Movement Transmissions

In Movement Transmissions, General Sisters collaborators Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Dana Bishop-Root invite visitors to explore open pathways constructed of words that suggest, but do not designate, routes. These pathways were designated in collaboration with four artists active in St. Louis’s justice movements—Dail Chambers, Basmin Nadra, and Xochi Plancarte—and repopulate public spaces along Jefferson Avenue with memories of people, buildings, and actions that are no longer present.

General Sisters also considers the plants that occupy those places: plants that also have stories to tell. Together, plants and people highlighted in Movement Transmissions co-narrate histories of displacement, carcerality, and environmental racism as well as joys found in communities and solidarity-building.

Participants gathered in Carnegie Park on a blanket with colors made from avocados and black beans, woven on a four harness loom. Attendees were invited to soften a surface and inhabit the park, asking “Where do we go to be seen?”, “Where is the scene?”, “How do we cultivate these spaces while also holding space for safety/nurturing/self-preservation/protection?”, “Are there public spaces in St. Louis that resonate or are this for you?”

If these public spaces and languages for connection don’t fully exist, let’s talk about what they might be.

Participants joined at the corner of Cass Avenue and Jefferson Avenue for a guided public gathering of collective remembering at the site of a former billboard which claimed “The Most Dangerous Place for a Black Child is in a Womb.”

Dail and her friends repeatedly wheatpasted over it, took it down, and the Catholic Workers Movement billboard continued to be replaced over and over again. The corner is surrounded by the memories of the Pruitt-Igoe housing, as well as a new health center named for the Homer G. Phillips Hospital, the only public hospital to treat Black residents during segregation. Ailanthus trees, yellow dock, thistle and dandelions grow.

Daughter of all relations, Basmin Nadra weaves songs to sing as blessing and transcendence from here to there, above and below, melodies that hold the memory of the ways generations of her family have lived in St. Louis, been up and down Jefferson Avenue, been firsts here. Her songs locate ancestors both within and out of bloodlines whose knowledges of this place provide directions to share in the chorus for how to find what you are looking for but also how to find yourself, all while keeping the Mississippi River close. This performance was hosted by Intersect Arts Center.

Spreading out a woven blanket so that we can find each other here, with Xochitl Plancarte

There once was a billboard here, with Dail Chambers

Sonata for St. Louis, with Basmin Nadra

Program Images