentering whiteness have started to captivate the attention of most cultural institutions, Denniston Hill, as a queer Black and People of Color-led organization, has always cultivated space for deimperializing visions. As artists and writers who work within white-dominated fields (academia, contemporary art, architecture) we are keenly aware of the ways in which our words, works, and identities can be easily co-opted for institutional purposes.
During the pandemic, we launched Porch Conversations—intimate conversations with our peers who we want to engage as we reimagine our role and responsibilities as a cultural institution invested in fostering the radical imagination.
Innovative research, sustained conversations, and fugitive study are the backbone of our process. “Exodus and the Ethics of Uncertainty" is the conceptual framework. Collective organization, mutual aid, and action are our goals.
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Thank you for being part of the Denniston Hill community.
- The Denniston Hill Team