“There isn't a challenge of our time that isn't somehow fundamentally tied to land, whether it's what we do with land, whether it's how we treat it, or constitute it or chop it down, all of the things come back to the relationship to land.”
Amahra Spence, MAIA
Hood Ventures
Ladywood, Birmingham
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Amahra
Our Why
In 2023, when Birmingham City Council filed Section 114, effectively declaring itself bankrupt, we braced ourselves. Having already faced a surge of insecure housing tenure and the managed decline of local social and cultural services and infrastructure, our community was anticipating further loss. In the months following last year’s announcement, the council committed 100 per cent arts cuts, and started the process to sell off its assets, beginning with the civic and social infrastructures that have been critical to the livelihoods, health and wellbeing of the people living there.
Our Idea
Our proposed project challenges the defaults, not only of who gets to access space, but who gets to be the custodians and decision makers of said space - can the cultural infrastructures of a place be determined, shaped and tended to by the life that exists there? Currently, we are working to acquire two local sites, a former stables building and a former school house and aim to bring them into Black-led community stewardship. With Hood Ventures to act as the custodian and risk-holder, transferring land from private commodity to community resource that supports capacities for rootedness and self-determination.
Long-term, our intentions are to test the feasibility of a Black Commons, interrogating how a diasporic network of Black space-makers, land-workers and custodians could collectively govern a set of community assets beyond borders.
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About
Amahra will constitute her new organisation to usher land out of the private speculation market into a community-based entity, held in trust and perpetuity. Growing in confidence, opening up pathways to think critically and be connected with peers navigating similar challenges.
MAIA
MAIA’s vision is a world towards liberation, in which artists are resourced and mobilised to reimagine its possibilities. Their mission is to grow capacity for collective world-building, where Black imagination and culture are lenses to explore how we get free.