Welcome.

There are few living platforms at Colgate that bring people together to find voice and speak life from the margins. This limits our individual and collective abilities, as members of the Colgate community, to understand how each other’s struggles, passions, and the expression of these struggles and passions, are inherently linked to others, and instrumental in shaping our entire lives. Collective Breathing (learn more here) is a space where unheard contemporary voices from the Colgate community  engage in a collaborative process of breathing life into our stories for ourselves and the wider Colgate community.


As a member of Collective Breathing I, Sharon Nicol, designed a companion independent study entitled Collective Breathing: The Making and Memory of a Feminist Art/Performance Collective. This blog is the home of my work in the course and an archive of my experiences within the collective.


The Collective Breathing course is centered around three major themes—Shaping(Making), Telling(Living), Remembering(Archiving). These themes exist as a framework for the present collective and future generations. Shaping the Collective Breathing project involves developing the vision for the current collective, understanding who is part of the vision, and determining how the vision will be realized. Telling the project means executing the vision, whether it be a communal creative space and/or an end-of-semester performance. Telling is not only about the end-product, but all that exists between. Remembering the project focuses on how a project’s herstory is preserved for those involved and future generations. Remembering is in conversation with content and medium, asking what do participants want to be remembered and how? These processes can occur simultaneously, at varying lengths, out of order, and sometimes not at all, yet having engaged with other models that uptake such a structure and in recording the collective’s experiences with these themes as they happen, we will be better able to return to order/the vision if there are any missteps during the process, and better contextualize our outcomes post-vision. Through this blog, I will document my reflections as I move through the Collective Breathing syllabus (which can be viewed here, along with the independent study proposal) 


This is my attempt at remaining accountable and transparent with my own thoughts and further humanizing the process myself and fellow collective breathers are engaged in, for generations to come. I am imperfect, and I recognize the value of sharing the imperfections of the building process in order to sustain this work.

I welcome feedback and hope that you will stay engaged throughout our journey. Please visit the larger Collective Breathing Blog/Archive that will feature voices of the whole group.



Thursday 6 April 2017

The Making of A Womxn of Color Archival Collection

I find you in folders and boxes stored away
Were you waiting for me?
Because I have been dreaming of you and your stories
Were you dreaming about me and my friends?
Were you thinking of us when asked for Black and Gay?
Were you thinking of yourselves and just how badd you were/are?
-Excerpt from "The Archive -- Poetry in the Finding blog post by Dr. Kai M. Green

I was told that we were not worthy of being remembered, that past students, staff, and faculty who look like me never did anything worthy of remembering. Our position in Colgate's institutional memory is limited and rarely from our perspective. 
Yet every time a history of our impact on this campus is uncovered, and every time my peers and myself carry out radical work that calls the nature of this campus and its neglected responsibilities to us into question, I am asked to challenge the erasures that plague the history of women of color's impact on this institution. As Collective Breathing adds to the history of women of color creating space for our voices to be heard , the question of memory becomes more personal than it has ever been. I do not know what the future of Collective Breathing will be, but as a founding member I am invested in ensuring that our existence is not erased or untraceable. I want future members of Collective Breathing to know that the collective was created with them in mind. Today, I do dream of the women of color in class years to come. I want them to feel empowered to share their stories, knowing that someone who came before them cares, even if the realities of their present moment do not offer the same level of care. 

 This semester, I have worked to create a Womxn of Color collection in the University Archives. If you would like to know more about the project, you can find the vision statement here. If you are a current or past womxn of color at Colgate and would like to be part of the collection, please email me at sevelynwrites@gmail.com 
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