Unbinding the tongue and bearing witness.

LO/URE is an archival methodology, storytelling practice, and community inquiry that explores how memory travels—through bodies, relationships, landscapes, ritual, and story.

My work begins with a simple question:

What carries memory when no one is looking?

For years, I believed I was searching for stories. What I have come to understand is that I have always been searching for the connective tissue—the relationships that bind science, lived experience, cultural memory, and imagination together.

Research has become my way of listening.

Science has become another language of recognition.

Community has always been the archive.

Inspired by the literary practices of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Jesmyn Ward, and Zora Neale Hurston, and informed by scholars including Dr. K. Zauditu-Selassie, Jeong-Eun Rhee, S. R. Toliver, Diana Taylor, and Saidiya Hartman, LO/URE asks how knowledge survives beyond institutions. Rather than treating archives as places where history is stored, I approach them as living relationships continually carried through people, place, and practice.

This inquiry has led me across seemingly different fields: oral history, photography, narrative fiction, hydrology, epigenetics, Grandma Egg Theory, microchimerism, ritual studies, and African diasporic traditions. I do not understand these as separate disciplines. Together, they reveal a larger pattern—that memory is relational. It moves through breath, through water, through inherited gesture, through ordinary objects, through stories shared around kitchen tables, and through the body itself.

The body is not simply a witness to history.

It is one of history's oldest archives.

For generations, Black women have preserved knowledge in places rarely recognized by official record: recipes passed between hands, hymns carried across generations, gardens, front porches, beauty salons, church basements, handwritten notes, laughter, silence, and the everyday rituals that sustained communities long after the moment had passed. These were never merely domestic spaces. They were technologies of remembrance, care, strategy, imagination, and futurity.

LO/URE invites us to recognize these practices for what they have always been: living archives.

Across workshops, exhibitions, writing, and collaborative research, I ask participants not simply to remember, but to notice. Together we consider a different set of questions:

What does the body know?

What has this object carried?

What relationship has remained invisible?

What else has this done?

These questions shift the archive from a place we visit to a way of paying attention.

At the heart of LO/URE is an ethic of relational accountability. Stories are not extracted; they are entrusted. Research is not separate from community; it is accountable to it. Scientific inquiry does not replace ancestral knowledge; it helps illuminate the remarkable ways communities have long understood themselves through observation, practice, and care.

Ultimately, LO/URE is a practice of recognition.

It teaches us to see that memory has never existed in one place alone. It lives in the connective tissue between body and landscape, science and story, ritual and research, individual and collective. When we learn to recognize those relationships, we discover that the living archive has been with us all along.

This is how I understand remembrance.

Not as returning to what was lost—

but as recognizing what has always remained.

“They ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine.”

- Lucille Clifton

“For all the juke joint women

With peek-a-boo knees and black seems

Grasping at hems in homemade winds

Red lip Sallys

With razor sharp teeth cutting paths for us

For all the women as emissaries

With velvet hands

Caught babies

Kneaded bread

And

Toiled unyielding soil

These divining rods prepared a sacred space for us

For all the Holy women

Leaving prayers in the back of photos in gilded frames

Taming fevered bodies with ancestral psalms from haint blue doorways

Performing miracles so that we would survive

Thank you”

SjCF

“I was raised by women who spoke in poems and songs, did ring dances and sometimes prayed for rain. They told fanciful tales, burned tobacco and sipped fire water.”

-SjCF