Kite and Alisha Wormsley invited for CREATIVE TIME Open Call 2023
Announcing the 2023 Creative Time Open Call Artists
Kite and Alisha Wormsley have been selected for their collaborative project to be presented next year.
For their Open Call project, Kite and Wormsley will explore Black and Indigenous futuring, a practice that asks participants to imagine many generations into the future, ushering forth new possibilities and collaboration. Integrating media, public space, and public interaction, they will design widespread invitations for rest and reimagination rooted in practices within Afro-Futurism and Indigenous Protocol. Each artist brings a deep knowledge through their ongoing engagement with the subject matter, with Kite’s work as a member of The Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Working Group and Wormsley’s series, There Are Black People in the Future.
Of the Open Call commission, Kite said, “I’m so excited to be collaborating on co-dreaming a world with Alisha Wormsley and Creative Time. I am grateful to my collaborators and family members who teach me how to listen more deeply and look forward to dreaming collectively over the next year.” Wormsley adds, “We are inspired by our elders and contemporaries who center rest and dreaming and aim to show what can be created when we encourage and share dream space in community.”
Kite and Wormsley’s project challenges the scarcity mentality that defines our flawed present by forefronting ancestral Black and Indigenous technologies that have historically been erased or forbidden. Under the European settlement of North America, the universal expression of dreaming and human need for rest and rejuvenation has historically been criminalized, from the coerced labor of enslaved Africans to governmental sanctioning of Indigenous ceremonies, while the unyielding grind of capitalism has more broadly penalized downtime and respite within American culture. Within this context, these acts emerge today as deeply radical confrontations of the status quo and opportunities to cultivate transformative visions for the future.
