“The culture that’s going to survive in the future is the culture that you can carry around in your head.” – Nam Jun Paik
In the break of the Middle Passage, the culture of Africans transported across the Atlantic was retained primarily through intangible forms – music, performance, spirituality – which could nestle in the hearts and minds of these transposed peoples. Through this understanding, the relation to material and the lineages of craft thereof became estranged from those who would become Black people. Now, if one desires a reconnection to these traditions, it necessitates not only a mending of the disjuncture, but a recontextualization of the new environment these diasporic peoples found themselves in. In the face of this challenge, there are key qualities of Black culture, found thematically in our retained cultural forms – improvisation, coded and layered messaging, and usage of the malleable, the accessible, the versatile – that serve not only as a historical means of cultural remembrance, but as cultural continuity and propulsion with an ever-expanding potential.
