Changing Frequencies is an abolitionist organizing project that designs cultural memory work to disrupt harms and violence from the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC). We amplify and honor communal stories towards healing and transformative futures.
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.