Fractal Facilitation

Creating frameworks for wild love and belonging

The Atlanta Police Department hopes to turn eighty-five acres of forest into a tactical training compound featuring a mock city. Image Description: The lush and wild understory of the Weelaunee forest. Photography: Peyton Fulford for The New Yorker

“I remember in 2021, I was on this whole wave. I was like, “How do we make love go viral?” All these other things are going viral. How do we make love go viral? And I reached this epiphany: it doesn’t need to go viral. It needs to go fractal. What you’re describing is exactly that, mimicking this patterning of the forest floor of these root systems and having these frameworks spread in that way. It’s inherently emergent and it inherently reaches more people and gets more nutrients to them the same way that mycorrhizal networks do.”

— Neema Githere, Software for Artists Book #003: In Poetic Coalition (2023), pg. 29

It’s Software for Artists Day, Saturday November 18th, 2023 in Red Hook and I’ve just walked off the stage and into a garden, a site I’m much more comfortable with. I meet up with a group¹ of Seeda School learners and we share a meal around the garden’s picnic table, warming our fingers and hearts while nibbling on chicken tikka wraps. There is a crowd buzzing around us and sounds by the incomparable keiyaA ride the air. Somehow that all begins to fade in the background as our conversation constructs a classroom in mid-air, with the only framework present being a picnic table in a garden. 

In February of 2023, I had the honor of being in conversation with

Neema Githere Siphone

over Zoom — they were in Kenya and I was in Richmond, VA. Our conversation titled, “On Making Care Work Go Fractal” can be found in the Software for Artists Book #003: In Poetic Coalition, published by Pioneer Works, edited by Zainab Aliyu and organized with the School of Poetic Computation. It’s been 9 months since my conversation with Neema and the open questions feel as ripe as yesterday. If the classroom is a site for rehearsing wildness, what are the frameworks for facilitation? 

If the classroom is a site for rehearsing wildness, do we remember that the aims of white supremacy ladder climbing and campaigns to “buy the block” to advance the wealth of a select few might be contributing to the emergence of a self-sabotaging fractal² pattern? It’s Week 6 inside the Seed A World Retreat where we learn how to create frameworks of divestment for communication and collective study inside our practices. Inside this week, I ask us to reflect on whose frameworks do we replicate through the mission, vision and values inside our practices. Are our goals contributing to the emergent patterns of colonization and extraction whose recursive outcomes always re-inscribe death? Or are our goals contributing to the emergent patterns of cooperation and care whose recursive outcomes usually re-inscribe life? Sometimes the emergence of fractal ways of being don’t always serve liberatory means. The same worldbuilding imagination that could liberate us, is the same imagination that could advance the goals of our oppressors. It’s far too easy for us to become the cop in our own communities or the colonizing force in our own neighborhood and ecosystems. 

What happens when we remember the third space we’re all craving is the public library? What happens when we take our workbooks for collective study, our spirit centered spells and syllabi and our frameworks for fractal facilitation there, yes, there. To the public libraries, parks, schools, radio and television stations? Or here, yes, here. At the picnic table in the garden, your sister's couch, the porch of an elder, the bedroom of a lover. Now this begs the question, which aesthetics do we need to prioritize at this moment? The “dominant aesthetic of innovation”³, in the context of community building, sometimes looks like floor to ceiling windows, feels like the furniture of the co-working spaces of yesterday or smells like the coffee our aunties can’t afford. But what happens if we embrace the aesthetics of our public infrastructures that, let’s be real, aren't as cute but are closer to the aesthetics of belonging, the aesthetics of interdependence, the aesthetics of the people — all the people. The cousin who has no clue what your job title even means, the elder whose wisdom we repackage for the TED stage and the braider who politicized you as you sat between her legs on the floor of her living room with Sade’s Lovers Rock coating the conversation. 

What does fractal facilitation look like inside these sites of possibility? Inside the computer room of the library that desperately needs renovation, funding, resources and our collective imagination, attention and return.  What might it look like to publish an open source curriculum on GitHub and use it as a framework for studying alongside the folks in our communities, our local ecosystems and the books that line the walls of the classroom that is the public library? How might the Flint, Michigan, Jackson, Mississippi, New Orleans, Louisiana, Oakland, California, Birmingham, Alabama, Houston, Texas, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Georgia adaptations of your open source curricula facilitate a network of pop-up classrooms in local libraries and work “against the scale of empire”⁴?

The remnants of a forest campsite after a police raid. Image description: A portrait of an 21st century abolitionist hush harbor. Inside the Weelaunee forest there is a light blue camping chair in the the left of the photo in front of an overarching branch with a variety of shirts and pants drying in the sunlight pouring in from the tree canopy (not pictured) above. Photography: Peyton Fulford for The New Yorker.

While in conversation with Neema Githere we speculated on the various sites of relation — intuition, harambees, clinics, bodies, forests, classrooms — as potential sites ripe with the possibility of refusing certainty and rehearsing wildness instead. I feel us practicing the interspecies belonging and indigenous interdisciplinarity we’ll need in the worlds we’re building on the weekends, in public parks, on the pages of our healing journals and inside Zoom rooms where our constellation of evening classes turn our bed into a single node in a distributed network of classrooms happening simultaneously across borders and time zones. We are showing up to this work “against the scale of empire” and toward the shape and scale of the patterns inside fugitive quilt making practices⁵, the aerial view of a Ba-ila settlement in southern Zambia⁶, the curves in our cornrows⁷, the scaling iteration encoded into Fante cloth⁸, the fractal possibilities of love⁹.

Stay tuned for the announcement of the next Seed A World Retreat where we imagine the mission, vision and values of your practice as the seed shape and your framework as the organizing structure for the fractal possibilities emerging from your art and communities. In search of frameworks for our wildness we return to fractals to facilitate alternative ways of being. Ways of being that don’t frame liberation and freedom gains as a black or brown face controlling institutional levers of power, administering the goals of empire through multicultural rhetoric. No, please god no. Fractal facilitation, when done at the scale care, reflecting the curve of a cornrow allows us to prioritize different aesthetics of belonging that don’t require domination, only divestment. 

“That’s what a library is, right? There’s the computer access, but there are the books. The library is the mother tree. Even this dialogue with you feels like a microcosm of what is possible and what is begging to be experienced in connection. Here, we’re building constellations together and the lights that I’m working with are talking to yours and together they make a map.”
— Neema Githere, Software for Artists Book #003: In Poetic Coalition (2023), pg. 30

Using a sankofa sensibility, let’s meditate on where we are coming from and what we are traveling toward. I understand binaries are generally unhelpful and we can hold multiple roles and callings at once inside collective liberation, but I also understand there is power in our choice to unsubscribe, unfollow and unlearn. Let’s choose to light a map toward otherwise. There is power in collective divestment and collective study. This power looks and feels completely different than the promises of “safety” and “security” that capitalism and colonization can only provide via domination and hierarchy. What frameworks for wild love and belonging emerge when we remember our desire for utter relation is more powerful than our desire for utter domination?

If our practices are focused on the self-similar aesthetics of river deltas or the frameworks of mutual aid proposed by mycorrhiza in the forest floor then it doesn’t matter if our meeting spaces have floor to ceiling windows, austere white walls or mid-century modern furniture. If we are prioritizing the aesthetics and values of utter relation over utter domination, we might find our work actually taking place at the scale of the kitchen table¹⁰ and the surround of the hair salon. When we prioritize the aesthetics of relation over domination we might find the perfect location for our workshop is the public library and not the co-working space made possible by gentrification. Maybe just maybe, if we prioritize the aesthetics of relation over domination we iterate toward a world and way of being that makes cop city impossible¹¹ — a world where we remember the Weelaunee forest is all three: the teacher, the classroom and the framework.

Dreaming inside fractal facilitation,

Ayana

1. This newsletter is made possible by the conversation that happened at that picnic table, in the Pioneer Works garden, on November 18th with Seeda School learners Ravon Ruffin and Bo Dautruche and old and new friends Malorie Casimir and Joelle Fleurantin.

2. “A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop…Tune in to the prevalence of spiral in the universe—the shape in the prints of our fingertips echoes into geological patterns, all the way to the shape of galaxies. Then notice that the planet is full of these fractals—cauliflower, yes, and broccoli, ferns, deltas, veins through our bodies, tributaries, etc.—all of these are echoes of themselves at the smallest and largest scales. Dandelions contain an entire community in each spore that gets blown on children’s breath. How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale. There is a structural echo that suggests two things: one, that there are shapes and patterns fundamental to our universe, and two, that what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale.” — adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017)

3. “Whether or not design-speak sets out to colonize human activity, it is enacting a monopoly over creative thought and praxis. Maybe what we must demand is not liberatory designs but just plain old liberation. Too retro, perhaps? And that is part of the issue — by adding “design” to our vision of social change we rebrand it, upgrading social change from “mere” liberation to something out of the box, “disrupting” the status quo. But why? As Vinsel queries, “would Design Thinking have helped Rosa Parks ‘design’ the Montgomery Bus Boycott?” It is not simply that design thinking wrongly claims newness, but in doing so it erases the insights and agency of those who are discounted because they are not designers, capitalizing on the demand for novelty across numerous fields of action and coaxing everyone who dons the cloak of design into being seen and heard through the dominant aesthetic of innovation.” — Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019)

4. "Artist and guerrilla theorist Neema Githere in conversation with artist and cultural worker Ayana Zaire Cotton about Black feminist praxis and intuition as technologies for building prototypical learning spaces against the scale of empire.” — Software for Artists Book #003: In Poetic Coalition (2023), pg. 19, edited by Zainab Aliyu and published by Pioneer Works

5. Romi Morrison, “Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe” presentation at Software for Artists Day #8, November 18, 2023. Following SFPC’s year-long collaboration with The Kitchen L.A.B. and Simons Foundation, inaugural research residents will share their understanding of the residency’s theme “Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe” and reflect on their engagement with the Kitchen’s archive.

6. Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, figure 2.3: Ba-ila, pg. 27

7. "A Yoruba hairstyle, Ipako Elede, adapts the scaling of the braids to the nonlinear contours of the head.” — Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, figure 6.7: Adaptive scaling based on various shapes, pg. 82

8. "The Fante pattern can be thought of as two iterations of scaling subtraction (that is, erasing). Strips are erased from an all-black background. Where the thick strips intersect, we get large squares, and where the thin strips intersect we get small squares” — Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, figure 8.2: Scaling pattern from subtractive iteration, pg. 27

9. Neema Githere, Software for Artists Book #003: In Poetic Coalition (2023), pg. 29

10. Here I’m thinking of Carrie Mae Weem’s The Kitchen Table Series (1990) and the Sojourners for Justice Press: Black Abolitionist Feminist Publishing (Nov 3, 2022) conversation with Mariame Kaba, Neta Bomani and Barbara Smith of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.

11. Please watch this Instagram reel on Cop City reposted by @sid.dis.say from @latmpod.