Sultana Harris is a social practice artist and the Interim Executive Director of The Descendants Project’s Woodland Plantation Museum. Her professional interests foreground ecosystems and ecologies, and internal and external landscapes at the intersections of art, culture, somatics, and the psyche. She has curated and produced projects of large scale public art, horticulture, and film. Sultana has also participated as both presenter and panelist at arts conferences and professional development and cultural adaptation workshops. Her background in anthropology, psychotherapy, and cultural resource management allows her to articulate and navigate the precarious relationship of equity, solidarity, and collaboration while exploring Black creative processes in the visual and performing arts. Sultana has worked with organizations such as Holistic Resistance, Grief to Action, Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Xavier University of New Orleans’ Department of Psychology, the Gulf Coast Fellowship for Community Transformation and the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs. She serves as board Vice-President of the Seattle based nonprofit Color of Sound, which supports artists of color filmmakers creating film projects with an emphasis on social and environmental justice. Sultana stands in solidarity with the land, its travelers, and all earth-others.

This work is the somatics phase of an ethnographic art project nuancing the effects of land discrimination and the erasure of home and community while also exploring the tensions and negotiated intimacies that accompany it. The plan is to research and develop a somatic vocabulary and a container in which to ground the whole person so that a curriculum for moving, incorporating psychogeography and psycho-physicality, can be developed. Land, environment, and landscape will be utilized to help locate emotions, feelings, and thoughts and to assist in regulating the nervous system while addressing and confronting spaces that hold and perpetuate land violence – specifically the violence attached to encroachment, capitalist-urbanization, and disrupted ecosystems. In essence, revealing that colonizing space is not just a form of physical violence – it is emotional, mental, and spiritual violence as well. It is a silencing and limiting of movement and, therefore, a tool of power and oppression, and should be recognized as such. Providing a somatic vocabulary to identify this becomes communal technology to dismantle this internal invasion while simultaneously broadening how we think of violence, homemaking, and place-making.