UN-[TITLED] is an immersive, multisite-speciﬁc project that centers on the ways in which communities are displaced by development, displacement, and gentrification. Guests are guided through a series of engagements and reckonings with community meaning, cultural memory, and healing in the Central and Chinatown International Districts of Seattle.

As a series of offerings and invitations created in collaboration with theater and community artists and architects, UN-[TITLED] is an immersive, multisite-speciﬁc project that centers on the ways in which communities are displaced by development, displacement, and gentrification. Guests are guided through a series of engagements and reckonings with community meaning, cultural memory, and healing in the Central and Chinatown International Districts of Seattle. Participants (artists included) are asked to locate themselves within the patterns of gentrification, locate home in themselves, and to naturalize through Right Relationship. It asks for a demonstration of responsibility to the land, air, and water, and to actively center marginalized folx, memories, and stories through art, sound, movement, performance, ritual, and community.

UN-[TITLED] is a socially engaged project conceived and organized by commissioning curator Berette S Macaulay. Creative collaborators include Benjamin Hunter, Margaret Knight, Nia-Amina Minor, Kamari Bright, and Tom Pearson (Third Rail Projects). Community partners include Stephanie Johnson-Toliver (Black Heritage Society), Tara Tamaribuchi (Friends of Inscape and Inscape Arts), Cynthia Brothers (Vanishing Seattle), Elisheba Johnson, Inye Wokoma, and Soulma Ayers (Wa Na Wari Seattle), Jazmyn Scott (Arte Noir), and Teme Wokoma (Sankofa Theater).

UN-[TITLED] is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation and Development Fund Project co-commissioned by On the Boards in partnership with BRIC. The Creation and Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Audio recordings and production made possible through the Artist Residency Programs at Jack Straw Cultural Center. UN-[TITLED] is also supported by fiscal sponsorship with Northwest Film Forum, and administratively by i•ma•gine e•volve and Third Rail Projects.

The UN-[TITLED] Project takes place at multiple locations in different neighborhoods. Shuttles will be provided between locations, departing from the Nova High School parking lot at 6:45pm (for 7pm shows) and 1:45pm (for 2pm shows). The performance lasts approximately two hours.

Accessibility: UN-[TITLED] includes periods of standing and walking, with limited opportunities to sit. Due to ADA limitations at the presenting sites, the performance is not accessible for guests in wheelchairs. UN-[TITLED] may not be suitable for guests under 18 years old.

UN-[TITLED] Peoples: Family Tree

Curatorial

Project Conceived, Organized and Curated by Berette S Macaulay. Co-commissioned by presenting organizations On the Boards (Seattle) & BRIC Arts Media (Brooklyn, New York).

Commissioned Creative Collaborators

Benjamin Hunter (Seattle) | Composer, Musician
Margaret Knight, AIA (Seattle) | Architect, Map Design Artist, Spatial Thought-partner
Nia-Amina Minor (Seattle) | Movement Direction
Tom Pearson (Third Rail Projects, New York) | Theater Artist, Choreographic Collaborator, Development Thought-partner
Kamari Bright (Seattle) | Poet
Laurie Allison Wilson, AIA (Seattle) | Architect, Spatial Thought-partner

Performers* and Performance Development

Justin Lynch (Third Rail Projects, New York) | Performer*
Akoiya Harris (Seattle) | Performer*
marco farroni leonardo (Seattle) | Performer*
Katrina Reid (Third Rail Projects, New York)
Rebekah Morin (Third Rail Projects, New York)
Roxanne Kidd (Third Rail Projects, New York)

Community Partners

Stephanie Johnson-Toliver (Black Heritage Society of WA State)
Cynthia Brothers (Vanishing Seattle)
Tara Tamaribuchi (Friends of Inscape & Inscape Arts)
Elisheba Johnson, Inye Wokoma, and Soulma Ayers (Wa Na Wari Seattle)
Teme Wokoma (Sankofa Theater)
Jazmyn Scott (Arte Noir)

Project Geography/Site Activations

INSCAPE Arts Building (International District)
Wa Na Wari – The Peoples House (Central District)

Community Organizations and Partners

Black Heritage Society of WA State | Archive and Research Partner
Inscape and Friends of Inscape | Site and Community Partner
Wa Na Wari | Site Partner
Vanishing Seattle | Research Partner
Sankofa Theatre | Site and Community Partner
Arte Noir | Community Partner
Bric Arts Media | Co-Comissioner (Brooklyn, NY)
On the Boards | Co-Commissioner (Seattle, WA)
Jack Straw Cultural Center | Recording Studio for The UN-[TITLED] Project
Third Rail Projects | Production and Admin Support for Tom Pearson
i•ma•gine | e•volve | Admin Support for Berette S Macaulay

Curatorial Statement

“What is home for you? How does home reside in you? What is it that makes you feel like you belong? What is it that makes you feel like you don’t belong? And what can fill that cup? What can replace that? What relationships do you need?” - Berette S Macaulay

UN-[TITLED] simultaneously interrogates the idea of ownership and what it means to de-gentrify how artists work, inviting new ways of enacting partnerships beyond the creative sector. It is a framework that invites intentional pathways of building accountable and meaningful relationships, especially for socially engaged projects that are informed by lived experiences. How do we learn, co-teach, and become committed actors in securing the community memory of critical sites and the community economies around them?

This project has been built in community by activists, artists, community organizers, developers, architects, and scholars in equally valuable roles, as no one person can attend to the urgencies of gentrification and displacement in a silo. UN-[TITLED] engages the community in immersive performances with shared oral histories, music, and poetry. Through these performances, we are able to foreground communities faced with the constant onslaught of housing and cultural insecurity in cities everywhere. While an art project alone can’t solve gentrification, we strive to offer meaningful encounters across contentious lines of titled land, and indigenous and settler relationships. The inertia of guilt and overwhelm can be transcended through intimate access and connections to actionable ways of participating in reparative organizing.

We hope UN-[TITLED] lives beyond itself to inspire reflexive examination, more nuanced relationships within culturally shifting Seattle neighborhoods, and lasting support of our collaborators and the communities they serve. We seek to connect people who typically reside within the complication of gentrified spaces, or across contentious lines of harm where profits parallel community divestment. This project succeeds only by facilitating additional intervention frameworks, which hopefully are nurtured through relationships beyond this collective action.

A Note to Potential Commissioners

Through partnerships with community-forward venues and presenters in multiple cities, the framework of this project disrupts extractive practices inherent in the colonizer-settler foundations of art-making to create more equitable and sustainable experiences for collaborators, audiences and spaces alike. If you would like to partner with us on this project or commission the work, please reach out to Berette or Tom via our websites listed in our bios below.

Berette S Macaulay is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, curator, and writer with training and performance roots in theater and contemporary dance. She was born in Sierra Leone of West African, French-Dominican, and German lineage. She was raised in Jamaica and the UK, before moving to the US, living in Georgia, New York, and currently Washington State. Interrogating her im/migrant identity as both liminal and as a constancy, her interdisciplinary practices engage complex cultural negotiations of be/longing, trans*national personhood, coded identity-performance, memory, and mythmaking. She has exhibited and published widely with works in ICP and National Gallery of Jamaica collections. Berette has curated with the Bob Marley Museum, Frye Art Museum, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Photographic Center Northwest, and Taller Boricua Gallery, among others. Artist grants and residencies include National Performance Network (NPN), Vermont Studio Center, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Shunpike Arts, 4Culture, and Wa Na Wari. She received the UW Ottenberg-Winans Fellowship for African Studies for Embodied Witness - her ongoing research on Afro-gestural vocabularies in diaspora. Berette is the inaugural Curatorial Fellow at On the Boards, Seattle where she is developing her project “UN-[TITLED]” in creative collaboration with artists and community organizers from Seattle and New York. The work, which is co-commissioned by On the Boards and BRIC Arts Media is an interdisciplinary performance work that examines cultural displacement and reclamation in the face of rapid urban development. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Washington, and is the founder of Black Cinema Collective (BCC) – a project of i•ma•gine e•volve.

Photo by Laura Bianchi/Bogliasco FoundationCREATIVE DIR., CHOREOGRAPHY, EXPERIENCE DESIGN BIO @ TOMPEARSONNYC.COM

Tom Pearson is a poet, multi-media performance and visual artist, choreographer, director, and filmmaker. He is known for his original works for theater, including the long-running, off-Broadway, immersive hits Then She Fell and The Grand Paradise, and as a founder and co-artistic director of the New York City-based performance company Third Rail Projects. He is also director and curator for the Global Performance Studio, an international program for cultural listening and exchange. Tom has been named among the 100 most influential people in Brooklyn culture by Brooklyn Magazine and has received numerous awards and accolades for his work including two New York Dance & Performance (BESSIE) Awards for dance-based works, a Kingsbury Award for writing from the Florida State University, and an IllumiNative Award from the National Museum of the American Indian and Ford Foundation for his work in Native Theater. He has also been awarded artist fellowships and residencies from CEC Artslink (St. Petersburg, Russia), The Bogliasco Foundation (Liguria, Italy), the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University (CT, USA), and Olin College of Engineering (MA, USA), among others.

Benjamin Hunter, a Seattle-based polymath, is an award-winning multi-instrumentalist, composer, creative/cultural advocate, social entrepreneur, producer, and educator. He is the founder of Community Arts Create, co-founder of the Hillman City Collaboratory, co-founder of Black & Tan Hall, and currently serves as the Artistic Director at NW Folklife. He served on the Seattle Music Commission from 2017-2021, and co-chairs the Columbia Hillman Arts & Culture District. Benjamin is a 2019 Gordon Ekvall Tracie Memorial Awardee, a 2020 Artist Trust Fellowship Awards recipient, and served a 2020/2021 Artist-in-Residence at On the Boards. Ben plays in the internationally acclaimed roots duo, Ben Hunter & Joe Seamons; as a soloist, performing original works; and with his band, The Intraterrestrials. In 2017, Ben composed music for the critically acclaimed dance piece, Black Bois, which was presented at On the Boards in 2017, and The Moore Theater in 2020. Connecting all his experiences in one musical language, Benjamin’s music scans the margins and the nucleus alike searching for the stories and intersections where everything converges.

Margaret Knight is a licensed architect at Seattle-based Runberg Architecture Group, where she works on affordable multi-family housing. She is also a past member of AIA Seattle’s Board of Directors, and a recent chair of AIA Seattle’s Diversity Roundtable where she strives to encourage and promote diversity within the profession by providing youth of color introductions to the architecture and design industry. Margaret is passionate about work that centers historically disinvested communities and allows them to be active participants in the changemaking of their neighborhoods.

Nia-Amina Minor is a movement artist originally from Los Angeles. She approaches her practice as an imaginative space grounded in rhythm where improvisation, Black vernacular movement, and choreography meet. Her creative work focuses on the body and what it carries using physical and archival research to explore memory and history. Nia-Amina has presented work in St. Louis, Seattle, and Los Angeles. She holds a MFA from UC Irvine and a BA from Stanford University. From 2016-2021, Nia-Amina performed with Spectrum Dance Theater. In 2021, she was recognized as Dance Magazine's 25 Artists to Watch. In 2021, Nia-Amina was recognized as Dance Magazine's 25 Artists to Watch. Currently, she is a dance curator at Wa Na Wari and a Velocity Dance Center Made in Seattle Artist in Residence.

With the goal of creating something that starts the process of healing for herself and others, Kamari Bright is a poet/videopoet/multimedia creative heavily inspired by her personal growth and observations. The award-winning artist transcends the bounds of imagery and language, fortifying one with the other to create work more closely resemblant to the multi-sensory experiences of life. Her videopoems have been internationally received and lauded at Seattle Black Film Festival, the Film and Video Poetry Symposium, Tacoma Film Festival, and others festivals. The 2022 Artist Trust Fellowship Award for Black Artists recipient is currently working on a manuscript connecting the influence of Christian folklore on present-day misogyny, and a videopoem extrapolating collective trauma and its connection to land stewardship.

Laurie Allison Wilson (AIA) is one of the first African-American women architects licensed in Washington State and is a passionate advocate for creative placemaking that benefit and honor the communities she serves. She was a founder of the “Cities for All Project,” and was a Senior Project Manager in Weber Thompson’s Affordable Housing Team, working to deliver mixed-use projects such as the Opportunity Center at Othello Square and the SCIDpda North Lot project on the historic Pacific Medical Center campus. Laurie has supported organizations including Africatown Community Land Trust, King Street Station Arts, The Black Farmer’s Collective, as well as numerous planning and design boards.