WE DO THIS ’TIL WE FREE US- The discipline of Hope

“Hope is a discipline… We have to iterate it, model it, build it, and practice it every day.”

— Mariame Kaba, We Do This ’Til We Free Us

How do we move away from punitive, individualistic, and extractive ways of making and being together? How do we cultivate hope not as a vague feeling, but as an active, daily artistic and relational discipline?

This semester, we take Mariame Kaba’s seminal work We Do This ’Til We Free Us as our starting point to explore abolition, collective care, and liberation as practical strategies within spatial and creative practice. In a world that conditions us toward surveillance, punishment, competition, and capitalist urgency, this seminar invites us to practice building the worlds we actually want to inhabit—here and now.

Continuing our practice-based structure as a workshop / exhibition / reading-room, we will engage with new media and performativity—using sound, video, movement, performance, visual journals, filmic notes, and found objects—to make our inquiries tangible. Together, we will fashion an environment where we are co-creators in the learning experience and co-practitioners in unearthing knowledge.

We will explore:

• How do we practice accountability, transformative justice, and care within our creative processes and shared spaces?

• What does it mean to make art from a place of collective safety and mutual aid, rather than sacrifice, extraction, or burnout?

• How can our embodied practices, sound, movement, and media serve as tools to dismantle harmful structures and dream up liberated futures?

We invite our theoretical capabilities to ground themselves in the lived, emotional knowledge within our bodies. Together, we will build a practice of sustained care, experimentation, and collective imagination.