Cultural memory interrupts and heals the erasures of our traditions. Cultural memory is our intergenerational memory that has been passed down for centuries and lives in our collective bodies —cells and bones transfused through our memories of our relationships to land, body and spirit.
We co-design cultural memory work that interrupts the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC). Reclaiming cultural memory is important to know our ancestral traditions of collective healing & care, survival, creation, and liberation.
Cultural Memory is intervening on the erasure of communities of colors cultural and ancestral practices as a weapon of colonization & genocide. For too long, hospitals, prisons, and detention centers, to name a few, have treated LGBTGNCQTSI, disabled and People of Color as expendable and used our bodies for experimentation. From forced sterilizations to non-consensual testing of therapies and drugs, to forced institutionalization of our communities’ medical and carceral institutions have been used to perpetuate white supremacist pathologies, misogyny, classism and ableism under the guise of care.
The co-optation and stealing of our cultural memory has impacted our communities’ psychic, spiritual, emotional, environmental, cultural and physical survival for generations, including those in the Global South, Black, Indigenous & People of Color (BIPOC) communities, people with disabilities, sex workers and people living in street survival economies, people who are incarcerated and institutionalized, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Two Spirit and Gender Non-Conforming, Queer, Intersex+ (LGBTTSGNCQI+) communities.
The MIC is inseparable from the Prison and Military Industrial Complex, which enforces medical experimentation, exploitation, testing and biological policing as an extension of racial capitalism.
We believe that true well-being must come from community-led infrastructures and practices for collective care and safety that must be rooted in place and in relationships to local communities and conditions.
