The Black School (Joseph Cuillier and Shani Peters Cuillier)
Radically Reimagining Black Futures: Art, Pedagogy, and Community Design
This year’s Practice Activation was led by The Black School, the New Orleans-based initiative co-founded by multidisciplinary artists Joseph Cuillier and Shani Peters Cuillier. “Radically Reimagining Black Futures: Art, Pedagogy, and Community Design” opened with a lecture grounded in the cultural and historical traditions of Black New Orleans, whose structures of mutual aid, ceremony, collective care, and joy offer a powerful model for organizing and design. Participants then broke into groups to translate a series of prompts into phrases, poses, movements, and sounds, which were woven into a collective demonstration enacted by the room as a shared declaration: a living manifesto for liberatory design.