Convened by Blair Smith at University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign and Ruth Nicole Brown at Michigan State University

Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) Studio: A Collaboratory of Resonance for Respiriting our  Wildest Dreams builds on SOLHOT’s Whiting Award-winning initiative, Black Girl Genius Week to elevate one of the week’s signature events: SOLHOT Studio. During SOLHOT studio participants are invite to dream, create, and record music based on a process of music making and listening developed by SOLHOT’s band, We Levitate. We Levitate was created in a moment of collective rupture that asked those who remained dedicated to the praxis of celebrating Black girlhood to listen to their heats, spirits, minds, and souls for what was next in our praxis and to share and record what emerged as words and sounds needing to be witnessed by each other. At the time, we didn’t intentionally know we were making music but rather it felt more like we were sounding out our dreams for ourselves, our work, and SOLHOT’s future. This process got so good to us, we named ourselves a band and begin sharing out music publicly, as art and scholarship via soundcloud. Our music making and sounding out respirited all involved.  

Sound, listening and music making have become the preferred way for SOLHOT to organize ourselves,  girls and homegirls with whom we work. However, due to pandemic conditions, personal and  professional aspirations, band members and SOLHOT homegirls currently live in different places and our desire to connect is often impeded by obligations of daily survival. Furthermore, this time on the clock of the world has negatively impacted our most cherished dreams and desires.  

We propose to host a series of SOLHOT Studio sessions for the purpose of respiriting our wildest dreams in SOLHOT while also creating conditions for collaboration based on shared resonance created during the studio session with all invited. Through ritual, space-making, and collective art-making, SOLHOT has cultivated living archives where Black girls and those who love them practice genius as relational and sonic freedom-making under the duress of survival. These collective songs and studio experiences, as we know from lived experience, move with the improvisational, relational, and unpredictable qualities so wild that collaborative possibilities not only emerged but are taken up in joyfully quantum and collaborative ways we could have never predicted!