Gallery of the Streets exists at the intersections of art, education, geography, history, activism, and movement-building in New Orleans. Using Black Feminist Theory as a point of departure, their social practice installations and performances are rooted in community collaboration and democratic processes. Communities who are directly impacted by policies and practices of structural oppression work together to conceptualise and produce visual opera projects that interweave painting, sculpture, found objects, sound, movement, ritual and narrative. Here GotS will share their ongoing practice, collaborating with G.O.D.S, as they develop [b]reach, an abolitionist black queer retelling of Marge Piercy’s incredible feminist utopian novel Woman on the Edge of Time. At Episode 8, GotS is represented by Kai Lumumba Barrow and Jazz Franklin.

Gallery of the Streets

Kai Lumumba Barrow formed Gallery Of The Streets in 2010. It is an evolving network of artists, activists, organisers, scholars, cultural workers, and community supporters exploring black geographies and the politics of place. Engaging everyday spaces as sites of resistance, Kai’s work fuses public art and organising for social change to reconfigure the familiar and generate new ideas against the oppression of existing conditions. As well as Kai, Jazz Franklin from GotS will be joining us at Episode 8. Jazz is documentarian of social movement organisations. She aspires to evaluate the power dynamics and contradictions within the production, storytelling (editing), and objective truth of documentary film/video, and is currently the lead documentarian with Gallery of the Streets, capturing the process and progress of the network’s cultural organising praxis.

Kai Lumumba Barrow

Since the late 1970s, Kai has been an inspirational figure in abolitionist grassroots organising in the USA: she was one of the founders of Critical Resistance, a major prison industrial complex-abolitionist organisation, and played a leadership role in groups such as the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika; the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement; the Black Panther Newspaper Committee; FIERCE! INCITE! UBUNTU; SONG, and Queers for Economic Justice (to name but a few). In our experience, she is a fierce, committed and hilarious revolutionary.

Glasgow Open Dance School

“For G.O.D.S’ movement begins with the body, to de-intellectualise by listening acutely to the body; the collective body and your (my) individual body. (YES). Following feeling rather than style or technique and attempting to move from the gut, we learn together, allowing our instinct to be our nose, leading us towards what is attractive to us and away from what is not. It is integral that G.O.D.S. is physical and holistic, valuing shared learning and collective movement above individual excellence. We (you) move as a group in continual process without pressure to ever perform or finalise. (YES). Everyone (you) is equally welcome to contribute to the content of the workshops. All forms of movement and methods of teaching are encouraged. G.O.D.S is a non-fixed group with an intentionally non-thematic style. Our intention is to move. (YES)”