2022 was a very big year for the ANANSI project. Though our philosophy and praxis has been percolating and we’ve been working towards these goals as individuals for a long time, this year marked an evolution for us in that it was the first time we really began to work together—first in small groups and partnerships, and now as a larger more cohesive body. Though we did not officially come together under the banner of ANANSI until the fall, 2022 was filled with group explorations of a pan-African approach to a holistic philosophy of distribution that ultimately served the same goal of creating a commons and establishing a caring praxis of collective organizing for Black artists based around the world. 

Building from the momentum of the collective decision making that a few of us helped facilitate in 2021 with the TCHNO community and conversations with other ad hoc and semi-formal collectives in Nairobi, a group of seven of us (Monrhea, Branice, Nabalayo, Sayankah, Rabudi, Emmaus, and Kadallah) began meeting regularly to incubate a Nairobi based art cooperative. During the months that we met, we conducted many team building and visioning exercises to get to the heart of what it is that we wanted to create together and define how we wanted to interact and work with each other. This culminated in a consensus exercise where we defined what our tech stack would look like for how we would conduct our work. 

After a few months of meeting mostly online, this arrangement of people paused our collaboration together, but continued to maintain the 1-1 relationships that were started and cultivated during that time. During this pause, Mia and Kadallah collaborated with the City of Seattle to produce Dreaming Black Futures, a series of workshops and lectures exploring Afrofuturism. Through this process, we created a ton of resources including lesson plans explaining the history of the movement, collective meditations based on the principles of Kwanzaa, and exercises for dreaming as an active liberatory practice. This collaboration also generated the ANANSI figma map, a visual aid for the oral storytelling of a narrative that weaves explanations of the Anansi divine spirit and folkloric character, the history of Black philosophies of distribution, and our current socio-political age of vectoralism together, ultimately giving our somewhat esoteric philosophy more concrete form. Additionally, we established an Infrastructure Fund, from which we facilitated a collective budgeting exercise with Black employees of the City of Seattle’s IT department, enabling them to allocate the funds within their community as they saw fit. 

Following Dreaming Black Futures, Kadallah began to plan ARC: MVP in collaboration with The Music Center as a means of creating an event that would embody the ANANSI principles in such a way that participants and producers alike could live out the philosophy and praxis that underpins our work. Unfortunately, systemic constraints on the project led to the project being produced in a much more centralized way than what we’d originally envisioned, ultimately leading to the project being put on pause. However, the collaboration still proved to be incredibly generative: Nardja and Kadallah began to experiment and create documentation around tele-performance, Pola was able to get us set up on Open Collective and set the foundation for future projects in LA by establishing relationships with vendors and artists in the area, and The Music Center paid us $25,000 that ultimately went towards paying out people involved in the process and seeding our financial commons for future projects. 

Since The Music Center collaboration, we have begun meeting regularly, making an explicit effort to cross-pollinate the communities that had up until this point been working separately in primarily geographically defined silos. We’ve conducted both synchronous and asynchronous consensus decision making, allocated $13,000 using collective budgeting techniques, and started to work towards defining a protocol that can govern our collective and commons without a hierarchical power structure. On our last call, we had members join in from Nairobi, Bali, Hervás, and Los Angeles in our virtual gather.town hang out space. 

We accomplished a lot in 2022! We worked on three large, distinct projects together, conducted many consensus and collective budgeting exercises, began the process of putting our vision to paper together, and most importantly, we’ve begun building real friendships across our network rather than just work-like connections.
 
Most directly, we used funds to pay out contributors to The Music Center project. On a higher level, we used funds to prove out the power of collective budgeting by allocating over $10,000 together. From these funds, we set aside money to continue the project we’d begun with The Music Center and established a financial commons of money for art experiments and financial security for collective members. We also implemented (and thus set precedent for) a “reparations bonus” to help correct the growing wage gap between Black and white workers.
 

During 2022, we experienced much joy as well as some hardship. With the initial Nairobi art cooperative, we were particularly challenged by keeping up the pace of our collaboration when all of us had to work other jobs in order to keep food on the table, as well as the unexpected year long displacement of Kadallah from Kenya which led to the primarily online organizing of the group. From this experience, we began to understand the importance of creating a porous collective of people that allows for voluntary action rather than imposing strict structures around required participation as well as developed a much better understanding of what sort of care praxis is needed for people to continue to feel connected even while physically distant. We also learned about the need to distribute not just power but responsibility in order to avoid burnout.
 
From The Music Center collaboration, we learned about the importance of fully showing up as yourself even when working with institutions or individuals that hold more power than you. Going into the project, we knew that the biggest challenge working with The Music Center would be the centralization inherent to one of the largest performing arts centers in the world. In the process, we tried to adapt and fit into their existing structures in order to learn as much as we could about what goes into this sort of large-scale collaboration. However, after this iteration of the project came to a close, we felt that as stewards of the ANANSI philosophy we have an obligation to shake things up, just as our trickster name sake would. The question isn’t just “what can we learn and gain from The Music Center,” but also “how can we challenge the existing power structures, such that the institution walks away from our collaboration changed for the better?”
 

2023 is going to be a big year for ANANSI. On January 21st, we’ll be hosting our first semi-public event where we will premiere our series of online art parties that act as a means of both collaborating with other artists around the world, as well as a time-space for members of the ANANSI collective to discuss anything that needs to be talked about in live conversation. There is a plan bubbling up to host the next iteration of The Music Center tele-performance project in the first quarter of the year, and a sequel to Dreaming Black Futures is in the works featuring a more distributed approach to the workshops and lecture series from this year’s programming. We’re also in the beginning stages of defining the protocol that governs the collective and commons (including our process for collective decision making and a rotating responsibility structure), and we plan to implement the consensus we’d established in early 2022 around tech stack, so this upcoming year will be a lot of dogfooding, stretching, and adjusting.