As of yet I envision it two ways:
1) As a campus of sovereign real estate, owned and collectively operated, featuring beautiful, functional, fully equipped accessible and low to no cost living spaces as well as spaces for various retreat activities such as beach front and forest access, gardens and orchard, laboratory, spa, state of the art kitchen; art, recording, and dance/movement studios; and so forth.
2) Alternatively, direct reparations and mutual aid hold the power to create sanctuary for Black Mages across time and space, giving life to a multitude of sanctuaries within Black mages’ existing homes and communities and ecosystems in many places around the world at once, thus eradicating numerous potential barriers to access.
[Especially] for other Black and Indigenous mages to reach the healing that we dearly deserve and even desperately need. If I had not been displace soooooooooo many motherfucking times. If I had had a home of my own all this time… Not only would I have had the space and peace (if not the time bc that may vary with work and responsibilities and requirements maybe in having and keeping a home) to pursue my own healing along a way more fluid and even direct flow/path but moreover I could as I still intend now have provided space for others to do so along side me.
© Whitney Sparks, 2021
A Bay Area native, my mother taught science classes at the Palo Alto Junior Museum where I adopted a tree at the neighboring park. I earned my bachelors degree with distinction from Yale where I majored in American Studies with a thesis project on Black mothers’ autonomous childcare collectives in Brooklyn housing projects. I went on to receive an MFA in visual art from Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland where my thesis art protect was a mixed media multisite installation featuring collage, original films, and “bedfloating” to explore “Where the Two Rivers Meet”: parallels between aquatic and human migration patterns. Yet although I have exhibited all over the world from Prague to Berlin to Chicago to Santa Cruz to Santorini to Bangkok to Sattal, India I have not had a smooth path to success in…
