This episode focuses on different projects that are rooted in care and mutual aid through the lens of the city’s ground floor, and how practices that strengthen bonds of affection can transform and reshape our immediate environment. It is a part of our 2023–2024 research theme: On the Ground.

It opens with an experimental choral performance read by Natalia Boumatar and Zara Zulfiqar. Red Canary Song introduces us to their advocacy around Asian and migrant massage parlor workers through their short film, “Fly in Power”. Curator Diya Vij, writer and organizer Ted Kerr, and artist Zacarías González have a conversation about the 90s Chicago-based art collective titled Haha, and their project Flood, which was a hydroponic garden in a storefront that grew vegetables and herbs for people with HIV. Curator Eric Booker reads archival texts from Smokehouse Associates, the artist collective that transformed Harlem with vibrant, community-oriented abstract murals and sculptures during the late 1960s. Writer Lam Thuy Vo reads from an article she wrote on Pearl River Mart for Documented NY. Artist Cudelice Brazelton talks to Senior frieze editor Terence Trouillot about his recent exhibition at Wschod Gallery in the Lower East Side and how his work relates to intimate micro practices of care. We learn from OlaRonke Akinmowo how the Free Black Women’s Library is fueled by tenants of Black Feminism, and the transformative power of both reading and creating. Huda Tayob discusses her research on Architectures of Care. Scholar Adam Anabosi performs a poem by Palestinian poet Tawfiq Zayyad written to the Palestinian people in their different places of refuge. Interspersed throughout the episode are clips and archival sounds from professors and writers Premilla Nadasen, Carlos Sanabria, Sharon Zukin and artist Jenna Bliss’s documentary “The People’s Detox.”

This episode was originally published through Montez Press Radio.

The Peoples’ Forum (Director). (2023). BOOK TALK: Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism with Premilla Nadasen and Ujju Aggarwal

Red Canary Song (Director). (2022). Fly In Power

Bliss, Jenna (Director). (2018). The People’s’ Detox

Global Cities Local Streets (Director). (2015). Orchard Street, New York Center for Puerto Rican Studies – Centro (Director). (2017). The Bodega: A Cornerstone of Puerto Rican Barrios

Tayob, Huda. (2015). Architectures of Care