the UN-[TITLED] Oral History series
(an ongoing engagement)
The UN-[TITLED] Oral History series is an ongoing testimonial work in community, with the Seattle recordings to be preserved by Black Heritage Society of Washington State.
Thank you to our guests who offered their personal experiences for this series, to Black Heritage Society of WA for being the space of preservation for this project, and to you - for taking the time to listen to these testimonies from citizens and residents of Seattle.
Oral History Participants (as of March 2023)
Maisha Barnett, TraeAnna Holiday, Ruby Holland, C. Davida Ingram, Gloria Jackson-Nefertiti, Maria Kang, Brandi Li, Karen Akada Sakata, Jazmyn Scott, Stacy Torres, Laurie Wilson, and JM Wong.
Audio recordings and production made possible through the Artist Residency Programs at Jack Straw Cultural Center.
The Oral History series so far engages Seattle residents as part of the UN-[TITLED] project. It is a space of reflection on where we all fit on the spectrum of gentrification, and the shifting story of home in Seattle.
Each installment bears witness to changes experienced by everyday people, their friends and their families, the impact on their street blocks, their memories, and their sense of place. Together they illustrate that much of urban development seen today is capital driven and not people centered, and undeniably contributes to visible displacements and rising rates of unhoused people in King Country and throughout the Greater Seattle area. These stories, rants, and reports offer a compass of be/longing, and serve as a vessel of memory-keeping and memory-making for displaced communities.
SHUTTLE PERFORMANCE ROUTES + SOUNDTRACKS
As part of the immersive series of performance offerings, audience participants experience a roundtrip journey with shuttle pick up in Central District, to INScape in Chinatown International District, then returning for their experience at Wa Na Wari in Central Disrict before going home. Our guests travel along routes intentionally charted to coincide with our project geographies: its maps and places we learn about from community members. The ride featured soundtracks/soundmappings edited specifically for the journey, which was also shared as part of the 2024 Jack Straw Cultural Center podcast series “Story-keeping”.
the UN-[TITLED] project holds a series of offerings that aims to expose the realities of housing insecurities, community dispersion, and cultural erasure caused by rapid urban developments. This collaborative work also looks to powerful organizing actions of community resistance and reclamation in this face of these challenges. The geographic focus of the UN-[TITLED] project is in, and at the intersection of Central and Chinatown International Districts, and is informed by the witnessing and embodied knowledge of people who currently reside or formerly lived in these spaces.
Oral History series in full
Listen here
UN-[TITLED] is a project of i.ma.gine | e.volve®