When Ruth Nicole and I brought the collectives together in our first Forms of Freedom exchange session, the first question we got was, “Do you think we can create together?” There was emphasis on the word together. Of course the answer was “Yes” (That’s that emergent, participatory design). But we couldn’t be together in the same space yet, because you know why.

A year later when the exchange sessions were finished and it was safer to travel, safer to be together, we brought everyone together-together. Like in person. This was the experiment of the People’s Sound Studio in NYC @ Teachers College. The idea was to create how the collectives create in the same space and invite the public in. Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths - Solhot & The Aadizookaan & Fire in Little Africa / The Space Program

The People’s Sound Studio also happened specifically in New York and at TC because Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz and Bettina Love said yes. Yes to the sounds, yes to the snacks, yes to the visitation. Holding space in Bettina’s abolition teaching seminar boosted the most radical idea seeded in the project: a proposition that formlessness itself is as an abolitionist strategy (that’s Ruiz & Vourloumis in Formless Formations).

We shared artistic creations from the project, and the response and conversation in the seminar pushed us outward and upward. It was energy that would help create the ensemble of movement frozen in space where it all now lives. What I mean is that there are sacred things we made as part of this project that we didn’t know should or needed to be public before that visit. That’s true of everything I made with our archive of shared sounds. More on those later.

Being there also showed us a contradiction running through this work. Here we are, calling this a “People’s Sound Studio,” inviting in the “public” to an elite, Ivy League space that’s a room inside a building inside another big ass building inside an ever-expanding zone of university sprawl. Some public. Boy are we silly sometimes.

That was a moment of levitation. When the contradiction you’re standing on drops out. You’re floating, levitating — as Kesho Scott explains (thanks for that podcast, Matt). It wasn’t a negation of our work. The levitation was a call to think about it differently. The differently we got to (or maybe this is more me) was the notion of passing through — all the ways we are passing through these institutions together. Passing though, romping through, and stomping through together. The People’s Sound Studio was a kind of passing through.