Future Memory

Paul Farber:You are listening to Monument Lab Future Memory where we discuss the future of monuments and the state of public memory in the US and across the globe. You can support the work of Monument Lab by visiting monumentlab.com, following us on social @Monument_Lab, or subscribing to this podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts. Li Sumpter:Our guest today on Future Memory is artist, scholar, and composer, Nathan Young. Young is a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians and a direct descendant of the Pawnee Nation and Kiowa Tribe, currently living in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. His work incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially-engaged art, and experimental and improvised music. Young is also a founding member of the artist collective, Postcommodity. He holds an MFA in Music/Sound from Bard College's Milton Avery School of the Arts and is currently pursuing a PhD in the University of Oklahoma's innovative Native American art history doctoral program. His scholarship focuses on Indigenous Sonic Agency. Today we discuss his art and practice and a recently opened public art project at Historic site Pennsbury Manor entitled nkwiluntàmën, funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and curated by Ryan Strand Greenberg and Theo Loftis. Let's listen.Welcome to another episode of Future Memory. I'm your co-host, Li Sumpter. Today my guest is Nathan Young. Welcome, Nathan.Nathan Young:Hello. Thank you. It's nice to be here with you today. Li:Future Memory is the name of Monument Lab's podcast. In the context of your own work, when you hear the words "future memory," what does that mean to you? Do any images or sounds come to mind? Nathan:They really do. There's one. It was a website of a sound artist, a writer, an educator, Jace Clayton, DJ/Rupture, had a mixed CD called "Gold Teeth Thief". I remember it was kind of a game changer in the late '90s. I got that mixed CD from a website called History of the Future. Li:That's very close. It was very close.Nathan:It's always stuck with me. I'm fortunate enough to be able to grapple with a lot of these kind of ideas. I'm not really quite sure how I feel about some of the history of the future because in some ways I work within many different archives so I am dealing with people's future or thinking about or reimagining or just imagining their future.But future monuments are something that I grapple with and deeply consider in my artwork. I think it's one of the more challenging subjects today in art. I think we see that with the taking down of monuments that were so controversial or are so controversial. But I find it fascinating the idea of finding new forms to make monuments to remember and the idea of working with different communities of memory. It's key to my work. It's just a lot of listening and a lot of pondering. Actually, it's a very productive space for me because it's a place to think about form. Also, it opens doors for me just to think about the future. I will say this, that one problem that often arises as a Lenape Delaware Pawnee Kiowa person is we're often talking about the past, and I really like to talk about the future and to work with organizations that are thinking about the future. Li:I can relate to that. Nathan:I think it's a misunderstanding. We always really are talking about the future. I've had the great fortune to be around some people. Actually, I grew up in the capital of the Cherokee Nation, Oklahoma. A lot of people know that Oklahoma is the home to 39 federally recognized tribes. I was fortunate enough to grow up in Tahlequah, which is the capital of the Cherokee Nation, and was able to be around a well-known and respected medicine man named Crosslin Smith, also an author. I remember being a part of an interview with Crosslin. I grew up, he was a family friend.He said, "I'm often asked about the old or ancient ways and the new ways." What Crosland said was, and I'll try my best to articulate this idea, is that there is no difference between the ancient ways and today. These things still exist. It might be an illusion or we might not be able to comprehend or understand it, but there is no difference between the ancient, when we're thinking of things in the sense of the sublime, I think. There is no understanding the ancient and what is contemporary. That was really an important moment for me as an adult. To hear him articulate that was really important. So I think about that. I'm not really sure about a lot of things, but I really like to think about that when I'm working. Li:It kind of runs through your mind as you're working and creating. It's a deep thought, that's for sure, connecting those things. Even thinking back on your own personal history with sound, when did you first connect your relationship to place and homeland to sound and music? Nathan:Well, my earliest remembrances of music, honestly, are my dad driving me around in his truck, picking me up after school, and singing peyote songs, Native American Church songs, peyote songs. The members of the Native American Church call that medicine. My father was an active member of a chapter of the Native American Church at that time. I was fortunate enough to receive my Lenape Delaware name in a peyote meeting. But the first things I remember are the music he played in the car, but really the singing in the car, the singing in the truck that he would do of those peyote songs. Even after he quit going to meetings or he wasn't active in the Native American Church anymore, he still would sing these peyote songs, and I would ask him about the peyote songs, because they're different for every tribe. The forms, they still have their kind of conventions, but they're very tribally specific.Everything in what we call legally Indian Country here in the United States is super hyper local. So just down the road, that's really the beautiful thing about living in Oklahoma, is you have people whose ancestors are from northeast, southeast, southwest. There's only one tribe here from California. So it's a really rich place for sound and song. Both of my parents are Indigenous American Indian. My mother is Pawnee and Kiowa. My father is Lenape Delaware. I also grew up around the Big Drum, what we call the Big Drum at powwows. I never became a powwow singer or anything like that. Never learned anything around the Big Drum. But I did eventually learn Pawnee songs, Native American Church Pawnee songs.But really, I was just a kid in a small town in Oklahoma. When skateboarding hit and you become kind of an adolescent, you start to discover punk rock and things like that. Those to me were the way that the culture was imported to me. I didn't realize that I was already surrounded by all this beautiful culture, all of the tribes and my parents' tribes and my grandparents'. But then it was like a transmitter. Even these tapes were just transmitters to me. So those were really important also. I have a lot of thoughts about sound. Other thing I remember is my father often would get onto us or make fun of us for being so loud and saying we would be horrible scouts or hunters.Li:Making too much noise. Nathan:The Native Americans, yeah, yeah. We weren't stealth. You'd hear us coming a mile away. So he would always say, "You wouldn't be a very good one," just to try to get us quiet down.Li:No one wants to be a bad hunter, right? Can you break down the concept of Indigenous Sonic Agency? is this based on ancestral traditions, your artistic practice, academic scholarship, or a bit of all the above? Nathan:Well, Indigenous Sonic Agency is really one piece of a larger subject sonic agency, which I encountered in a book titled Sonic Agency by Brandon LaBelle. I was a former member of this collective, Postcommodity, and I'm reading this book. When we were first starting the collective, we had the opportunity to work with this Czech poet named Magor, Ivan Jirous Magor. It means blockhead, I believe. It's a nickname. He was kind of described as the Andy Warhol of the Plastic People of the Universe. He was an art historian. He spent most of his life in prison just for being an artist, an art historian. He was an actual musician. He didn't play with the Plastic People of the Universe, to my knowledge, but he did to write the lyrics, to my knowledge. We had the opportunity to record with Magor. So I'm reading this book about sonic agency, and here I find somebody that I'd actually had an experience with sonic agency with in my early days and as a young man and an artist.But ultimately Indigenous Sonic Agency is, in some sense, similar but different to tribal sovereignty. So when you think of agency or sovereignty, it's something that they sometimes get mixed up. I'm really trying to parse the differences between this, what we understand so well as political sovereignty as federally recognized tribes and what agency means, say, as an artist. But in my research, in the subject of sonic agency and Indigenous Sonic Agency, it encompasses pretty much everything. That's what I love about sound. Everything has a sound, whether we can hear it or not. Everything is in vibration. There are sounds that are inaudible to us, that are too high or too low. Then there's what we hear in the world and the importance of silence with John Cage. I think that they're just super productive.I was introduced really to sound studies through this book called Sonic Warfare by Steve Goodman. It was really about how the study of sound was, in a sense, still emerging because it had mostly been used for military purposes and for proprietary purposes such as commercials and things like that. As I stated earlier, I felt like music was my connection to a larger world that I couldn't access living in a small town. So even everything that came with it, the album covers, all that, they really made an impression on me as a young person, and it continues to this day, and I've been focusing deeply on it.My studies in sonic agency -- Indig

Li:Welcome Jon Kaufman and El Sawyer to Future Memory. Jon:Thank you for having us.El:Thank you, cool name. Li:So what's your origin story? How did Jon and El become Ming Media? Jon:It's an interesting story and there's not really one particular magical spark, but it definitely was an organic process from my perspective, right? El his own journey and perspective with it, but I never really considered filmmaking as a career at all when I was younger, I never wanted to be like a Hollywood person, never wanted to direct or anything like that, but I was always interested in storytelling and especially advocacy and just trying to combat the narratives that I knew were false. I didn't know how to do that. And then it wasn't until I went to Temple and took a class, which was, I forget the name of, it's something around community media, which was a film class. I wasn't a film major at all, didn't study a film at Temple, but this class took me to the Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philly where El was teaching video production to neighborhood youth.And that was my first real exposure to filmmaking was this model that was completely outside of the traditional structure of what we consider to be like mass media and filmmaking in Hollywood storytelling, and just kind of fell in love with it. The idea that it was probably 2007 and cameras were just starting to get a little more accessible. Editing software was just starting to get a little bit more accessible to people. And so it was really this moment where I felt like, "Oh wow, this is something I could do." And I saw the power of it with what El was doing with kids in the neighborhood and just to be able to tell their own stories. Then I graduated Temple, El hired me to take over his position, actually The Village as the video instructor there and started teaching there, and I taught there for many, many years.And then we started doing our different projects together. At the time, I was just hustling music videos and whatever I could do to pay the bills with video. And I think our work really kind of solidified around 2010 or so when we started working with the Department of Justice in the US Attorney's office here in Philly to make Pull of Gravity. And that's what really kind of solidified our work and sort of joined us as a partnership and took our work to the next level. And we started Ming shortly after that. But that's a short version of it, and El has a different story for sure of how he got to The Village. Li:Right? There's always two sides to first encounter.El:There's three sides actually. Yeah, that's a good rendition. I think from that perspective, from my perspective, as you would see in "Pull of Gravity", I was introduced to film while I was in prison, and I had never wanted to be a filmmaker either. I was stabbed while I was in prison, and I didn't think I was going to go home. And there was an internal video crew inside the institution, and my plan was to kind of work my way onto the video crew in an event I didn't go home to basically make videos to send home to my son at the time.Not to be dramatic about it, but just like- Li:Like the archive of, yeah. El:... or a suicide note. I mean, it could be a lot of different things that way in event that I wasn't going to be there, it was something I would leave to him and I would sneak it out of the prison. And I did. I did about 10 videos. In that process, I was on the video crew just to get access to the cameras, and I had a chance meeting with Glenn Holsten, who was a Philadelphia filmmaker that came into the institution. And at no point, like I said, I was only on the video crew for that access to the cameras. And then he was accompanying Lily Yeh, who's the founder of the Village of Arts and Humanities into the institution, and he was documenting her work. She started a program at Graterford Prison, and in that he was allowed to come document her and her work there, but he wasn't allowed to bring camera crew or equipment.So they asked the camera crew internally, did anybody want to assist with him and nobody wanted to, and I volunteered to do that and it changed my life. So that was my sort of coming into film and even knowing that that was even an alternative that way. And in the process of doing that, I felt like there's this interesting quote, John Hendrick Clark, this author, and he said this quote, he says, "It's your duty to fashion your lived experience as a tool for liberation." And I feel like that's ... My elders used to say [inaudible 00:04:21] used to say that all the time to me. And I felt like in a lot of ways when I came home, that was my thought is how can I use my lived experience and who I am and my skillset to actually give other people the opportunity that I didn't have?So coming home, doing film with Glenn was really just like interning and trying to figure it out, navigate like that. And I had a job at the Village, and Lily Yeh gave me the opportunity to basically provide training and support to youth there at the organization and folks in the community teaching them what I knew about film. And I was kind of learning it as I go. And I did, so for a number of years and then in comes Jon, and this partnership I had with Temple and the professor at the time, Jon's professor, to bring that class. They had to learn along with the class that I was teaching at the Village. And it was love at first sight. I love him like a little brother or like a brother, honestly. And that's been our relationship ever since.Li:Well, that's a perfect segue to this next question about your relationship as working collaborators. What's your collaborative style like and would you say you've developed any kind of shorthand or secret language to get more effective with your process?El:Yes, and yes in every way, but I'll let Jon jump in on that. What you got, Jon?Jon:Yeah, there's a lot to that honestly, because I think neither one of us is really trained in any sort of traditional way. El, like he said, his first exposure was in Graterford, in prison using equipment that was probably way outdated and with very limited sort of technical training. But obviously Glenn was super helpful to him. And then for myself, I didn't study film in any traditional way. At the time I probably couldn't have named one director in the world besides Spielberg or whatever. I didn't know anything about that film world. I think just the fact that we don't come from the traditional filmmaking world has always been our thing where we're humans first. We just engage with people as humans and want to always take that approach where it's not about extracting a story or like, "Oh, how can we make the most exciting or dramatic stuff?"It's more about connecting with folks on a really human level and less about telling their stories, but really giving them a platform to tell their own stories and assisting people telling their own stories. We sort of see ourselves as a vehicle and as a tool for folks to leverage their own storytelling. So our process is super collaborative and sometimes to our detriment, it can be hard. It's not linear. None of this stuff is linear. And I think traditional production is like, oh, you write a script, you shoot it, you edit it. But we work with real people with real stories and a lot of our stuff, most of it is around trauma and very traumatic stuff and very heavy stuff and dealing with equity and violence and poverty and racism and it's really, really heavy stuff. So it's really important for us to connect with people on a really natural level first before doing any filming.We come from different backgrounds. I grew up in Germantown in the 90s, but I didn't grow up in poverty, but I experienced a lot of violence in my neighborhood and violence in the home and all kinds of stuff. And in college I tried to look at that experience through lens of urban studies and sociology, and I was like, "This is bullshit, putting people into categories, just labeling people." I was like, "This is bullshit." The academic approach to looking at what I was trying to understand about my experience growing up was not working for me. And then I think the sort of community filmmaking was just a way of like, "Oh wow, this is it. This is a way for real people to tell their own stories with some assistance from their own perspective," I think. So it was really just powerful to realize the power and the gap that community storytelling and community media could fill, not just in my own understanding of the world, but I feel just missing from the conversations that are happening in the newspapers and in mainstream media, so yeah.Li:Exactly. And are there additional folks that are working with you? Do you have an expanded team?Jon:We used to have a larger team. Covid kind of had us downsize a bit, but our main producer is Gabe Wiener. He's an amazing producer, filmmaker. He's been in Philly for about 15 years now, so he's our primary producer. But we work with a lot of folks all over Philadelphia and around the country and around the world too. But yeah, mostly we staff up as needed for different projects, but we could run down a huge list of names that are Philadelphia folks. But no, it's a collaborative effort, right? We work with so many different people and we're super grateful. It's not a solo sport. There's so many people. We've been talking about our film Music Vets, which we'll get to later, but when the credits roll in one of our films, there's like a hundred names or something of people. So yeah, that's the short answer.El:And to the point of just like you're saying secret language or how we operate together, a lot of it's nonverbal, like I say when I say Jon and I are like brothers, that's not an exaggeration at all. A lot of times it's so nonverbal. And then to bridge that to our team, a lot of our team either learned from us or learned with us, and I always look at it as like a Philly style. I don't know why. I associat

​​Li Sumpter:So welcome back to another episode of Future Memory. My guest today is Jesse Hagopian. He is a Seattle-based educator and the author of the upcoming Teach Truth: The Attack on Critical Race Theory and the Struggle for Antiracist Education. Hagopian is an organizer with the Zinn Education Project and co-editor of the books Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice and Teaching for Black Lives. Welcome, Jesse.Jesse Hagopian:Oh, thanks so much for having me. Good to be with you. Li:Thank you for joining us. Well, I want to get started with some questions about your own education and how you got started. I was curious about what your own early education and high school experiences were like. As a youth, what ways did you relate to or even resist to your own classroom curricula? Jesse:I was very alienated from school growing up. I felt like it didn't really speak to me. I didn't feel like I was intelligent. I can remember very clearly a parent-teacher conference in third grade where the teacher brought us out into the hallway with me and my mom, and she took out my standardized testing scores and there was a blue line that ran through the middle that was the average, and then there was the dot far below that line that represented my reading scores.And I knew from that day forward until about halfway through college, I knew that I was not smart, and I had the test scores to prove it to you. And school just felt like a place that reinforced over and over again that I was not worthy, that I was not intelligent. And there was very little that we studied that was about helping me understand myself, my identity, my place in the world as a Black, mixed-race kid.And really, it was just a fraught experience, and I took quite a bit to get over that. I was sure I was going to fail out of college, that I wasn't smart enough to go to college. And I think that it was finally the experience of a couple of professors in college that showed that education could be more than just eliminating wrong answer choices at faster rates than other children, that it could be about understanding the problems in our world and how we can collectively solve those problems.And then I realized I did have something to contribute. Then I realized that I did have some perspectives on what oppression looks like and how it feels and what we might need to do to get out of it, and I was hungry to learn about the systems that are set up in our society to reproduce inequality. And that was a real change for me. But growing up, my mom would tell me, "You're good with kids. I think you're going to be a teacher." And I said, "That's the last thing I'm going to be."Li:Oh, really?Jesse:School is just so arduous, and why would I want to come back? And then she was right. I came back to my own high school. I came back to Garfield High School, where I graduated, and I taught there for over a decade now. Li:I think that's an amazing story, coming full circle to teach back where you got your first experiences in the classroom. And going back to that, I was wondering if you had any standout memories, like I did, with the actual content. You were saying you didn't relate to it so much, but I remember very clearly a moment with my mother coming to the school when I had a moment in the classroom around Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, things like that. Do you have any standout memories of content that really either made you feel excluded or exploited or any of these things that really stuck with you? Jesse:For sure. I mean, there are many experiences that I think shaped my approach to education throughout the years. I mean, one of my firsts is from kindergarten. I remember very clearly one of the boys called me the N-word. And I didn't really know what it meant, but I knew it was directed at me and not the other kids. So I went and told the teacher, but there was parent-teacher conferences going on and parents were coming through, prospective parents, to look at the school, and the teacher got just beet red in front of the parents and was very embarrassed that I had said this, and said, "Oh, yeah. We'll deal with that," and just sort of pushed it aside and never came back to it.And the message that I got was that I had done something wrong, like I had disrupted the education process and that it was wrong for me to have done that because nothing was taken care of. And that's something that still sits with me and I think guides a lot of my approach to how to handle situations in the classroom. And I can remember the first time I had a Black teacher and that I began to learn about Black history in sixth grade, an incredible educator named Faith Davis, taught us about ancient Egypt. And it was the first thing I really got excited about learning, and I was amazed by all these accomplishments that Black people had done.And then after that class, it just sort of disappeared for a long time, and I never learned about anything else that Black people had done, and it made me wonder, "Is that why I score so poorly on these tests? Because I'm Black? Because I don't see other people like me in the advanced classes? And maybe those aren't for us. Maybe it has something to do innately with my race." And that's such a disempowering feeling, and I wanted to ensure that no other kids had to go through that kind of humiliation. Li:No, that's a great point that you bring up because I think we had similar experiences. I was actually recently going through some old photos at my mom's house, and I came across my elementary school class photo, the classic one, everyone's lined up, shortest to tallest kind of thing. And there I was, the only Black child in a class of 25 white students. And I think at that young, innocent age, I didn't really understand what I was up against, and today's youth and teachers are facing so many challenges in the classroom today, things that I don't think either of us could have really imagined.And so, as I was exploring the amazing tools and campaigns that you've been authoring and spearheading, like Teaching for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter at School, and the Zinn Education platform of so many resources, I think, "What would my early school experience have been like if these tools were available?" Right?And I'm wondering, would you have thought the same thing? Because when I think about these amazing tools that are being offered, I just imagine, and we're not even talking about the digital stuff. I'm just talking about the things around critical race theory, these ideas, just about things that are showing a representation of Black folks. Like you said, even just having a Black teacher and what that meant for you. So even thinking about, what if the tools that you are all creating today were actually in your classroom back at Garfield when you were youth? Jesse:Oh, wow. That would've been incredible. I mean, at the Zinn Education Project, we have scores of free downloadable people's history lessons that center Black history and struggles against structural racism. And these lessons tell history from the perspective of people who have been marginalized, who have been pushed out of the centers of power. We look at the founding of America from the perspective of those who have been enslaved, not those who were doing the enslaving. We look at American history through the eyes of those who are organizing multiracial struggles for racial and social justice, not the ones that are trying to maintain segregation and hoarding wealth in the hands of the few.And I would've just lit up to be able to have a teacher say that your family's history matters, that struggles that your family went through shaped this country, and whatever semblance of democracy that we're able to hold onto in this country is the result of the Black freedom struggle and the result of multiracial struggles for social justice. Instead, we got the message in American government class that democracy is something that's handed down from those in power and those on high.I can remember, at Garfield High School, my American government teacher assigned a research project, and I did a project about J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director. And it was the only paper I think I ever really tried on in high school. I was very disengaged from school and didn't see any point in it, but this research project captured my imagination because I learned about some really despicable things that someone in power had done.I couldn't believe that J. Edgar Hoover had led a campaign against the Black freedom movement, had targeted Martin Luther King, someone who we're all supposed to revere, and yet our government was wiretapping and even trying to get him to commit suicide and some pretty despicable things. And I poured myself into the research and I wrote the best paper I had done up until that point, and she gave me a C with the notes that the claims I was making were unsubstantiated. Li:Wow. Jesse:And it's clear that she just didn't agree, that she didn't want to hear that a white man in power had misused it. And that was a strong message I got that some ideas are off-limits, and it doesn't matter how hard you work. If you go against what makes a white teacher comfortable, then there are consequences for that.And after that, I really didn't want to try anymore. I didn't feel like my opinions mattered, and I would've loved to have a teacher help me understand how we can live in a society that calls itself the freest nation on earth, and yet was based on enslavement of Black people and genocide of Native people, continued with Jim Crow segregation to where up through my dad's generation couldn't vote if you were Black.And then in our own generation, we have mass incarceration. And how is it that racism continues to change in focus and character, but is a constant in American society? And I wasn't able to learn that until much later, and I would've loved to have some of the resources that the Zinn E

Concluding the Plot of Land series, we look at the work being done across the United States to repair our relationship with the land, from the Tongva conservancy in Los Angeles to the Sea Islands of South Carolina. What will it take to imagine a radically different future? With the stakes rising along with the temperature, what is the scale of change we need to shift power and build a more just world?Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Katherine Nagasawa @Kat_Nagasawa, Anya Groner @anyagronerInterviewees:Kavon Ward; Twitter:@JusiceforBruc1Liz Ogbu; Twitter: @lizogbuDoug Kiel Twitter: @Doug_Kiel *seems deactivated. @’s fail on twitter.John Echohawk, JD  Org tag: @NDNrightsKimberly Morales Johnson MPH, P.h.D William Horne, Ph.D. @wihorneAshleigh Lawrence-Sanders @AshleighWritesNikil Saval; Twitter: @SenatorSavalDesiree Fields, Ph.D.;Twitter: @fieldsdesiree Daniel Aldana Cohen, Ph.D.; Twitter: @aldatweetsTara Raghuveer ​​@taraghuveerLuke Melonakos-Harrison @l_melo_h

We return to Louisiana and the Joneses, where in recent decades family members have moved away for work and to escape the increasingly toxic air and water leaking from the neighboring chemical plants of Cancer Alley. As stronger hurricanes and vanishing wetlands reconfigure Louisiana’s topography, new industries continue old patterns of environmental harm. What will this mean for the future of Jonesland? What can their story on the front-lines of climate change teach us as the nation faces the dire consequences of extractive economies?Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Anya Groner @anyagronerInterviewees: Jazmin “Jazzy” MillerFamily: Laverne JonesReverend Samuel “Papa” JonesReverend Joseph JonesSharon LavigneWjuankeil JonesCora Jones RossClaudette JonesImani BrownJoy Banner, Ph.D; Twitter: @drjoy08Jo BannerAnne Rolfes; @annerolfes, Organization’s Twitter: @labucketbrigadeSheila Tahir @labucketbrigade

We learn the incredible story of Sedonia Dennis, a woman once enslaved in Louisiana, who came to own a piece of the plantation that had once claimed ownership of her family. And we explore how, over time, the plantation economy gave way to the petrochemical industry. Join us as we spend time with Sedonia Dennis’s descendant, Jazzy Miller who is documenting her family’s fight to exist at the intersection of each of these forms of extraction.Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Anya Groner @anyagronerInterviewees: Jazmin “Jazzy” MillerFamily: Reverend Joseph JonesReverend Samuel “Papa” JonesWjuankeil JonesCora Jones RossAnissa JonesLaverne JonesJoy Banner, Ph.D.; Twitter: @drjoy08Jo BannerAnne Rolfes; @annerolfes Twitter: @labucketbrigadeSheila Tahir @labucketbrigade

We’re looking at what happened after subsidized affordable housing programs expired in the 2000s on New York’s Roosevelt Island. Some residents managed to buy in, build equity and stability. Others experienced precarious tenancy or displacement while an ongoing influx of wealthier residents is changing the face of the island. We ask the question, can Roosevelt Island’s past guide state and federal investments in multi-racial, multi-income neighborhoods for the future? Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Melissa Fundira @MFundiraInterviewees:Ted Liebman FAIA ; Twitter: @liebman_tYonah Freemark, Ph.D.; Twitter: @yfreemarkRosemary Ndubuizu, Ph.D.Kim Phillips-Fein, Ph.D., kimphillipsfein.comDorothy Davis @diasporantouchMarion Ntiru @marionntiruResidents past and presentSasha Ross *Note: residentLionel Fundira *Note: residentCourtney Francis *Note: previous residentBarbara Spiegel *Note: residentRita Ombele *Note:previous residentNikki Leopold *Note: residentEneaqua Lewis *Note: residentLudi Nsimba *Note: residentMorgan Elinson *Note: former residentJudith Berdy *Note: residentMarie Orraca *Note: resident

New York’s Roosevelt Island was imagined as an idyllic, multi-racial, multi-income community, developed as part of the social housing movement in the 60s and 70s. But by the 1980s, socially-minded investments in housing were overtaken by neoliberal policy. We talk to current-day and displaced residents to see how this change affected them, while looking back from the point of divergence to find the decisions that created and dismantled housing as a human right. Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Melissa Fundira @MFundiraInterviewees:Ted Liebman, FAIA; Twitter: @liebman_tYonah Freemark, Ph.D.; Twitter: @yfreemarkRosemary Ndubuizu, Ph.D. Affiliate Twitter: @GU_AFAMKim Phillips-Fein, Ph.D.; Affiliate Twitter:  @CUHistoryDeptMarion Ntiru @marionntiruResidents past and presentSasha Ross *Note: residentLionel Fundira *Note: residentCourtney Francis *Note: previous residentBarbara Spiegel *Note: residentRita Ombele *Note:previous residentNikki Leopold *Note: residentMarie Orraca *Note: residentEneaqua Lewis *Note: residentLudi Nsimba *Note: residentMorgan Elinson *Note: former residentJudith Berdy *Note: residentAndrew Kerr *Note: former resident

Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Katherine Nagasawa @Kat_Nagasawa, Anya Groner @anyagronerInterviewees:ResidentsNate Bradford, Sr.Nate Bradford, Jr.; Instagram: @gline_ranchTheola Cudjoe JonesFannie WashingtonPatricia HarrisAmanda BradfordHenrietta HicksDamien McCormickDr. Willard TillmanKendra Field Ph.D.; Twitter: @TuftsRCDMelissa Stuckey Ph.D.; Twitter: @melissanstuckeyRussell Cobb Ph.D.; Twitter: @RussellSCobb

Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Katherine Nagasawa @Kat_Nagasawa, Anya Groner @anyagronerInterviewees:ResidentsNate Bradford, Sr.Nate Bradford, Jr. ; Instagram: @gline_ranchTheola Cudjoe JonesFannie WashingtonLucy EllisPatricia HarrisHenrietta HicksDr. Francis Marzett Shelton, Ed.D. (Mayor)Damien McCormickClaudio Saunt, Ph.D.Twitter: @ClaudioSauntKendra Field, Ph.D.; Affiliate Twitter: @TuftsRCDMelissa Stuckey, Ph.D.Twitter: @melissanstuckeyRussell Cobb Ph.D.; Twitter : @RussellSCobb

What happens when the place we call home, the communities we form around it, and our sense of safety, is at the mercy of forces far outside of our control? We visit Long Beach, in Los Angeles, where oil and gas pipelines have jeopardized people’s homes and security. Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Mark Nieto @COMBATmusicInterviewees:Lisa NietoJacqueline CasillasRobert DavisSarah Elkind Ph.DAshley Hernandez; Affiliate Twitter: @CBECal, @STAND_LA

Have you ever seen billboards on the highway offering cash for houses? Has a stranger called you offering money for your home sight unseen? In Plot of Land’s second episode, we wade into the world of housing speculation, considering how private equity markets and real estate investment trusts have transformed the places we literally call home. How did housing become such a profitable market? And so volatile that it could lead to the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression?Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond , Anya Groner @anyagronerInterviewees: Nikil Saval; Twitter: @SenatorSavalDesiree Fields; Twitter: @fieldsdesiree Daniel Aldana Cohen; Twitter: @aldatweetsTara Raghuveer; Twitter: @taraghuveerLuke Melonakos-Harrison; Twitter:@l_melo_h

Plot of Land dives into the history of land ownership through the emerging future: real estate in the Metaverse. In creating virtual land, we could make literally anything true, from universal public space to zero gravity, so why have people chosen to replicate real-world patterns of land use when we know they are highly inequitable, exploitative, and unjust? In this first episode, we meet the Plot of Land team of producers and go deep into the ways land, housing, and memory intertwine. Reporters: Jameela Hammond, Irina ZhorovInterviewees:Mike Borden; IG: mikebbordenAllan Greer, P.h.DLouis Rosenberg, P.h.D; Twitter: @LouisBRosenbergAlexander Cho, P.h.D; Twitter:@alexcho47K-Sue Park; Twitter: @ksuenamuLars Andreas Doucet, Twitter: @larsiusprime

Plot of Land is a podcast mini-series by Monument Lab that explores how land ownership and housing in the United States have been shaped by power, public memory, and privatization. Over the last year, we have assembled a team of storytellers and reporters to explore the invisible forces that shape both the land and story of this country. The podcast breaks down how race, class, land, and power have been used to create unfair systems that harm nearly everyone today. We believe that to build the future we deserve, there must be a radical change in our approaches to policy and practice. Join us to remap and rethink land ownership. Major support for Plot of Land has been provided by the Ford Foundation.

This episode, co-host Li Sumpter, caught up with multidisciplinary artist, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh at the onset of her mural project, Flight. Tatyana sees flying as a metaphor for liberation, escape, and transformation. She informs and illuminates this vision through the experiences, hopes, and dreams of everyday people who dare to look up. Li and Tatyana dig into the layered meaning of flying and share some of the literary and pop culture inspirations for Flight. From Toni Morrison to Kendrick Lamar, this conversation connects the souls of black folx and airborne archetypes across history, myth, and the radical black imagination that knows no bounds.

In this episode, co-host Li Sumpter turns the mic to Future Memory co-host and Monument Lab Director, Paul Farber, to go behind-the-scenes on the production of his new podcast project The Statue from WHYY digital studios and the NPR podcast network. The series investigates one of Philly’s most monumental destinations visited by millions from around the world each year --- the Rocky Statue. Li and Paul discuss some of the local and global stories that make the history of the statue as epic as the legend of the under-dog boxer turned worldwide hero. Tune in for Paul’s take on the hope and controversy the statue stirs up and why Rocky – "the greatest Philadelphian who never lived" – continues to have a firm grip on our collective memory.

For this episode, we take a trip to the Brooklyn Museum with Future Memory co-host Paul Farber where he moderated a program for the popular discussion series Brooklyn Talks. How can we memorialize and visualize the extraordinary loss of life caused by COVID-19? Farber explores this question in a dynamic exchange between Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Sekou Cooke – two powerful practitioners working in separate but intersecting fields. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a media artist working at the crossroads of architecture and performance art. ⁠Sekou Cooke is an architect, researcher, and founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. Monument Lab: Future Memory was a part of documentation of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s A Crack in the Hourglass, An Ongoing COVID-19 Memorial – an participatory exhibition and “anti-monument” installation previously on view at the Brooklyn Museum and the inspiration for this public conversation. Lozano-Hemmer's project demonstrates the power and possibility of re-imagining the existence of monuments in physical and digital space. On this night at the Museum in May 2022, marking a somber milestone of one million COVID deaths in the US, Farber, Cooke and Lozano-Hemmer discuss the role public art plays in remembrance, collective mourning and healing communities.

This episode, co-host Paul Farber speaks to multidisciplinary artist Lava Thomas. They catch up about a major project a long time in the making – a monument honoring Dr. Maya Angelou – prolific poet, Civil Rights activist, and American memoirist. The monument is slated for installation outside of San Francisco’s main public library in the near future. Lava’s monumental journey begins with bike tours with her family in Washington D.C. and makes a sharp turn in when she learned monuments had the power to embody ideology and ignite a movement.

We kickoff a new season of the Monument Lab podcast Future Memory with Yolanda Wisher and Trapeta B. Mayson, two renowned former poet laureates of Philadelphia. Wisher and Mayson are the creators of ConsenSIS, a project that summons “sisterly history” to preserve the past and present literary legacy of Black women and femme poets in Philadelphia. ConsenSIS is a part of Monument Lab’s nationwide Re:Generation project, supported by the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project. ​​Co-host Li Sumpter speaks to Wisher and Mayson about ConsenSIS, their upcoming event, The Clearing (inspired by Toni Morrison), and the meaningful historic images and authors that guide their project’s vision.

Welcome back to the Monument Lab podcast. This episode, we focus on St. Louis. For the past two years, Monument Lab has worked closely with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, mapping monuments in St. Louis. That includes traditional landmarks and unofficial sites of memory, whether they are existing, potential, or erased. To mark the close of our project together, we wanted to speak with locally-rooted MADAD, a brilliant and thoughtful collective of artists and designers from St. Louis whose work illuminates spatial injustice and cultural memory gaps in the region.MADAD’s Damon Davis, Mallory Rukhsana Nezam, and De Nichols work to reimagine how joy, justice, and interactivity improve public spaces. The group started their collaborations during the making of Mirror Casket, a sculpture, performance, and visual call to action composed in the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014. Mirror Casket is now in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.Their new project, Black Memory STL: Division, Displacement, and Local Diaspora, is a multi-year series of public art installations and interventions in partnership with the Brickline Greenway development and the Griot Museum of Black History. MADAD are also 2020 Monument Lab Fellows, and are featured in the exhibition and book project, Shaping the Past with the Goethe Institut and the German Federal Agency for Civic Education.