New Terms and Conditions with Ravon Ruffin Feliz

For the Worldbuilders Ep. 049

Image Description: Black and white photo of Ravon Ruffin Feliz standing in front of a black background and door wearing Fulani braids, a white shirt featuring flowers and a pair of clear eyeglass frames while staring directly into the camera with a soft gaze and even softer smile. This photo was taken by their wife on their honeymoon last year while in Spain.

when we remember everything is connected — that we are part of a set of interdependent relations between earth and humans we restore our ability to future. new terms & conditions, the forthcoming abc glossary, and my practice, are an invitation to restore our connections — to return to what already exist through an ecological approach. i not only reclaim my vision of a future that can and does exist but also my responsibility to ensuring that future comes into being.

— Ravon Ruffin Feliz, “Notes on an Ecological Approach*” published in New Terms and Conditions on May 19, 2024

Dear Worldbuilder,

Recently I had the absolute honor of being in conversation with Seeda School alumni, Ravon Ruffin Feliz. Ravon who goes by she/they is a cyber anthropologist, writer, educator and founder of Citation Studio, a Black feminist experimental thinking studio mapping the possibilities of computing, archives, and nature with/on/for/at the internet. Born in Chicago, now based in the Bronx — she has worked in the arts and culture sector for 10+ years, tending to public engagements with art, archives and the internet, URL and AFK (away from keyboard).

Ravon is also the steward of the “Glossary for an Anti-Colonial Black feminist Critical Media Ecology”, tenderly referred to as the ABC Glossary as a short hand. They are building the glossary inside “New Terms and Conditions”, a newsletter they launched in January of this year.

In the Preface of New Terms and Conditions, they speak with clarity, stating: this is “an attempt to define terms like cloud, seed, garden, and data, that make visible the exploitation on our land, our resources, and our communities, and to address the exploitations that are hiding in plain-sight. and even more so, begin to liberate these terms from the lips of our oppressors.”

Inside This Week’s Podcast Episode

It feels so deeply aligned that the very first guest episode of the podcast For the Worldbuilders is a black feminist who is a sankofa¹ spellcaster, embodying a citational praxis as a way of being.

We cover so much ground in this episode but these are the main questions I ask Ravon:

• Journey of Transformation: 1) What’s your earliest creative memory? What's the first thing you made? 2) What happened in between? How has the world transformed/changed you? 3) What does your creative expression look like now, as a direct or indirect result of that transformation?

• Embodying Citational Practice: Why citational practice? And a follow up, how do you find yourself embodying citational practice in your daily life/ways of being? In what way is the “incessant and irreversible intellectuality”² of Citation Studio already present in how you be?

• Glossary as Black Method: Can we think about black shapes and method together? Why a glossary? What can a glossary do that perhaps a series of essays, poems, stories, footnotes, maps, paintings and pots can not?

• Notes on an Ecological Approach: As so many black feminists have named, language itself is sometimes the colonizing technology that makes so many of these systems of oppression possible. What do you hope to break open or make newly possible in your citational practice by turning our attention to the entanglement of land and language?

• The Archive is Alive: At times the archive feels sentient, like it’s walking, talking, singing and sometimes refusing as we try to reproduce it or collaborate with it in our practices. What do we owe the archive?

• An Invitation from You: Is there a research question or creative prompt you’ve been circling around lately? Do you have a question for us? A prompt we can work with this week in our journal and dreams together and alongside you?

Towards the end I ask Ravon a question I’ve been circling around since 2021: What do we owe the archive? Ravon invites us to offer our care and attention to all that has come before us as an essential step inside the liberatory labor of futuring. Instead of asking questions and waiting for answers, Ravon prompts us to practice inside the questions — to live, learn, dream, build inside their landscape both online and on our block.

This Week’s Journal Prompt from Ravon

In the beginning of the episode Ravon reflects on the creative foundation of her childhood, one spent inside an intimate, devotional relationship with music. Getting it’s start in a girl group, lyric books and the multi-media archive of music videos, Ravon’s practice is one of call and response. This week she invites us into this practice with her by offering the following prompt to work with…

This week’s journal prompt:

How do you want to return?

— Ravon Ruffin Feliz, “049. New Terms and Conditions with Ravon Ruffin Feliz” published For the Worldbuilders on June 13th, 2024

She asks, how do you want to return to yourself? How do you want to return to the ecosystems that hold you? How do you want to return to the place that raised you? How do you want to return to the people that made you? Spend some time with the journal prompt this week and feel free to jot down reflections in the comments below or by replying to this email. We return to remember, we always already have everything we need to create new terms and conditions for generations forward and back.

Until next week…

So be it, see to it, breathe through it,

Ayana

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