the title of our studio is an homage to June Jordan's poem "Moving Towards Home" published in her 1985 book, Living Room: New Poems by Thunder's Mouth Press. we love this still of June laughing (she had an iconic sense of humor) from A Place of Rage, directed by Pratibha Parmar (New York, NY: Women Make Movies, 1991).

an archival portrait of railway workers in the canton of Vaud from the 1920s. Switzerland is a place we are still coming into relation-with, as diasporic peoples. our sense of place is oriented by the train tracks to the northwest of our home, and the Lac Léman to the southeast. Lausanne—an hour away in train-time—is our favorite city to visit in Vaud. photograph by Eugène Würgler, Jura-Simplon Line, 1922, reprint ca. 1960s–1980s, Cantonal and University Library, Lausanne, Iconopôle — Vaud Iconographic Collection.

completed in 1963, this brutalist structure is the only North American building by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. the 3rd floor was home to our first shared studio space. we spent so much time on the communal black leather sofa—eating late-night Chinese takeout, editing films on the laptop, hand-molding ceramics—that we nicknamed it our 'living room'. the way that students inhabit this space and the experimental curriculums that circulate around its signature concrete columns, is an embodied counterpoint to the architect's vocal fascist ideologies. archival image of Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1961–1964), sourced from the CCVA website.

making living room is a material + metaphysical practice. making living room is a correspondence with intellectual/spiritual/familial ancestors. making living room is staying with the trouble.* making living room is a queer, feminist knowing-with. making living room is not a narrow preoccupation, it is a return to wholeness.**

*Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
**June Jordan, "Defining Black Feminism", The Women's Forum (Cambridge, MA, June 1985)
correspondence postcards designed by living room studio, may 2025.

archival activation: teachings that sustain engagement with intellectual ancestors across time + space. all of the symbols for our principles are hand-drawn, loosely inspired by the spirit-pattern-world-making of Haïtian vèvès.

relational worldmaking: collaboration through entanglement with humans + beyond-humans. ibid.

critical curiosity: research, thinking, and discernment that is perpetually in-process. ibid.