Through calendars we see ourselves in time. In them we record what we do, and when. We also customize, update, and share calendars to satisfy a broad range of needs. But on a deeper level, personal calendars are becoming forms of fragmentary historicism. A way of recording our own trajectories spatio-temporally and effectively making our experiences into living histories.
Reimagining calendars, The Liberation Calendar Has Been Shared With You is an online calendar that observes the emancipation of former colonies in America, Africa, and Asia between the 19th and the 20th centuries. Each holiday is written directly into a shared online calendar available for viewing/editing. The objective of this project is to emphasize the importance of binding past and present (and public and private) histories in order to collectively ground ongoing decolonial struggles. Participants are encouraged to alter this calendar by responding to it. The accumulation of responses to emancipatory holidays becomes a way of reminding ourselves that liberation is not only a symbolic, fixed date that remains in the past, but a daily act that involves changing the ways we affiliate to evolving forms of nationalism. Moreover, participants’ responses may overcrowd the calendar, blurring the lines of colonial notions of linear time.
The Liberation Calendar Has Been Shared With You allows users to add new events in a shared calendar. Existing events can also be contested to expand the scope of what it means to remember independence in the present tense, on both a personal and political level.
is a collaboration between poet Nilufar Karimi and artist Eliseo Ortiz. As a collective, Loom embodies both its noun form—an instrument used to weave together disparate threads—and its verb form—that which slowly comes into view and implies futurity. Work created by Loom sheds light on structural inequalities, while also looking optimistically towards community action to revise systems of power.
Together, Karimi and Ortiz create games, interactive media, poetry, films, and performances, all of which are born from a common interest in investigating the language and symbolism nations use to enforce violence on their populations. Loom aims to raise community awareness of the many modes of state violence that exist by creatively unpacking the tools the state uses to impose this violence.