Black Metal, "Training Grounds"

New York, NY

Black Metal is a cultural anthology “kitchen table” book uplifting themes of Black futurity and magical realism. What began as weekly research exchanges in summer 2021 crystallized into an heirloom – a limited edition art book that reframes space travel as an inward journey. The project culminated in fall 2024 with the book’s release and an immersive book tour. My contribution, the "Training Grounds" chapter, explores how metaphysical training grounds can facilitate a program for shedding inherited conditioning.

Year:

  • "New Forms" Incubator: 2021

  • Book Launch: 2024

Medium: Limited edition (500 copies) art book, speculative fiction, magical realism, world-building

Collaborators:

  • Jeremy Kamal

  • Kordae Jatafa Henry

  • Ari Melenciano

Partners:

  • Afrotectopia (creator)

  • WeShouldDoItAll (designer)

  • Small Editions (publisher)

Support:

  • Ford Foundation

  • MIT Space Exploration Initiative (SEI)

  • NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)

In the depths of the Pacific Ocean, a new material waits to be discovered – or perhaps to discover us. This is the founding myth of Black Metal, a speculative universe that resulted from the collision of four artistic visions seeking to articulate new frameworks for Black liberation. The cohort was formed through a “New Forms” incubator by Afrotectopia, in partnership with MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative and New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Through our weekly gatherings, Jeremy Kamal, Kordae Jatafa Henry, Ari Melenciano, and I weaved our ideas together on an ever-expanding Miro board. We took those ideas and propagated them through our respective practices, worked with the creative agency WeShouldDoItAll to design the book’s visual language, and ultimately conceived Black Metal, printed by Small Editions and released in October 2024.

My chapter, "Training Grounds," materialized as a manual. This is a detailed protocol, based on my own lived experience, for shedding, integrating, and grounding in order to access latent potentialities. The works draws on insights from astrology, astronomy, and metaphysical properties of the bodymind connection. It poses essential questions about how we prepare ourselves — body, mind, and spirit — for journeys into unknown territories, as we re-member our true nature. This framework recognizes that space travel begins not with external vessels, but with internal preparation — the careful cultivation of practices that allow us to move through the world with less density, both literally and symbolically.

As the book finds its way into the world through a limited release of 500 copies, these investigations into collective liberation and personal transformation feel more urgent than ever, speaking to a growing hunger for frameworks that can help us navigate between the worlds we've inherited and the worlds we dream of creating. Developing my chapter as a training program allowed me to think about community organizing, residencies and workshops in new ways. I aim to continue making the “Training Grounds” work more accessible through world-building, collaborations and program development.