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ANANSI Radical Catalyst

From ANANSI
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The ANANSI Radical Catalyst was a distributed, collaborative experiment in decentralized cultural production, governance, and resource sharing. Rooted in Black radical thought, the initiative unfolded over a year of dynamic collaborations, spanning multiple countries, disciplines, and digital/physical spaces. Emerging from a proposal to The Music Center, the project catalyzed a self-sustaining network, embracing communal computing, consensus-driven governance, and creative experimentation.

Through key events such as ARC: Conflux, Meet Me in the Living Room, and the establishment of the ANANSI Residential Compound, the collective fostered a space where artists, technologists, and organizers built alternative infrastructures for artistic creation and economic redistribution.

By developing protocols for reparational funding, communal computing, and distributed festival organizing, ANANSI was not just an artistic movement but a living prototype for decentralized, community-run institutions. With support from The Music Center, Meet Me, Santuri, and SoulCircle, the collective initiated new ways of sharing knowledge, resources, and creative labor.


History[edit]

The ANANSI Radical Catalyst (ARC) was over a year in the making, evolving through numerous phases of experimentation, collaboration, and reimagining decentralized creative practices.

February 2022

  • Kadallah Burrowes submitted a formal proposal to an open call from The Music Center for its new Digital Innovation Initiative.

June 2022

  • Kadallah began working with The Music Center on pre-production for an LA-based, distributed music festival.

September 2022

  • The original distributed festival project was sunlit, and Kadallah was awarded $25,000 USD in unrestricted funds.

October 2022

  • Six artists that had been involved in developing the ANANSI philosophy and working on The Music Center iteration collaborated on a collective budgeting exercise, the first project officially under the ANANSI name.
  • In addition to retroactively paying artists for their work on ANANSI projects, pools of money were set aside to continue working towards the ideas from the original pitch, with unallocated funds forming the basis of a financial commons.

December 2022

  • Seven artists from various phases of the project gathered for a virtual meeting in gather.town with the explicit goal of hanging out and getting to know each other rather than engaging in “productive labor.”

January 2023

February 2023

  • The ANANSI Residential Compound began hosting collective mythmaking sessions open to the Nairobi creative scene.
  • Jabez began experimenting with the Computer Commons.
  • Six artists came together to form the base organizing committee for the ANANSI Radical Catalyst distributed festival.

March 2023

April 2023

  • ARC: Conflux was hosted in collaboration with ANANSI, Meet Me, Santuri, and SoulCircle, successfully organizing a hybrid tele-production event with a final organizing team of 12 people across three countries.

May 2023

  • The membership guidelines protocol was approved.
  • A proposal to purchase a computer for collective use was approved.
  • Organizing for a tele-performance event officially began.


Praxis[edit]

ARC: Conflux[edit]

The ANANSI RADICAL CATALYST: CONFLUX was a hybrid happening built around musical tele-production. During ARC: CONFLUX, attendees existed together in physical and virtual space simultaneously. Many attendees participated from in-person at the Santuri Salon in Nairobi, while also joined online by artists from around the world, including from Zimbabwe, Indonesia, the U.S. and the U.K.

While the physical activation featured in-person facilitators and support staff as well as access to equipment, the locus of the event was the virtual gather.town space where artists were able to self-organize into groups to create music and write lyrics. Artists used BandLab to produce music together, using two classic Conflux techniques, and a new Lyrical Conflux style was premiered during the event.

This event was a collaboration between ANANSI, Santuri, Meet Me, and SoulCircle.

Reparational Funding[edit]

The catalyst officially began with a reparational funding exercise, that embodied this concept in two ways: first, it retroactively paid artists that were key in developing the ANANSI philosophy through leading collaborations that included consensus decision making and collective budgeting with various Black communities; secondly, it was the first time we included a “reparational bonus” into collective budgeting that paid Black workers an additional 25% bonus to compensate for the wage gap between Black and white college educated workers in the United States. From this exercise, we also produced a Notion template for collective budgeting.

Communal Computing[edit]

Beginning in February of 2023, ANANSI began investing in its decentralized technical infrastructure. Jabez King’ori has been experimenting with Raspberry Pi, Funkwhale, and Matrix to not only establish community tools for communication and resource sharing, but also developing tutorials for members of the collective to begin building for themselves. Most recently within this project, the collective voted to purchase a desktop computer to host our self-hosted servers from, rather than relying on centralized cloud computing services.

Praxis and Protocol[edit]

From that initial “reparational funding” collective budgeting exercise, we have been explicitly defining our praxis and protocols. Our praxis is all geared towards distribution, decentralization, and Black empowerment. They are not explicit rules for how we engage, but the traditions and frameworks by which we interact with each other and build projects, all culminating in a collective that is truly community run.

Our protocols are the harder “rules” that we’re putting in place to ensure that everyone’s voices are heard and to protect the community as a whole. While these conversations are still in their nascent phases, the ultimate goal is to create a protocol that explicitly breaks up consolidation of power and resources, engaging with our guiding spirit of Anansi and the practice of Anansesem to always call truth to power, especially within ourselves.

Meet Me in the Living Room[edit]

This event included live performances from Ndung’u Mbithi and the chair kickers and ANANSI’s resident DJ: KJ, as well as a hybrid panel conversation about African mobility hosted by Emma Nzioka. The event was a collaboration between ANANSI, Meet Me, and Pass Pass. As the first collaborative event underneath the ANANSI Radical Catalyst banner, it was a chance for the “official” organizing committee to work together in a distributed manner without the brunt of organizing alone. ANANSI contributed to the event by providing the venue (the ANANSI Residential Compound), organizational and planning support, technical support staff, and funds to pay the artists.


People[edit]

Members[edit]

Partner Organizations[edit]


Media[edit]

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