Worldbuilding Inevitable Futures
Dreaming and Practicing at the Scale of Black Feminist Futurity
Why worldbuilding?
Why worldbuilding?
Why worldbuilding?
Why not weaving or quilting or braiding? As a black feminist textile artist and software engineer I know how much power and possibility lie inside metaphors related to fiber. The black radical tradition of quilting and it’s ancient overlap with sample culture in hip hop, ancestors braiding seeds into our hair before the violence of departing from our shores, the weaving loom being a computer and cloth being a coding document, DNA of the cotton plant hosting the data of freedom dreams spun into fiber to keep us warm, entanglement….so much entanglement whether it’s mycelial or memory, below the forest floor or on the web. There are invisible strings everywhere holding us together, binding us to one another as a matter of fact, as a matter of being. I feel it and I know you do too. I explore this in my suspension paintings, how we hold each other up in midair with our care and cotton cooking twine.
So, again, why worldbuilding? It has something to do with scale. I needed a method, a metaphor big enough to hold the writings, the paintings, the performances, the cornrows, the garments, the software, the self-portraits, the prayers, the research, the abolitionist longings, the ceramic artifacts belonging to a parallel universe named Cykofa, somehow excavated in Dawn, Virginia. Why worldbuilding? What other container is large enough to hold the expanse of black feminist longing? Please show it to me. In a dream I found myself on a cliff with my back towards the drop. An elder standing in front of me asked me to visualize my want. Confused but obedient I dropped into my body and imagined the expanse of my craving. They told me to turn around and open my eyes. This canyon was beyond grand. It was a prehistoric hole in the earth quilted with lush greenscapes and threaded with rivers, each pocket had its own micro-climate and from this vantage point I saw the flowering ecosystems of my need, gushing with water and fully resourced. Not wanting for sun or rain — only wanting me to join in it’s aliveness. To join it so completely that I couldn’t help but materialize the vision when I awake.
“The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t happened yet but must. It is an attachment to a belief in what should be true, which impels us to realize that aspiration. It’s the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be. It’s a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now.”
— Tina Campt, “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity.” Listening to Images, p. 17.
Why worldbuilding? Because it allows us to dream at the scale of our longing, yes. But perhaps, more importantly, worldbuilding invokes a speculative practice. Through this “politics of prefiguration” we take our black feminist longings and weave community agreements that allow us to perform a future that hasn’t happened yet but must. Right now. If abolition is life in rehearsal1 then worldbuilding is the method that allows us to invent the choreography and the score. The framework of worldbuilding allows us to traverse this landscape of longing with a map of our own making. Perhaps it’s one of the only methods that follows up our practices of refusal with actionable steps: remember your desire, find your people and develop ceremonies for ushering in the world you want to see into being. How else might we exit the landscape of colonial imaginaries? Winter is full of longing but it doesn’t have to be spent alone. Inside the Seed A World Retreat we return to the warmth of our desire, outline our vision and values then create the framework of creative offers that keep us in conversation with each other and our liberatory imagination for years to come. Why worldbuilding? It allows us to dream and practice at the scale of black feminist futurity.
The Worldbuilding Framework
A worldbuilding framework for interdisciplinary creatives wanting to use their practice as a platform for collective liberation. The Seed A World Framework consists of a 9-step path for mapping your interdisciplinary ecosystem, discovering your creative offer, building a framework for practicing in alignment with your values, learning how to sell and market your offer in ways that feel sustainable and so much more. The Seed A World Retreat is anchored by three essential worldbuilding tools: Imagination, Story and Platform. Review the step by step framework and weekly breakdown of the retreat using our syllabus.
The Winter 2024 Retreat is 50% off at $550 with two payment plan options ➡️ 2-Pay: $275 and 4-Pay: $139.
This is the last retreat session where the weekly Tuesday workshops will be taught LIVE. So if synchronous jam sessions are your thing, join us. Can't make every live session? No worries! Every Tuesday workshop and Thursday open studio is recorded and uploaded to your course library and private podcast feed on the same day.
The Seed A World Retreat Is for You If…
You are longing to seed, deepen or return to an interdisciplinary practice rooted in the truth of your desire. Particularly if you’re craving support from creative community in learning how to trust your desire and liberatory imagination.
You are working full-time or part-time inside work misaligned with your values and the needs of your body. You have been wanting to divest your labor from upholding systems that don’t serve us but are unsure how to develop a creative offer to generate additional income with the goal of replacing your primary source of income.
You want to maintain your full-time job but desire to reconnect with your childhood curiosity and combine it with the skills you’ve developed in adulthood to serve your community in new and empowering ways.
“Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.”
— Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, pg. 110
The retreat starts tomorrow, let’s collectively study inside speculative practice and build futures that haven’t happened yet but must. See you in class!
With desire,
Ayana
What Seeda School Worldbuilders Are Saying About the Retreat…
"Words cannot express enough how grateful I am for the blessing that is both Ayana and Seeda School. Enrolling in the retreat was an immediate yes for me — where the weekly meditations and facilitations from Ayana felt like sacred invitations to return — return to community, return to self, return to Spirit, return to our gardens. Like The Artist's Way, but through a decolonial Black feminist lens, I continue to find Seeda School and its Retreat as an evergreen gift and artistic nourishment that, as a result, enriches the tending of my spiritual and literary practice — The Conflicted Womanist.”
— Chinyere Erondu, Fall 2023
“The violence is endless under empire and white supremacy, but so is our capacity to imagine new worlds and to love on each other” – a thought Ayana offered us early on, amid the grief, heartbreak and rage at the apocalypses taking place close and far, is also the best summation of this heart-and-possibilities-expanding retreat. Under Ayana’s effervescent, loving, wise guidance and expansive vision, these 9 weeks were a space for us to practice loving ourselves – breathing through fear, taking our desires, curiosities and oddities seriously, seeing a divine throughline in our journeys, choosing to start without having all the information – in order to answer the call from our people, past and present, and bring about the futures we need today. I told everyone I care about of the gift that is the Seed A World Retreat, looking forward to revisiting our session recordings and completing the worksheets (that I know my life depends on <3). I am so grateful I followed my intuition (and desire!) and chose to invest in myself through this course. I am grateful and forever charged/changed by this offering, that Ayana had dreamt up and powerfully-beautifully woven into being.”
— Aisha Jandosova, Fall 2023
“Ayana Zaire Cotton, is, to me, a being whose radically tender ways of loving, teaching, and questioning mirror the revolutionary labours of love of bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, and the list goes on. Through Seeda School, Ayana plants seeds of responsible hope, of revolutionary reimagining(s), and most importantly, of communal (and personal) pursuit(s) of the erotic into the body, mind, and soul of whoever has the chance to waltz with their teachings, with their being. Being a student of Seeda School is constantly being reminded that one’s desires are needs, and therefore that we — as people — have the power to materialize the conditions we yearn to have in order to thrive, to be free. Receiving teachings and exchanging with Ayana and the lovely beings who tap into their care-full-y crafted [offers] is a blessing that keeps on giving, and I trust that this will remain the case in near and distant futures.”
— Gloria-Sherryl François (G L O W Z I), Fall 2023
McKittrick, Katherine. “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Just Told Us: Abolition Is Presence, It Is Life in Rehearsal. It Is Not the Recitation of Rules. Freedom Is a Place. Freedom Is a Place. Guys. Get into It!” Twitter, 26 Oct. 2020, https://twitter.com/demonicground/status/1320862580039143433?lang=en