Ọmọlará Williams McCallister
Ọmọlará collaborates with people and plants to create art-based experiences that instigate conversations around how communities cultivate cultures of collective power and care while navigating the everyday violences of systemic oppression.
Ọmọlará is committed to stewarding ancestral craft traditions and the indigenous lands that beloved occupies. Ọmọlará blends TEK(traditional ecological knowledge); with obsolete tech (hand looms, 17th century machines); with digital tech. TEK teaches beloved to collaborate with nature. Obsolete tech teaches beloved to use beloved’s body to transform local resources into art materials. Digital tech enables love to collaborate across time and space; to archive resources for remembering & resilience.
Omọlará Williams McCallister, ISO: Higher Ground
Miami is in Crisis.
Climate Crisis: flooding, extreme heat, decreased biodiversity
Housing Crisis: mass forced displacement, overdevelopment, affordable housing shortage, criminalization of homelessness
Social Crisis: isolation, third space shortage
We are perpetually in search of higher ground. Literal higher ground where we can escape flooding. Also, metaphorical higher ground, places where we can safely access resources for resilience, support, rest and ease.
ISO: Higher Ground combines ArcGIS mapping, traditional ecological knowledge(TEK) and old-world tech to provide art-making experiences where we reconnect with each other and the land while mapping the spaces of high ground–the resources for resilience– in our communities.