Zeelie Brown’s first art museum was the pine woods in Alabama. They make Black&queer wilderness refuges called “soulscapes” to (re)imagine what nature might be. Zeelie works with the MIT Department of Architecture, NOMAS, and Group Project to create sustainable human waste solutions in their native rural Alabama.

While in residence, Zeelie worked on Little Creole Gardens, which aims to tend a revolutionary front of Black wilderness that rages against the tide of white greed threatening to drown our world. To that aim, they spent six weeks designing a Creole liberation wild garden — via research in New Orleans’ wealth of Gulf South visual and material culture archives, providing a solid groundwork for future acts within a Creole survival aesthetic.

Photos by Zen Omi.