BADS_Lab 2026: Maroon Infrastructures: Black Arts & Decolonial Sciences

Overview

BADS_lab (the Black Arts and Decolonial Sciences Laboratory) is a nomadic lab at the edges of art, research, and social practice. For five Sundays this past May, at the Land School, we convened a cohort of twenty creatives around the prospect of generating maroon infrastructures: community-built systems for communicating and cultivating, playful and usable now, resilient when centralized systems fail.

The gatherings centered on the building of a process germ bank, an experimental approach to preserving and sharing knowledge in its most nascent form. We invited each fellow to articulate small germs of their own creative practice: carryable seeds of ideas that other people in other contexts can grow in their own soil. Alongside, we drew inspiration from what was already germinating in the neighborhood around the Land School: the arrivant plants growing in the cracks and vacant lots of the South Side, the autonomous communications infrastructures we installed in the room, the questions surfacing from each fellow’s lifeworld. The repertoire that emerged will travel with us in August to São Paulo, and in November to Dar es Salaam.

Please join us on June 20 for an afternoon to engage with the experiment. The format will be a brief introduction to the lab, a round-table with the fellows reflecting on what they brought to the lab and what emerged through it, a short Q&A, and time to encounter the works in the room. Attendees will also receive a lab journal documenting the cohort’s process, including the germs produced, the texts that shaped the conversations, the exercises undertaken, and the questions that animated the work