Our next The People’s Archive teach-in is next month! Join us on Tuesday, June 16 at 6:30 pm ET for We The People in partnership with @blis_collective .
Inspired by Kinfolk Tech’s AR monument to Philadelphia’s No Arena Movement—when communities in Chinatown, Black North Philadelphia, and across the city organized in solidarity to defeat a proposed 76ers arena that would have displaced thousands. The fight wasn’t just about stopping one development; it was about Asian, Black, Latinx, and working-class white Philadelphians recognizing that gentrification, displacement, and corporate extraction are interlocking systems of oppression that require interlocking resistance.
This session will feature panelists Brea Baker (@FreckledWhileBlack ), Claire Maracle, and Dr. Aymar Jean Escoffery (@ajescoffery ) discussing how collective power emerges when communities refuse to be pitted against each other.
📅 Tuesday, June 16
🕡 6:30 PM EDT on Zoom
🔗 Link in bio to register
ASL interpretation will be available.
YOU’RE INVITED
🎉 Monument Launch Party
🗓️ Friday May 29
📍The World’s Borough Bookshop
The Clemente and Kinfolk Tech are excited to announce the Jackson Heights, Queens edition of Historias in Motion, featuring “Dome Cartographies,” a new AR monument by artist Natalia Nakazawa paired with historical contributions from the Queens Memory Project. This signature series engages audiences with historically important Latinx neighborhoods around New York City, building community memory through artist-storyteller pairings, walking tours, limited-edition zines, and commissioned AR monuments that offer new possibilities for memorialization.
Join us at 5 pm on Friday, May 29, at the World’s Borough Bookshop to celebrate the monument launch music, artist conversations, walking tours, ‘zines, and more!
Link in bio to RSVP
Archives aren’t just for museums, libraries, and government buildings.
They live in our homes, our phones, and the everyday moments that shape our lives, and your phone already holds the foundations of a personal archive.
Photos, videos, texts, voice notes, voicemails, etc., all hold memories that connect us to our families, our communities, and our histories.
In the first episode of History Starts at Home, we’re starting with the basics: What is an archive, and how can you start building one today? Because preserving our stories helps ensure a richer, more expansive history for the future.
When you’re ready to get started use these 3 simple steps:
1️⃣ Make a short list of memories you want to archive
2️⃣ Create a folder on your phone or cloud storage called “Memory Archive”
3️⃣ Start adding photos and videos from the moments that matter to you to this folder
#archiving #archives #digitalarchives #familyarchives #memories
A preview of, and some history behind @nakazawastudio AR monument and sculpture “Dome Cartographies”
This monument extends on Nakazawa’s sculpture of the same name, from her recent installation at Socrates Sculpture Park. This monument is a dome that functions as a space for storytelling, gathering, and diasporic connection in the World’s Borough of Queens.
The sculptural dome takes its inspiration from the work of CHARAS, an education-focused group of former Puerto Rican gang members-turned-activists who challenged notions of who New York City was built for. In the 70s, they collaborated with architect Buckminster Fuller to create Geodesic domes as gathering spaces in the abandoned areas of the Lower East Side.
Nakazawa’s reinterpretation of the domes are now transported to Jackson Heights, a neighborhood where many of New York’s Latinx populations (Ecuadorian, Colombian, and more!) have made their homes. But this neighborhood is not just a core Latinx neighborhood, but is also a place where different diasporas meet and fuse. Thus, the dome serves as a counter-map to how we see the city. Instead of street names and numbers, we see stories and perseverance.
Join us at The World’s Borough Bookshop in Queens to celebrate the monument launch with music, artist conversations, walking tours, ‘zines, and more!
🎉 Dome Cartographies Monument Launch Event
📅 5–7 PM
📍The World’s Borough Bookshop
🔗 Link in bio to RSVP
On June 20th, we invite you to come make history, and showcase our collective power. To show any and all forces of domination, that no matter how hard you try to erase our presence and our history, we will continue to reclaim all that was stolen from us.
Reclamation Day is our counter-commemoration to official 'America at 250th' celebrations, grounded in the histories of Indigenous and Black presence on this land, this is an opportunity for us to grow the movements for Reparations, Land Back, and economic justice.
Featuring over 40 artists, we'll showcase the art, music, and imagination that is shaping the next 250 years. Registration is now live.
Come as strangers, leave as kin, pull up to the reunion.
Who governs memory—and who gets to decide what lasts.
A look at @kinfolktech and the infrastructures shaping public memory, where technology, community, and storytelling intersect to build something more collective, more intentional, and more alive.
Words by @rena.okamoto
Photography by Gustavo Lopes, Cynthia Bryan, Vanessa Lynn
Full article available in Issue 003.
Tonight’s teach-in, Beyond The Past Tense, is inspired by “Black Hole Spacetime Machine” an AR monument created in partnership with Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa of @blackquantumfuturism . The monument is a tribute to the legacy of preacher, social activist, educator, and entrepreneur Rev. Leon H. Sullivan. It encourages viewers to look beyond the constraints of the present to envision Black people thriving in the future.
There’s still time to register and join us for tonight’s dialogue with our panel of digital archivists. We’ll explore questions of data sovereignty, algorithmic justice, and how we build technologies that honor non-linear time, ancestral knowledge, and future generations simultaneously. We’ll examine how digital tools can help us break free from oppressive timelines that treat Black and Brown communities as disposable, always past, never future.
💻 The People’s Archive: Beyond The Past Tense
📅 Monday, April 20
🕡 6:30 PM EDT on Zoom
🔗 Link in bio to register
ASL interpretation will be available.
Kinfolk is honored and excited to be featured in Issue 003 of @aodmagazine titled Future Legacies. Issue 003 comes at a pivotal moment for both AoD Magazine and Kinfolk as both consider creativity, legacy, leadership, and purpose.
The piece on Kinfolk written by @rena.okamoto “Who Governs Memory” takes us back to our most ambitious exhibition to date, KIN, as well as exploring the importance of building infrastructure to support collective memory outside the current powers that be.
Read the full piece in @aodmagainze available for purchase at aodmagazine.com
Special thanks to @bobbytrendz@rena.okamoto and the whole team at @aodmagazine
Exploration doesn’t have to be inherently exploitative or extractive. It can be beautiful if we make it so.
🌌🌌🌌
The latest edition of For Kinfolk, By Kinfolk is now live on Substack. Writer-In-Residence Brea Baker @freckledwhileblack reflects on NASA’s recent Artemis II mission through the lens of the works and words of Octavia Butler.
Read her reflections in full at the 🔗 in bio.
Our upcoming teach-in, Beyond The Past Tense, will orbit around two big questions: what if communities under siege could preserve not just their past but their futures? What if we could archive dreams, warnings, and visions as rigorously as we document harm?
Through dialogue with our panel of digital archivists, we’ll explore questions of data sovereignty, algorithmic justice, and how we build technologies that honor non-linear time, ancestral knowledge, and future generations simultaneously. We’ll examine how digital tools can help us break free from oppressive timelines that treat Black and Brown communities as disposable, always past, never future.
When the archive becomes a portal—collapsing past, present, and future—how do we use it to resist displacement not just of our bodies but of our temporalities? How do we code liberation across time itself? This session treats digital justice as speculative practice: the right to remember forward, to be archived in the futures we’re building now.
💻 The People’s Archive: Beyond The Past Tense
📅 Monday, April 20
🕡 6:30 PM EDT on Zoom
🔗 Link in bio to register
ASL interpretation will be available.
Meet our third and final featured panelist joining us for the Beyond The Past Tense teach-in, the incredible Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez!
💻 The People’s Archive: Beyond The Past Tense
📅 Monday, April 20
🕡 6:30 PM EDT on Zoom
🔗 Link in bio to register
ASL interpretation will be available.
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez is the Archival Collections Manager at the Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora at CENTRO. Cristina’s work focuses on participatory, slow, and non-hierarchical approaches to knowledge-seeking and making through archival practice. In addition to her work at CENTRO, Cristina is the Grants and Giving Manager for We Here’s Dream-Shaping initiative, is a founding member of Archivistas en Espanglish, a collective dedicated to amplifying spaces of memory-building between Latin America and Latinx communities in the US, and co-runs Barchives, an independent outreach initiative that brings archivists to bars to talk about New York City’s archival collections and local history. Cristina has taught at various graduate Archives programs in NYC, and previous to CENTRO, was the Institute Archivist at Pratt Institute and is a former fellow for the National Digital Stewardship Residency for Art Information. Cristina holds a BA in Geography from Universidad de Puerto Rico Recinto de Río Piedras and a Master’s in Library Science with a certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials from CUNY Queens College.
We’re excited to introduce you to the next featured panelist joining us for the Beyond The Past Tense teach-in, the exceptional Sharon Mizota!
💻 The People’s Archive: Beyond The Past Tense
📅 Monday, April 20
🕡 6:30 PM EDT on Zoom
🔗 Link in bio to register
ASL interpretation will be available.
Sharon Mizota (she/her) is a researcher, metadata consultant, and art critic who works to improve diversity and inclusion in the historical record. Recent projects include research reports for the Community-Centered Archives Practice program at the University of California, Irvine and for Critical Minded, an initiative supporting cultural critics of color. Metadata and vocabulary collaborations include work with the Arab Image Foundation, Curationist, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and Outwords Archive. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, ARTNews, and other publications. She is a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers’ Grant and a coauthor of the award-winning book, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art. Sharon is a settler on unceded Tongva and Chumash lands in Southern California.
