Changing
Frequencies
What is Cultural Memory Work?
Cultural Memory intervenes on the erasure of communities of colors’ cultural and ancestral practices that have been stolen from us as a weapon of colonization & genocide. The co-optation and misappropriation of our cultural memory include the stealing of our lands, traditions, food, and medicines. For too long, hospitals, prisons, and detention centers, to name a few, have used ‘treatments to fix and cure’ that are rooted in state violence & cultural genocide and have caused immense harm to treated Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, Two Spirit, Gender Non-Conforming and Intersex (LGBTQTSGNCI) communities, people with developmental, physical & neurodivergent disabilities and living with chronic illness, and people living in street & survival economies. It is our cultural practices & traditions that have allowed our survival despite the violence and these abuses of experimentation & exploitation of our communities.
Changing Frequencies values recovering cultural memory of our traditions as essential to our collective care and survival. We interrupt and heal this erasure and disconnection through co-creation, curation, and production of installations, immersive experiences, and cultural practices that are rooted in the reclamation of memory, transformation, and healing. We partner with other collectives & organizations seeking to build & restore cultural memory practices.
Cultural memory interrupts and heals the erasures of our traditions. Cultural memory is our intergenerational memory that has been passed down for centuries and lives in our collective bodies —cells and bones transfused through our memories of our relationships to land, body, and spirit.
Healing Justice Lineages
The Healing Justice Lineages Project archives the rich legacy of healing justice in order to meet the moment of escalating political crises. Through archiving past and present strategies for collective care and safety, Healing Justice Lineages works to fortify the political and spiritual needs of our movements and communities, centering an abolitionist and anti-capitalist compass.
Psalm for the MisMemoried
This VR film invites us into the story of an ancestor named Future who travels across time & space to take mismemoried* ancestors home from historical sites of medical harm. She is arriving at Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, to meet Hattie, a former patient and worker who was left behind. Future has come to take her home. Filmed in 360° video, this experimental and historical drama takes place on the actual campus of the Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, GA.
*Mismemoried is a new word meaning-the missed and the lost memory of ancestors when they are disappeared and/or taken from generations.
Written and Directed by Cara Page
VR Filmmaker, Philip A. Sanchez
Featuring Tamika Middleton & Adaku Utah
Attendees to the immersive event offer flowers.
Psalm for the Mismeasured & Unfit
VIDEO: Psalm for the Mismeasured and Unfit (full-length) (Youtube)
This is a prayer
A psalm
A tonic
A medicine
For our freedom from this vile history
and contemporary violence
Committed on generations, and generations
and generations to now.
We are still waiting to be seen, remembered, recovered, freed from these rooms.
This video is an excerpt of an original piece, written by Cara Page in 2018, entitled; “Psalm for the Mismeasured & Unfit” staged reading for Haunted Files. This performance is dedicated to Black Women & Indigenous Women & Women of Color globally, who have been tested on, experimented on and sterilized. For Black women whose bodies have been vilified and exoticized, raped and pathologized by white supremacy, scientific racism and the medical industrial complex. It is also for the Black birth workers, healers, midwives, doulas and root workers who survived and birthed generations despite attempted genocide.
The performance opens with the memory of the poking, prodding and painful extraction of medical racism that has been pervasively testing on Black women and many Communities of Color, Indigenous, Disabled, Queer & Trans, and Migrant/refugee Communities for centuries since slavery and colonization to now. In our blood, bones and memories for as far back as we can remember, we have been tested on, terrorized, observed, objectified, used and abused by colonizers and colonialist institutions seeking to prove our inferiority through our anthropometry; literal bone structure, dna and bloodlines.
Performed by the amazing ensemble cast of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative. Featuring; Vesta Walker, Jaime Dzandu, Audrey Hailes, Jehan Roberson & Sara Abdullah, from the artistic vision and choreography directed by Ebony Noelle Golden. In partnership with the writer and producer, Cara Page of Changing Frequencies, we time traveled through this psalm of pain to transformation and power.
We are bearing witness to the embodiment of Black women’s pain from scientific racism under the guise of national security and being less than human, subjects, objects and animals at the whim of white supremacist, ableist, misogynist violence as an extension of popoulation control, eugenics and slavery. The performers begin by replicating the sterilization, the needling, the forced physical & emotional interrogation, the tearing and ripping of experimentation committed on Black women for centuries while images of the archaic instruments used are overlaid visually. While some of the performers embody the pain experienced from this terror.
Then a healer begins to conjure and move the energy and they begin to heal and transform and recover. They find each other amidst this pain and hold one another. The energy moves into resiliency as we hear the words of, “Mama, Nana/Grandmama/ Auntie we are waiting” to be seen and heard and recovered in these waiting rooms of racist, homophobic, classist, doctors and scientific genocide. The performers move into a reclamation dance of resilience & transformation as they move the energy (to an exceptional soundtrack in the backdrop by DJ Petra) while we witness them moving their power as survivors, healers, witches, midwives and birth workers.
The Video was edited and produced by Sergio Tupac Uzurin of Native NY Video. sergiotupacuzurin.com
The Anti-Eugenics Project, seeks to excavate and examine the lasting effects of eugenics towards dismantling the politics of exclusion— the founding eugenicist ideology that some humans are “fit” and and others are “unfit”— continues to plague our society in the forms of racism, classism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and other forms of social tyranny.
The “Dismantling Eugenics: Legacies/Reckonings/Futures” digital convening was held from Sep 27 – Oct 2, bringing together bring together activists, artists, critical thinkers, cultural workers, organizers, and scholars to envision a future free from the insidious founding principles of the eugenics movement, which posited through pseudo-science that some human beings – largely white, able-bodied, heterosexual men – were “fit” while others were “unfit” that still plague modern society in the forms of ableism, classism, homophobia, misogyny, racism, transphobia, xenophobia and other forms of social tyranny today.
Over the course of the seven days, the Dismantling Eugenics convening acted as a counter centennial to the Second International Eugenics Congress, held at the American Museum of Natural History on September 25-28, 1921. Participants excavated the history of eugenicist thought, lifted up the cross-sectional movements working to counter the oppressive structures that propagate eugenicist ideals, and offered space to envision solidarity—thus presenting a counter narrative to the conference held 100 years ago.
Special Series on COVID-19 & the Medical Industrial Complex on Fortification Podcast
Co-produced with Auburn Seminary, Anjali Taneja & Susan Raffo
Part I: Past: Rooting in histories, we have been here before. Co-moderated with Caitlin Breedlove, featuring TL Lewis and Anjali Taneja (May 1, 2020)
Part II: Present: What is emerging in COVID times? Moderated by Anjali Taneja & Caitlin Breedlove, featuring Michelle Morse, Francisca Porchas, and Jack Tchen. (May 1, 2020)
Part III: Future: Spiritual and political mandates for our future. Moderated by Susan Raffo & Caitlin Breedlove, featuring Erica Woodland, and Shira Hassan. (May 1, 2020)
Part IV: Abolition in COVID times: Weaving strategies for healing justice and transformative justice. Co-moderated with Caitlin Breedlove, featuring Mia Mingus, Shira Hassan and Sonali Sadequee (August 25, 2020)