Bloc is a trans-disciplinary social practice and community-centered art project linking poetry, movement, soundscape, storytelling, performance and education. It is also simply a practice of circling a place and noticing everything.
In partnership with the Marian Cheek Jackson Center and UNC’s Department of Geography and Environment, Culture Mill has worked with UNC faculty and students to examine oral history archives from Chapel Hill’s historically Black Northside neighborhood. Drawing on voices articulating community flourishing and imaginations past, present and future, artists R. Stein Wexler, Cortland Gilliam, Caitlyn Swett and Tommy Noonan have rendered archival fragments into an artistic map of a single city block at the threshold of Northside, downtown Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
This map, which lives in the form of a linked poem, soundscape, installation and walking score, is meant to provide an alternative way to experience and understand a place understood through the transformative work done by the Northside Neighborhood Initiative, a broad-based partnership effort by neighbors to control the dirt in Northside so that residents might determine the future of the neighborhood directly. Bloc celebrates this grassroots work and considers how it might be scaled more broadly.
On April 5th and 6th from 1 to 5 pm, audiences and community members will be invited to experience the first iteration of Bloc. The installation can be visited free of charge, any time during the opening hours, though registration is appreciated.
Culture Mill’s collaboration “Bloc” is presented as part of Southern Futures at Carolina Performing Arts in partnership with The Marian Cheek Jackson Center and the UNC Department of Geography and Environment with support from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. This project is supported by the North Carolina Arts Council, A Division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Initial project development was supported thanks to an artist support grant from the Durham Arts Council, local grants administrator.
