She builds archives, conjures futures, and questions everything. Tamika Abaka-Wood on ritual, refusal, and the joy of cultural strategy.

Tamika Abaka-Wood is a cultural anthropologist, conceptual strategist, and artist whose practice moves between community building, archival work, and spiritual inquiry. She's the creator of Dial-An-Ancestor, an ongoing project that collects voice notes as offerings to the past, present, and future. Her work resists categorization, merging care and critique, and often asks: what are we remembering, and who are we remembering for?

She explains:

* Why she’s more interested in frameworks than mediums

* How Dial-An-Ancestor creates a space for grief, communion, and speculative healing

* The tension between facilitation and authorship in creative work

* What it means to build archives that feel alive—not extractive

* How refusal and withholding can be generative tools

* Why she resists the singular identity of “artist,” and what she embraces instead

* The ethics of visibility, looking, and representation in public programming

* How joy and mischief shape her strategies for imagining otherwise

(0:00) Welcome + Intro(08:30) Refusing the artist title, reshaping the role(13:00) Strategy as creation(17:22) Dial-An-Ancestor: calling in future histories(26:08) Branding is not world-building(30:31) Building intimacy into the infrastructure(35:03) Refusal is not a pause, it’s a position(44:00) Grief, play, and spiritual maintenance(48:21) How to get involved with NewCrits

Follow Tamika: Web: https://tamikaabakawood.com/ Instagram: @tamikaka Learn more about Dial-An-Ancestor: https://dial-an-ancestor.com/

Full Transcript

Ajay Kurian: Hi everybody. Welcome to the July NewCrits Talk and Summer Party. Thank you all for coming!

I met Tamika through my partner Jasmine, who's here tonight. From day one she was electric, a mile a minute, excited about anyone's excitement, game for anyone's game, a facilitator par excellence. Whatever you supplied, she'd give back threefold with tangents, detours, serious things and fun things, codified and color coded. Tamika wants to help. She wants people to see their ideas through, and to excite them to build the worlds they're making and to believe in the possibility of a different tomorrow without blinders on. She's not deaf to misery or darkness, but somehow she manages to channel her best energies to maintain a joyful persistence.

It's only recently that Tamika has felt comfortable calling herself an artist, and she probably wants to chime in right now and question the importance of the name. Anyways, she has self-identified as a cultural anthropologist and I think that's definitely true. Her ongoing project, Dial-An-Ancestor, is a beautiful testament to this where she gathers future histories into a building archive.

But her work as a kind of conceptual strategist is also its own form of cultural anthropology. And I'm interested in people who are creating in multiple ways in multiple worlds. But really I insist on the term artist, not because everyone needs to be an artist, but because I think it allows her to momentarily assume the role of head creative and not facilitator.

She's not alone, of course, but sometimes when you're in an ensemble, it's time for your solo. The group steps back and lets you play because what you have is special and singular, and the group knows you'll come back. But for that moment, it's about you, and this is a chance for that to happen. This is Tamika's world, and tonight we're all in it together.

Please help me welcome Tamika Abaka-Wood.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: That was so special, thank you. I feel so shy, I really do. That was beautiful.

Ajay Kurian: Of course.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Thanks for having me here. It is still surreal.

Ajay Kurian: What's surreal about it?

Tamika Abaka-Wood: What is surreal about it? I think you touched on it there. I definitely feel more comfortable in a facilitator role — a question asker role. You anticipated my reaction to the word artist, and you're a fine artist. Big A.

Ajay Kurian: So they say.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Who's they?

Ajay Kurian: I dunno.

Ajay Kurian: There are prompts over there, so I'm gonna ask you one of the prompts and then we'll get into what these prompts are. How's your head, your heart, and your body right now?

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Okay, let's start with body. I came back from London yesterday last night, so in my body it's like midnight, which is way past my bedtime. But my body feels relatively relaxed. I feel like my heart's beating maybe a little bit fast and I'll ease into this weird space.

My head feels really unburdened and my heart's really open. I went to London because my mom is sick and I got to be there with her, and it reminded me that life is so much more important than anything else. And doing it with people is so much more important than anything else. So I feel really grateful that I was there and I feel really grateful that I'm here.

Ajay Kurian: Oh, I'm wishing your mother well.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Thank you. How's your head, heart, and body?

Ajay Kurian: Let's see. I'm only gonna answer so many questions from you but I'll answer that one. My head is clear. I just got back from Bard where I was teaching for the last three weeks, so I need to clear out a little bit more. But I feel like, as I prep for these things, I try to do some breathing and get that clear.

My heart is always open in these conversations because really it is a very responsive thing. I'm here to celebrate the things that you do and that makes it easy to have an open heart. And my body's okay.

I want to start with Dial-An-Ancestor 'cause I think it's probably the project that has created the most iterations. Maybe it's the thing that's built a momentum in which this becomes an artistic practice and one that's of course related and implicated in cultural anthropology.

But this is a very specific project and it's one that's very open and you have the ways that you want it to be. And that's interesting to me 'cause this is this is a vision — what you want it to be. So I want to hear the beginning. I want to hear how this started and kind of the bones to the flesh to where we are.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: So Dial-An-Ancestor is a techno-spiritual hotline. It is gonna exist for a hundred years, which is obviously beyond my lifetime, purposefully. It asks people to do two things; to consider who is asked to listen and who is asked to speak. That is the most blunt, simple two questions that this artistic process asks. But it came around in 2021 when I was pregnant for the first time. I know it's so biographical, but I just think I wanna go straight there with you. I was pregnant for the first time and it was unexpected and it was really exciting and scary, and made me realize how precious and precarious time is.

At the same time that I had this germination of life within me, I also got a call from back home in London that my dad was really sick, so I've got two parents that are sick at the moment. So it was conceptually holding life and death at the same time and being like, oh my God, I'm the link between what was before and what is to come, what do I wanna do with that?

So it made me think about ancestry and links between the past and the future, but within my body for the first time. That's where it came from within my body, but also it was 2021 and I was new in America.

Ajay Kurian: That's lot of new things.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: It was a lot of new things at one time. But it came out of a learning experience, so twice a week I got on Zoom with seven people who are strangers that I did not know, and we had a self-directed course that was about unraveling our relationships to time. I know, it is like the weirdest thing to do.

Ajay Kurian: How did that even happen?

Tamika Abaka-Wood: I just know a guy that knows a guy. Honestly, that's how anything in my life happens. I have no idea. Just like through WhatsApp, there was this group.

Ajay Kurian: Know a guy that knows a guy, that's like intellectual gangsterism.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: No, true. Like I don't know anything. I just know people that know things and I get put on. So we were unraveling on our relationships to time, and this is where Dial-An-Ancestor really came from conceptually.

Ajay Kurian: Of course it happened in a group.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: It had to, there's no other way. Every good idea, if you really boil it down, comes from multiple dialogues and multiple references. Like you can't really locate it in one place or one person. There's a multitude of unraveling of references over a lifetime that leads you to one idea. An idea finds a person or a set of people at the right time.

Ajay Kurian: And so this was that time. There were so many thoughts that were going through my head right then where I think that's true for all artistic creation. The funny thing is that when people take on the name artist, they do slough off the group. They’ll say that they're for the group. They’ll say that they're for the community. But there are instances, and I'm not damning all artists and I'm not saying that everybody does this — it’s not that severe. But there are instances where that dynamic falls away, and then the singular artist is raised up and we get the genius.

And what I hear in what you're saying is that you're keeping all the things that make that rich and real and true. That's the time when I understand why maybe you shy away from the term artist because it does consolidate so much of that feeling of the one.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Ugh, yeah. So much of that is western ideology. It's never been real. It's never ever been a real thing. And this isn't to shun the idea of a singular artist, I think that's so important as well.

Ajay Kurian: Absolutely.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: I'm interested in the idea of the me within the we and vice versa. But for me, the way that I've been ignited, I definitely need external catalysts and factors to stimulate thinking and doing and practicing.

I guess this is a really bastardized, quiet, and trite understanding of what an artist is, but I'm just gonna do it anyway. So I think the traditional understanding of an artist is someone standing in a room being like listen to me, I've got the answers, I’m an artist. I came up with this individual like singular genius thought and I'm being praised for it, like in silo. But nothing ever happens in silo.

Whereas, I guess the thing that is interesting or natural for me through Dial-An-Ancestor is there are all of these things happening around me. What is the kind of consensus of what it is that we need as humanity right now? Or what mistakes are we making? Where are we tripping up? What is it that we're yearning for? What do we need collectively? And then is there something within that where I can play a role in at least moving us forwards as a people. So there's a step before the individual idea, which is based off of need.

Ajay Kurian: But then that part of it does still take guts because I think there's so many times when you have conversations with people and people are like, that's a fucking good idea. You have an energy, but then it just fizzles and nothing happens. But the difference between somebody saying, this is real. We've all acknowledged that these problems are real, and the solution that we're collectively coming to is also real. So let's go do something.

That step of doing something is usually terrifying enough that it stops 99% of people from doing the thing. So for you, what was the thing that made you start this. Let me start Dial-An-Ancestor and let me make this real in whatever way.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: It's such a good question. So my background is in research insight and strategy, where you inherit a brief that has come from somewhere else and someone else and you don't really know what purpose it's serving ultimately. Whereas this kind of brief and idea I could fully see, and it almost felt as if there was no other choice but to try.

I was really purposeful about being a guest in New York. It happened in 2021. I was living in Bedstuy, I was new and I wanted to be a good guest. So for a year I was like, I'm just gonna sit back and figure out how things are done around here.

I think the steps to realizing Dial-An-Ancestor and making it real were baby ones, which involved other people. So it kind of spread the risk as well. There's an accountability that comes with doing things in groups, but there's also a spread of risk. So when I say it's our thing, not my thing, I think it's me being like, Hey, love me, I’ve got an idea. I have things to say, judge me, love me, pay attention to me. But also this is really scary and I can't do it by myself, and I know that I don't have the skillset to do it by myself, so who else is around me that I can lean on when things do get nerve wracking or I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing.

Ajay Kurian: So just like the basic existence of Dial-An-Ancestor is that it's a hotline that you can call and record yourself as a future ancestor. I feel like we should listen to one.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: We should listen to one for sure.

Ajay Kurian: All right. I feel like we should start with “I wanna be a giant”.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Oh my gosh, yes. Start with “I wanna be a giant". This was anonymous by the way. I went full stalker mode to figure out who left this.

DAA audio: Hi, I'm Reva Rutherford. I started the record a message before and then I realized I had my air pods in, which have water damage. So this is me calling again. I wanted to share a half written poem that I have in my notes. I write mantras and manifestos in my notes a lot. So yeah. Here's one.

No more shrinking. I wanna be a giant.

I want my titties to swing to the floor when I laugh. I want to step over all the fucked up towns white people create. I'm gonna be a giant so I can leave my big footprint on your ass if you fuck with me.

I wanna be a giant. Unassailable. If you try and shoot me down the bullets ricochet. No more shrinking. Hear me roar. I'm trying to exchange tips with Godzilla at the kickback. Zine and pen in my back pocket so I can doodle newfound manifestos in the margins.

I wanna be a giant, so big that I can grab the moon out the sky. I wanna be so big the moon gave the moves out the way for me. I wanna be a giant so I can stuff the clouds into my cone, smoke it and feel the entire world in my chest.

I wanna be a giant so all the kids can play on my back when I lay down.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Right? So sick.

So this person left a voicemail twice and the first time that they did it there was like a little stutter in their voice, which I actually really liked. But they left this message again and I had to listen back to it over and over again to catch the name, Reva Rutherford.

I was like, who is this like secret notes app poet? I must find them. They're from New Jersey. It didn't take that long to honestly find them, but New Jersey poet. We ended up connecting and chatting afterwards, but they are so fantastic and I think there's something of a confessional aspect to being able to leave your truth to whoever is listening. Regardless of like where they're at, context, any of the various identities that we play with and perform and put on. It felt so pure and so wonderful that I had to second guess myself to be like, should I reach out? Is this kind of like breaking the spell?

Is this being unfair to the person that left it? Thankfully she was into it, but what I'm trying to say is morally, there are a lot of questions that this throws up for me that I do not have the answers to right now.

Ajay Kurian: Before getting into that moral quandary of stalking someone. Good intentions, we'll stick with that. But when you're doing something that's so based in community and collaborative, I think the question that comes up for me and something that I'm thinking about now is when you're beginning something, how long does it take before it turns into something that you believe in? You start dialing Ancestor and nobody's called, that's a thing that probably happened and then you get your first call.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: So the way that people find out about Dial-An-Ancestor is mainly through like street intervention. So we paste them, I don't have time, I don't have money. I come from a very working class background where we grew up quite poor, but conceptually and the ideas that were instilled into me in these like limitless propositions, we were surrounded by them. So there's a really lovely playing with scale where it was like, nothing's impossible, but your material reality means that right now you have $250 to figure out how to turn this techno spiritual intergenerational exchange into something tangible that people can interact and fuck with. So how do you do that? That's a huge leap from how do we share knowledge intergenerationally to, you have $250. Like how do you actually activate that?

I wheat pasted for the first time, it was the scariest thing in the world. 'cause like I'm trying to make friends. I'm in New York, I don't really know anyone that well. This is the kind of left field idea. Maybe one of the most visible acts of the way that I think that I've put into the world, which felt really scary for me. But people fucked with it immediately. Weirdly, it’s now like the tail end.

We love a new thing, we love a launch. We don't really love maintenance and care. It’s really boring to see this same wheat pasted thing over and over again. And it makes me think so much — Mierle Laderman Ukeles, you know who I'm talking about?

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, Ukeles.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Maintenance art and her manifesto. I dunno how, but I found it and I think so much of her work really resonates with me for that reason. The invisible labor that comes around maintaining a thing is not as sexy as the launch of a thing. So actually I'm finding it harder now than I did going out wheat pasting for the first time because everyone's like, oh my God, so cool, what is this? I wanna get involved. Whereas after four years it's oh, same thing again.

Ajay Kurian: But now that you now you have all these stories, now there’s there's maintenance. You get people that are like, oh yeah I know that, they move on and that's fine. To me it's the ongoing stories and it is the thing of just constantly meeting new people that meet it where it is, and when they see it, they're like, holy shit, this is an archive of four years and it's gonna be going for another 96 and I can potentially be a part of it.

And even what you were saying before about when people call, there is a very confessional tone. The energy on the phone is almost grave. They start talking and you can feel that they feel like either they're gonna make a detour and be like, I need to be irreverent about this. Or there's consequence and I need to treat this with consequence. I think that makes for a very fascinating project and a fascinating archive. But the, I totally hear you in terms of maintenance.

So this is how the website exists. This is the format. But then you also have a deck for it. I guess I'm curious — who is the deck for?

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Great question. I don't know how many people here are like in the big A art world. I have no idea how you people make anything happen because it is painstakingly slow. I come from a more so a break glass option. People reach out to me when it's ‘fuck, we've exhausted all options’. We can't do this internally. We need an outside point of view and process that is not our own to make something happen. So I think I'm really used to doing things on like an accelerated timeline. That’s become my natural pace of putting things out into the world. Otherwise I'll just talk myself out of it. But I've found that any inbound kind of inquiries from the art world, immediately I'm like, let me put a deck together. I'm gonna put this together in 24 hours. Otherwise the opportunity's gonna dissipate because that is so used to how I'm working.

But girl, I've gone like a year and a half waiting for some people to get back to me who shall not be named right now, but god damn. So I make the decks really quickly, but they're usually for inbound inquiries that I couldn't do by myself.

All of this is at a scale that my money, my time, and my energy can afford. But if someone comes into the inbox, which is really rare, and say ‘Hey, I'd love to turn this into and X, Y, Z, or what are you thinking about turning this into something more physical immediately?’ I'll pull an all-nighter to be like, okay, this is the idea. This is what we can do. Where do I meet you where you are at to make sure that this is something that is a joint process and is mutually beneficial. So I've probably got hundreds of those decks.

Ajay Kurian: I think you should just send an email back. I think there's a level sometimes, at least in the art world, what I've seen is that there is too much is ‘oh shit, I don't even operate that’ or ‘I'm not this prepared’.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Yes. There is a word for this in East London vernacular that I've grown up with and it's stushness. Have you heard that ness?

Ajay Kurian: No.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: So I grew up in East London slash Essex, depending on where your positionality is. But stushness is you've gotta withhold. You can't put it all out on the table. The act of refusal is actually really powerful. I think some of these psychological games that all of you are playing in the capital A art world, like I'm not hip to yet. So I actually think that's really brilliant advice, but this is something that is bigger than me and bigger than all of us. So I just feel like I wanna keep the momentum going. But I hear what you're saying.

Ajay Kurian: I have so many decks of yours open. I love the decks, do not get me wrong. This is in no way a shaming, it's more so to me that there's something very valuable about seeing these decks because I do think that there are ultimately multiple ways of operating and multiple ways of expressing an idea.

Sometimes having the clarity of a vision and being like, this is what we can do, this is how we can roll it out. This is how it can be meaningful and this is the role that you play. It doesn't have to be so hard and it doesn't make you more intelligent to be vague.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: A hundred percent. It does not need to be deeper or more complex or complicated than it is. Also, I think I tend to see things in power structures and who really holds the power. Sometimes when you upset the power hierarchy and being like, wait, I actually have a vision and thank you for giving me this opportunity.

I actually have thought about this in depth. It skews the natural hierarchy that an outsider artist is supposed to come into the conversation or the dialogue with that is not so helpful because power can only really talk to power. And I think sometimes we confuse agency and decision and choice with power. I think sometimes I try maybe a little bit too quick, I need to think of my when on to reveal.

Ajay Kurian: The art world is an interesting place in that there's these functionaries of power that have no power and there's a precarity there. There's like a lived precarity in that most of them are paid shit, or some of them have wealth already or have some forms of security, but many others do not. And they're just doing that job and they're putting things together and making it work. So in that position, I feel like they see something that feels more quote unquote corporate. There's also an aversion where it's oh, this isn't what we're about. This isn't how we function. That's something that has occurred to me and something that I'm just wondering about because I want to say I wouldn't have been that person, but maybe I would.

So maybe I would see a deck like this and be like, wait, what is she doing? That's just something that I had to learn where this is a really beautiful way to express yourself and for somebody to be brought into the fold and that you can build something and it's not scary.

I think people are also scared by confidence, especially when it's from a black woman, but like I think there's something that can be threatening about a level of confidence where it’s, I have my ducks in a row, do you? And then it's on them.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Without a doubt. I think the idea of governance and operating structures and who does what… This is the difference between joint process and collaboration that we've spoken about before. I don't like collaboration and people are like, oh my God, what do you mean? I don't like it because I feel like there's a level of accountability that people can shoo away from when there is no understanding of where you are at in the process.

My mission in life, and it might change, is to make potent, irresistible, malleable imprints for other people to fuck with, and the other people to fuck with is really important. But I'm coming in with a point of view and a directive and a mission and where I want this to go.

That keeps me accountable to the broader mission of whatever the thing is, right? Facebook started as a thing that was about intimacy and forging connections and then people gain power and start to really lose the guiding principles of why they started the thing in the first place.

I'm not immune to that at all. So I think some of this is also about holding myself accountable and keeping me in place as to what we're actually doing here. So I think, I'm threatened by this as well. I'm like, how the fuck am I gonna make this happen? I've said it out loud, but it's a really scary thing to say this thing is gonna exist for a hundred years.

Ajay Kurian: But I don't doubt that it will. When you have people reach out, are they interested in the archiving aspect? Are they interested in how you're framing time? It's even in the deck here, the concept of braided time and how you're thinking about complicating how we address time. What is the spatiality of this project? How does it take form and how does it move into space? Because for instance, it doesn't have an Instagram account, it doesn't have a social media presence. It is just wheat pasting and word of mouth. What are these stipulations? And if it is about reaching more people and getting out there, why these limitations?

Tamika Abaka-Wood: I think we are in a really big data, low context time right now, and so much of our lives have been designed to be frictionless and to take away any like difficulty in making a thing happen.

So much of Dial-An-Ancestor comes from quite a radical socialist practice. My parents are very socialist. I am from the uk, I am mixed black. I have a lot of contradictions and tensions within my being that have been there for forever. Some of those things are really generative and useful and complicate the way that we move through the world and I just like complication. I like things that don't fall off of the bone because so much of our lives are just fucking frictionless right now. There's so many barriers to Dial-An-Ancestor. It sounds so simple, but so much of this is anti mimetic.

If it finds you, it's supposed to find you. If you get it, it's probably for you. And if you don't get it, that's also fine. I don't really mind. It's not about scale and numbers and productivity and how big this thing gets, it's just, does it interrupt or intervene in someone's life? I guess that's where the spatiality comes from. It is an unignorable intervention that asks a very human question, no matter who you are. I like that the friction and the non explanatory nature of it, because it naturally keeps a lot of people out.

Ajay Kurian: It's I just learned about this a week or two ago. One of the students at Bard was talking about an indigenous writer, and forgive me for not remembering who the writer is, but the idea was that there's low context information and high context information. And through the process of the enlightenment, we prioritize low context information. That’s isolating and abstracting and creating something that we can look at and be like, oh, that's a universal. There's a universal man, quote unquote, and there's universal ideals and ideas. And these are very low context ideas.

With that structure in my head, I'm looking at projects differently and thinking about what are the benefits of that friction and that high context that can offer some forms of aesthetic resistance that feel like, if this becomes a model for reality and how we want to exist and persist with one another, then maybe that starts offering different opportunities for things to happen.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: I think this is why I landed in anthropology and not in art, because I think that is like the natural home. I think it's a discipline that has a lot to answer for, obviously, but I think it's a discipline that is absolutely scared of its own potential because it asks too many questions and doesn't offer solutions, offerings, gifts for other people to configurate in different ways.

Because so much of Dial-An-Ancestor came from the frustration of feeling like we were making the same mistakes over and over again. And in 2021 Black Lives Matter, that was so embedded in our consciousness, but I didn't trust it. I didn't trust it and I didn't believe it and I was really worried that we were looking at this thing really myopically and not thinking beyond our lifetimes and before our lifetimes. Like this playbook is the same frigging playbook, but in a slightly different context. I think abstraction is great because we understand what it means to be human, those type timeless qualities. But what does it mean for those things to exist in the context that we live in today?

Ajay Kurian: Yeah. To me it's about volume in a way. Like water is good and necessary, but you drink enough of it and you die. Abstraction is the same thing to me.

We're abstracting at every single point in time. There's never a time when our brain is accepting all evident information around us. But when you abstract to the point when you can dehumanize or you can create categories that have no bearing on reality, that abstraction starts putting lies into the world. And then it's a different thing and you can mobilize that and do things with it and have create power from that. There's realms of abstraction to me.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: I think that is so interesting. This is the way that my brain works, it’s like all over the place. I don't have an art background at all. So when you are saying some of these things, if I'm picking up the wrong end of the stick, just let me know.

Ajay Kurian: I don't think there's a wrong one.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: To me, the way that you've described abstraction, it feels like that is a very important thing for each of us to do as individuals, right. A very basic theory of change of how to make anything happen. The way that I see it, it's so fucking simple. You be the individual and see the individuals that are around you. You unite those people together with a common cause or a mission and then you tackle the challenge. But it seems like we skip tackling the challenge immediately and don't think about scales of intimacy when it comes to introspection and how to relate to ourselves so we can relate to other people.

I think that abstraction should happen but internally as an internal process. As a mixed black person, that level of abstraction and understanding of the way that I exist in the world, my own gaze on myself changes depending on where I'm at. And other people's gaze of me also changes depending on where they're at and where I'm at. There's multiple gazes. If we did that level of abstraction within ourselves, I think the world would be such a better place.

I remember having a conversation with a mixed friend, in a group of people, and several negronis down, so Lord knows what I was saying. But someone asked, as a mixed person do you feel confused? And I remember being like, fuck yeah. Are you not confused? I wish that everyone felt more confused about their positionality in the world when it came to race, when it came to gender, when it came to gender expression, when it came to the heteronormative or ableism, all of it. I'm like, gang, there's no way that none of you are not confused about this. Maybe you need to abstract within yourselves a little bit more. Am I understanding abstraction right?

Ajay Kurian: I think so. I think there's plenty of ways to understand it, but that's the way that I was thinking about it in this particular circumstance. I think the fact that you turn it inwards is what can be so valuable about it.

Because for instance, growing up and going to the movies; If I were not to abstract, then I'd go to the movies and I wouldn't be able to identify with anyone 'cause I wasn't there. And so, you have to abstract and say, I'm that white character, right? I identify with that character and I identify with that struggle. That struggle is an abstraction. So for that to even occur, there has to be a flight from self. Then you return to self with the gifts that gave you. If you leave and don't come back, you've become potentially tyrannical.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Classic hero's journey type. You need to return back to self with the new information. So much of the archive from Dial-An-Ancestor is so interesting right now. Because obviously it's people's own stories and ways of moving through the world in their own voice. I don't know where I'm going with this exactly, but I'm really interested in the material and printing out the words on paper. Understanding what those stories feel like in someone else's body and voice as a way to gain empathy. Then to abstract and be in someone else's shoes for a second, and intonation of voice, do you know what I mean? It's a really difficult thing to feel and to do.

Ajay Kurian: On the flip side of that, an interesting foil to this is that in hearing the quality of sound that it's on a telephone. It's not like Hi-Fi production, and it drops you into something so specific that it almost allows for more abstraction.

In art school you'll hear this a lot and in a lot of different circumstances, but you gotta go specific in order to go universal. There's a space of if you get the texture of something that feels really intimate and specific, more people will respond to that.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Oh, a thousand percent. Do you know what the amount of people that have left voice notes, that I know deeply, and are like obsessed with mallards or something so specific, but will live, laugh, love on this archive. And then I'm like, oh, this is also my responsibility in something that is so limitless and so open to provide a few more specific prompts that gets the person to be as hyper specific about what it is to be them in this time, in this body walking through this world as a way for more people to be intimate from that, you know?

Ajay Kurian: That's beautiful. This is one of the spatialization of this project. This is one of the ways that this has turned into something else. This feels important for so many reasons.

Tamika Abaka-Wood: Yeah, play it.

Dial-An-Ancestor Audio: Hey this is Nadia Hun. I'm calling in to tell you a story and this story is with a promise. The promise is that there are Palestinians in the future, and here's my story on humanizing the Palestinians and how to do it.

I am really good at code switching. Perhaps it's my blended identity. I am half Palestinian and half polish — an identity that loves to be objectified. I have heard every strange remark, othering remarks, racist remarks, islamaphoc remarks, classist remarks, oh, you're from Pakistan, et cetera. I grew up with that. I learned as most Palestinian kids learn that the very word Palestine or Palestinian is an act of revolution. I grew up mostly around white Latins in Miami, another strange identity marginalized in the US by the American settlers of this land, but at the top of race and class structures back home. W hite Colombians, white Venezuelans, white Cubans, et cetera. What you learn quickly when you are a blended race, ethnicities, languages, and religions, is that race in the US is completely made up.

An indigenous, brown-eyed and brown-skinned person from Mexico checks off the same Hispanic box. As a light-skinned blonde, blue-eyed Colombian, it is designed to erase indigeneity, which is the core cause of all subtler states. Growing up in Miami meant that almost everyone I interacted or stayed with assumed I was Latina, and after a while I stopped correcting because to correct meant to say what I really am. And to say Palestine to White, Catholic, Latin at a Miami private school would prompt a plethora of strange responses for a plethora of reasons. This strange identity soup on the land that is not ours, that is stolen from the quest of peoples, created a version of me that can talk to anyone about anything.

I know when I am talking to a white Jewish American about the federal state of Israel, that I need to almost always preface with an antidote that my family too was murdered in Auschwitz, that I'm a Polish citizen, that I speak Polish. It's a way of disarming a white person with my whiteness, and that is the part that I want to talk about today.

My white Polish grandmother of Jewish ancestry, who lives in Miami right now could become an Israeli citizen with a snap of a finger. Her trip would be paid for, she would be given land, and she would become a first class citizen in an ethno state with an advanced military that is funded by the United States. My Palestinian grandmother who is older than the state of Israel itself, and lives in Jordan right now, she could never go back to the land she was born in. Never. She would never be given citizenship and she would never be allowed on a land that was once hers. There is no way to justify that. And the main question I would like you, the listener, to ask yourself is, why does the rest of the world always have to pay for the atrocities of Europe?

Why? Why is it that we Palestinians have to talk to you about this only when white people are killed? Why? Why don't we engage in armchair activism around the clock? The very concept of Gaza, an open air prison created by Israel where people are not allowed to work, fish, farm, or leave. Why? That is the question I'd like everybody to meditate on.

And lastly, I wanted to say that I know there cannot be an earth without us because there has never been an us without the earth no matter how much they try. You know the word Palestine? The word Palestine is a radical act in itself. I hope you're having a good day, dear listener, wherever you are.

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