Cultivating Homeland(ing) owes part of its moniker (and it’s conceptual basis) to the beautiful words in the collaborative publication for Rheim AlKadhi’s exhibition ‘Templates for Liberation.’ Having focused on this exhibition in my master’s disserttaion — particualrly aorudn abolitionist politics of refusal embodied in Alkadhi’s withdrawal from the ICA in solidairty with ICA worker’s stirke — I wanted to make sure I at least had a material copy of what the exhibition stood for and against, and what it is trying to tell us about refusing to be folded back into the institution’s complacency and about autonomous practice.

I was moved when reading Kali Rubaii’s chapter on ‘…,’ and particuarly on the idea of ‘homelanding’ as the process in which repair is pursued by affected and damaged bodies in order to return to the homeland, using methods and praxes that subvert the ‘master’s tools’ as articulated in Audre Lorde’s reverberant essay. This way of thinking on repair and liberation, as approachable through material practice, amalgamated with my thoughts from an essay I was writing on the ‘form’ of collective life and naming the components that make a communal infrastructure. It was from here, and many other little epiphanies compounding together, that I