A sonata to seed whatever flourishes after the end of the American empire

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, this project will undergo constant modifications; the features of this page provide accruing information on the project’s developments.

I've spent the past decade at great personal and professional cost striving to operate outside of institutions of power, preserving my own indigenous rural Alabama culture practices, studying Haitian revolutionary musical and embodiment techniques, and researching Gulf South Creole histories and architectures to find the ways that Black folks renegotiated trauma to make some good from all the pain.

Through that journey, I’ve learned that the end to a genocide does not come from a final solution, but from a shift in consciousness. So, come. Eat. Heal. Rage. Cry. Discuss. Play a record. Leave a note. Sit with discomfort. Create. Seed the futures you want to see.

— Zeelie Brown

For their Session at Recess, a sonata to seed whatever flourishes after the end of the american empire, Zeelie Brown presents an evolving installation and performance laboratory exploring sound, ecology, and systems of value across the Gulf and Global South. Throughout the exhibition, Zeelie will transform the gallery into a site of research, composition, and collective gathering—developing sound works, altars, and hand-painted fabric hangings that reconsider how music and food systems shape ideas of scarcity, extraction, and survival.

Zeelie frames the project within reflections on colonial economies and the fractures they have produced—between land and extraction, nourishment and profit, community and empire. Two years ago, when they were conceiving of this project, the artist began to notice “handwriting on the wall” in the form of Instagram-revamped Hitler Youth propaganda talking points promoting eugenics, authoritarianism, and a white male grievance politics. At the same time, Zeelie sensed a culture of conflict avoidance in social justice spaces, that coupled with a lethargic political system, lead to the inability to pass common sense social investment legislation.

Solutions based on values of abundance and access — like universal basic income, single payer healthcare, increasing welfare benefits, making higher education nearly free, creating low-carbon public transportation systems, and creating housing codes that encourage sustainable, affordable housing — were mocked in favor of wholesale ransacking by the technocratic upper classes. As the country heads into an uncritical celebration of its 250th year, Zeelie couldn’t help but question:

Zeelie sat with the language of the blues and dreamed of a space of historical reckoning where sounds and food could be medicine. This space would trace how plantation systems still shape our ecosystems, economies, and social structures through violence and imposed systems of value, but would also nourish the collective imagination to possibilities beyond this American empire. Or in the artist's words “to plant a spiritual garden that will flourish in the cracks.”

Throughout the Session, Zeelie will build out this space and this liberatory sound through daily practices.They will develop a sonata during open rehearsals in the gallery on a newly commissioned cello built by luthier Christo Wood. They will be converting their thoughts and ephemera from their research travels into objects, altars, and sound. Visitors are invited to join them and spend time in the space as the project unfolds: listening to records from the artist’s personal collection, gathering through shared ancestral food practices and group reflection, and contributing to a collective writing prompt that will shape the work: “Please write down something that you need to leave behind for you to be free. Set it by the light.”