I want to explore methods of collective memory that reflect the larger social body. Ever since I read Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman, I have been fascinated by the concept of critical fabulation. Hartman uses this concept to write historical narratives that speak for figures who have been systemically silenced by traditional archives. I think scribing has great potential to illustrate narratives in a fashion that allows for multiple voices to speak and transverse between past and future more fluidly than traditional historical accounts. This medium also makes space for multiple truths to exist without compressing the complexity or following a teleological narrative.

In my quest to align my values and my practices, I have been doing deep research into solidarity economy principles and exploring how to create pricing models that feel more expansive than capitalism. There are so many incredible resources that I have been synthesizing for this practice from people and orgs like Both/And, Bear Herbert, Hadassah Damien and many others. Political education from Anticapitalism for Artists was also foundational for me in redefining artists as “cultural workers” and understanding how creative professions add additional factors in how we value labor and understand class.

Through the work of Claudia Berger, Frederica Fragpane, Sophie Chien, Tanvi Sharma, and others, I have delved into the world of data visualization and embodiment. What does it mean for data to be felt? Now that we intake so much information on a daily basis, our coping mechanisms for overwhelm and a lack of strategies to digest/metabolize data show up as ignorance or desensitization. How can we create a larger collective nervous system that allows us to process the gravity of data through our bodies rather than just our minds?

One of the intersections between scribing and abolition appears within narrative work: empowering communities to own their stories. With ownership comes the ability to unweave stereotypes that invisibilize system inequalities and enable freedom dreaming that reaches beyond our current reality. Using the principle of holding complexity, scribing can navigate between untethering dreams from the constraints of systemic oppression and strategically map-making through the challenges of those same systems. Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes “Abolition geography starts from the homely premise that freedom is a place.”

Scribing is a form of decolonizing knowledge, incorporating more information from the body, culture, and ritual, allowing knowledge to be co-created communally, and reflecting more expansive conceptions of time. I would love to weave together scribing with land-based practices to see how scribing can support land sovereignty and become a pathway of knowledge-keeping. This can appear in the ability for scribing pieces to “encode power,” using cultural references and symbols to orient a way forward while still protecting vulnerable information.

Similar to decolonizing knowledge, countermapping references the ability to create maps that break the carcerality of modern geography. Expanding into other forms of spaciality, I want to explore scribing as a reflection/mirror, surfacing what appears in the present and creating a sense of safety in reflecting what is behind us, molding a clearer picture of where we are coming from and what we are supported by. This feels connected with the way that myths are retold, how the story is reshaped by each iteration in a new context. In this way, scribing is also a portal to time travel between past, present, and future.