In 2024, the MAIA team are making a fundamental shift, to step into the next stages of making transformative cultural infrastructure tangible. We’re working on a spatial justice proposal to move land from a private commodity into a community entity, held in perpetuity for Black thrivance.*
Through this platform, we will create ABUELOS, a cultural centre with accommodation, as a site of radical hospitality and artistry. This is not speculative. Working closely with visionary and brilliant collaborators, from our community, to the design team, to artists-in-residence, to legal, finance and governance partners, we are excitedly embarking on the next phase of the journey to materialise this space and are looking for co-conspirators to organise with.
How do we prepare for a community space in which culture, radical hospitality and architecture are crafted to meet the moment?
What is the moment?
We are at a critical juncture, facing compounding global challenges which manifest differently across localised settings. Climate breakdown, rising temperatures, war and the cost-of-survival crisis are some of the symptoms of a deep-rooted set of problems, in which life is made collateral damage for private gain and profit. We acknowledge this, not to become immobilised by overwhelm, but to recognise the layers of what is to be transformed. At the root, we live in a cultural context engineered towards supremacy, domination and control — violence, genocide and isolation are just some of the strategies deployed to maintain this culture.
Among many things, this engineering has facilitated the extraction of wealth, land and materials from colonised nations via the exploitation of Black labour. The British Empire’s systematic theft, violation and ‘property’-making of Black bodies, labour, and life through enslavement and colonisation directly accounts for the accumulation of British wealth, in which land and property ownership are the key tenets. This exploitative system is not only the basis of Britain’s current economy, but has continued to devastate the lands and communities from which resources and lives were extracted.
“The injustices experienced by Black people and people of colour today are historically linked to the theft of land by Britain, colonial expansion and the exploitation of former colonies through the creation of systems of capitalism and racism. These systems continue to shape who has access to material resources and whose belonging matters on this land today.” — Land In Our Names
In the UK, this historical injustice has manifested in the ongoing decimation of cultural, civic, social and domestic spaces, particularly for working-class, Black communities. Spaces which are crucial to our resistance, self-determination and possibility are constantly under threat, disinvested in, policed or diminished.
The deliberate dismantling of Black spaces in Britain is a continuation of the colonial system, perpetuating cycles of dispossession, marginalisation and enforced movement. And this isn’t disconnected from a planetary-scale story. Globally, whether climate migration, war, racialised economic disparity or developer-led urban regeneration, the impacts of insecure tenure have generationally detrimental impacts on Black life.
In Birmingham today, we’re seeing loss at an unfathomable scale. In 2023, Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, filed a Section 114 notice, effectively declaring itself bankrupt. What proceeded was an escalated selling off of assets, largely in inner-city neighbourhoods, a process which was catalysed under previous governments. As the largest landowner in the city, the impact of these state-sanctioned sales for the benefit of private developers has devastated already vulnerable communities. Take, for example, Ladywood Unite, who are currently campaigning to “protect the community from displacement and corporate profiteering”, in the wake of plans to demolish between 2000 and 6000 homes as part of a major regeneration scheme, which is likely to price out residents forced to move elsewhere.
We know these stories are widespread across the UK: urban renewal projects, gentrification, and discriminatory housing policies have systematically displaced Black, racialised and working-class populations, eroding their homes, cultural spaces and community strongholds.
Spatial justice, through the land ownership layer, is central to our struggle, acknowledging land as key to self-determination and property ownership is where the concentration of wealth in this country is accumulated and held. el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz notoriously emphasised the crucial role of land, declaring “Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.” His words resonate deeply with the current struggles for Black spaces. In inner-city neighbourhoods across Birmingham that have long faced periods of managed decline and divestment, communities are competing with the pace of the private sector who are constantly looking for the new sites likely to yield high returns. The managed decline of working-class communities, which drives down values that can then be hiked later, make these prime locations for development.
Important to mention, that when in financial crisis, the local authority sells assets deemed unviable for its own investment as part of austerity measures. These assets are typically in the inner-city neighbourhoods of racialised and working class communities; infrastructure like libraries, learning centres and community hubs, meaning residents shoulder the burden of lost essential spaces and services.
That there are so few Black-owned organisations owning land for the community to do this work securely is part of the generational devastation. Today, we bear witness to the Harambee Organisation of Black Unity who are working to try and revive the Marcus Garvey Centre in Handsworth, for Black education and cultural preservation. We also celebrate Legacy Centre of Excellence in Aston, whose team had to compete with other for-profit bidders to acquire the space, when the council put a tranche of assets (including the former Drum Arts Centre) on the market years prior to the Section 114 filing.
This is testament to the importance of establishing community-owned social, cultural spaces, that are futures-facing and historically grounded at the same time, where land can be held in perpetuity for Black thrivance, with communities dignified by the agency of permanence.
If the challenges are widespread, why the focus on Black life?
“I have never worked on race and ethnicity as a kind of subcategory; I have always worked on the whole social formation, which is racialised.”
— Stuart Hall
Black life offers a necessary portal to understand the human condition. In our analysis, we acknowledge the liberation of Black people from the entrapments of capitalism and supremacy (including categorisations like ‘Black’) would necessitate a dismantling of all systems of oppression and therefore, profound freedom for all life. This is because the current systems of oppression we live within require inequality, which is preserved or enshrined by racism, to paraphrase Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
The struggle for Black liberation, as interconnected with other movements for justice, requires a fundamental reimagining of our economic systems, moving away from extractive capitalism towards models that prioritise collective thrivance and environmental stewardship. It would require a shift in our social paradigms, replacing hierarchies of oppression with frameworks of reciprocity, dignity and self-determination for all life.
The work of Black liberation, therefore, cannot be confined to the work of Black people and requires that we all play our part.
*”The word “thrivance” is a direct reference to intersectionality. Thrivance theory asserts that the solutions and responses to interlocking systems of oppression must be interlocking systems which lead to holistic thriving.” — Dr. Destiny Deguzman
These interconnected crises currently unfolding necessitate a radical reimagining of our social, economic and political systems, emphasising the need for collective action and transformative change. This is cultural work. And there is a resistance taking place, led by those working across fields, industries, places and contexts, engaging culture-making as a transformative practice.
What is the role of culture in this time?
As Aisha Shillingford says, culture is the foundational layer of our “beliefs, ideologies, values, assumptions, myths, behaviours, structures, systems, institutions, identities, workplaces, hobbies, economies, and more. Culture is what underpins our political and economic systems. It is also the manifestation of our political and economic decisions. Indeed, culture is who we are and what we do.”
“If culture is all that we believe, value, do, and create, then cultural power is the ability to shape what we believe, what we value, what we do, and what we create. It is the power to decide what imaginary shapes our society.” — Aisha Shillingford
As artists and cultural workers, we know how to give form to ideas, how to craft narrative and texture, how to create meaning, story, nuance. Our vocation is to make vision tangible, experiential, sensory and witnessed. So, at MAIA, we started getting curious about how we could make the vision of a world towards liberation tangible. As a community, can we engage our creative skills and capacities to materialise the worlds we’re longing for, in turn, creating a new cultural context engineered towards love, life, power-with, dignity and interdependence?
If this is the role of culture, and artists are to make this type of revolution irresistible (as Toni Cade Bambara incites), what does it mean in a city in which culture is used as the marketing strategy to appeal to global investors for urban development, while decimating independent cultural spaces, divesting from arts institutions, under-resourcing artists and disintegrating 100% of arts budgets, as if the decade prior wasn’t brutal enough?
Here’s what we know: Resistance always surfaces from the underbelly. The infrastructures we need will emerge from the grassroots and set precedence for the future of cultural life. For this to be a sustained, structural shift in power, what resources and infrastructures do we need to grow and build? How can this cultural power be rooted in and held across a community, rather than being used to leverage individuals? How can our contributions as artists and cultural workers transcend symbolic, identitarian work that, while often a beautiful gesture, fails to invoke collective, structural change?
ABUELOS as a Proposition
In 2017, we started reflecting on the radical precedents from which we wanted to envision these types of sustaining infrastructures, to resist the recreation of institutions that have extracted from and excluded us.
As a Black-led organisation, acknowledging the lifetimes of displacement of African descendants under enslavement, imperialism, colonialism, the violence of Empire and developer-led regeneration, thinking about spatial justice through land ‘tenure’ is fundamental to our livelihoods and culture.
What became really clear was that our definitions of what we’re sustaining are expansive. ‘What sustains us’ invites us to think about:
- the reparative land piece, to reclaim land, to nourish and be nourished by; how long-term stewardship enables capacity-building, community rootedness, healing and Earthly reconnection
- financial sustainability and the material realities of keeping a space operating and how we circulate resources, with the climate reality
- environmental sustainability and how the design, construction and operating of what we build is in some semblance of harmony with our climate, environmental and ecological assessments
- spiritual sustainability, in which we gather, are held and honour in reverence to Source — a seeing of life in all life.
- organisational care and what labour histories, Disability Justice frameworks and radical hospitality have to teach us about work in a 24/7 infrastructure, such as a hotel
Could we establish a space-based proposition that centres these layers, speaking to the reclamation of Black space, the centring of infrastructural hospitality and care, as well as the long-term investment of artists and cultural workers oriented towards transformation?
In community, over the last decade, we’ve been reflecting on where we’ve accessed this kind of radical hospitality, care and infrastructure before. Throughout the years, we uplifted the generosity of community workers, the fluidity of youth centres, the preciousness of the Caribbean front room, the storytelling lineages of the elders and the communal organising of post-Windrush migrant workers within a hostile Britain, in which a humble home or shopfront becomes a collective resource. As we established YARD (2020), and set about organising ABUELOS, the practice of upholding and learning from these precedents continues.
Iteratively, we started practicing the sanctuaries needed to grow cultures of abundance within the hostile environment of the 21st century — places and resources to stay, convene, grieve, grow, make, share, play, laugh, organise, build…
The idea for ABUELOS was born — initiated as a cultural centre with accommodation, reimagining hospitality and the hotel model, in the abundant spirit of Grandad’s house. Like the radiating embrace of los abuelos (the grandparents), this is a place where the armchair is a stage, where debate is meaningful and mobilising, where laughter echoes through corridors adorned with art and artefacts, where the walls are exhibitions of those we love, where the lush gardens produce vegetation to nourish our bodies, the stories shared nourish our souls, and where wisdom is passed down through generations. The cultural centre pulses with the rhythms of Caribbean life, hosting events, performances and gatherings that testify to a culture worth preserving; where bedrooms are private sanctuaries, each designed to feel like a cherished corner of Grandad’s house.
Organising ABUELOS
ABUELOS is more than a building. It’s a right to stay, to declare our terms, to orient towards what we care about and to collectivise in order to sustain it. Organising for ABUELOS therefore offers an invitation to reimagine the layers of the infrastructure we need — to think about its economics, ownership, architecture, hospitality, culture, operating model, land relationship, governance, and much more.
But this is not a speculative exercise. The choices that we make today are going to form the material basis of ABUELOS and the land-stewarding entity at its foundation. For this, we need to be in communion.
‘Organising ABUELOS’ is a programme running 23–26 October 2024, in which we invite our community, peers and those we have yet to meet into a collective enquiry that informs how ABUELOS becomes real.
What do we build with?
Who do we build with?
What do we acknowledge in the process?
What do we reimagine along the way?
Through this collective enquiry, we will gather in intentional space to:
- Connect ABUELOS to a longer arc of mobilising and organising with others doing culture-making work, asking what lineage we want to be in and who we want to work alongside in materialising this space
- Situate within a wider local resistance against cultures of domination, extraction and control
- Surface contradictions that emerge in responding to compounding crises, informing how we build
- Amplify the many forms of knowledge, visions, practices around us
- Explore how ABUELOS could serve as an infrastructure to recirculate resources to invest in radical hospitality and culture-making
- Find and mobilise peers to materialise ABUELOS with
- Recontextualise the role of culture within value-making contexts, recognising that those who create cultural and social value in a place should be able to share in that abundance
ABUELOS is a living testament to the Caribbean ethos of making much from little, turning scarcity into abundance through collective ingenuity, community, reciprocity and love.
‘Organising ABUELOS’ invites us to connect and consider how our labour, skills, visions and experiences can build what dignifies, uplifts and affirms us, instead of what depletes us. This is space for our culture.
Organising ABUELOS: 23–26 October 2024. Takes place in Ladywood, Birmingham, with some events being made available virtually. For full details: bit.ly/ABUELOS2024
We recognise and extend gratitude that this work is being generously uplifted by folks in so many ways, including by people unable to attend this event. If you are looking to support the project with skills, resources or advocacy, please email Amahra Spence at as@maiagroup.co. If you are curious and want to know more about ABUELOS, please email Mariam Aslam at ma@maiagroup.co.
