Southern Heat Exchange Values Black Lives

Southern Heat Exchange is a platform to lift the voices of Southern artists. Today, we lift the voices who are raised for justice. We mourn the devastating loss of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade. We seek to stay connected to this loss, to the actions being taken in their memory, to the outcry for change. We seek to hold space for artists as they capture, ignite, uplift, and unite during this moment of clarity and injustice. 

Below are examples of work from artists and writers we are inspired by and admire.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (fear eats the soul) (white flag), 2017

Image source: creativetime.org

“I believe the roots of most harm are systemic, and we must be willing to disrupt vicious systems that have been normalized….I believe that with time it must become an incredible pleasure to be able to be honest, expect to be whole, and to know that we are in a community that will hold us accountable and change with us.” 

“I believe that all organization is science fiction—that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.  I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations.  Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference.  Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality”

adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism

David Hammons Untitled (Body Print), 1974, Five Color Monotype on White Woven Paper, 21.5 x 22 inches

Image source: harvardartmuseums.org

"'Sister' is a verb...Sistering requires food.  It requires specific intentional foods that support our spirits...What happens if we replace the roles patriarchy has scripted us into with actions guided by what we want to create instead?  

…if we want to have a revolution, we have to craft revolutionary relationships…a revolution cannot be created by conforming to existing roles in relationships already defined by the systems we want to overthrow.  We have to practice creating new relationships."

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, "The Sweetness of Salt", Pleasure Activism, p 71