Built with creative listeners, thinkers, makers, doers and neighbours across constellations of global cities.
A counter-narrative project rooted in community power, memory, possibility and refusal to be erased.
EAR TO THE GROUND
Ear to the Ground is an emergent platform for amplifying grassroots cultural resistance by supporting community-led artistic practices, building transnational solidarity networks and developing sustainable alternatives to institutional and state-controlled infrastructures. Through creative research, counter-archiving and radical listening, we work to generate and safeguard cultural agency and nurture resilient, self-determined futures.
SPACETIMEMATTERING
This project is shaped by people for people and the more-than-human, in the places and communities where we live, remember, resist and imagine.
Ear to the Ground is a growing platform that listens closely to the textures of everyday life: the ordinary and overlooked, the urgent and intimate. Through stories, sounds, images, poetry and place-based practice, we gather what is often excluded from official narratives — voices at risk of being silenced by cultural erasure or displaced by hostile policy environments.
We ask questions. We invite responses. What we hear guides what happens next.
Born out of long-standing collaborative practice and interdisciplinary research, Ear to the Ground builds on work in creative education, cultural agency and community-led cultural development. The project draws from and contributes to transnational solidarity networks, particularly in response to politically repressive climates and the erosion of inclusive, critical educative practices, contexts where investments in cultural life and public education are rescinded atop long histories of exclusionary disinvestment. It is grounded in methodologies of counter-archiving, radical listening, psychogeography and co-creation practices that make space for resistance, reflection, and action.
Our aim is to understand how people reclaim cultural space and shape shared futures through care, creativity and resilience. We believe in the power of grassroots cultural infrastructures to outlast institutions and in the necessity of listening as a political and poetic act.
This is an open, evolving archive. Your voice helps build it. Your story adds a new layer.
Ear to the Ground is a collaborative, place-based platform that listens to everyday life: its overlooked textures, urgent stories and silenced voices. Through creative practices like storytelling, sound and image-making, it gathers what’s often left out of official narratives.
Rooted in community, care and cultural resistance, it supports grassroots action and reclaims space through radical listening and co-creation. This living archive is a movement that grows with each voice and story shared.
Get together
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Summer 2025
Be part of A Paradise of Displacement at Ingenuity Fest 2025 — a civic installation built from memory, invention, and the everyday. Created by and for the public, it invites all to contribute to the experience of a shared, living archive.
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September 2025
Explore and engage with civic expressions of collective imagination.
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Winter 2026
Following the sensory momentum of the fall, the new year marks a turn inward—toward grounding, reflection, and the deliberate cultivation of sustainable practices.
Spring 2026
Possibility is cumulative. As the Clv project enters a full annual cycle, this iteration is a return with new eyes and new positions.
Equality Before the Law: 'While mutal aid might seem like a shiny new phrase of online activism, its history as a concept is lengthy and diverse. Mutual aid asks that when you see a need in your community, you offer resources to the people with lived intimate need and not necessarily to entrenched power structures. Mutual aid embraces how real work for change must shift both our assumptions of whose authority matters and where resources reside.'
MANY HANDS MAKE A QUILT — JESS BAILEY (2024)
live photographic archive
Rustlight Radiance
Rustlight Radiance is a permanent, evolving repository of field recordings and visual documentation from Greater Cleveland. It preserves the textures of decline and the frequencies of resistance, offering a digital space where memory, entropy and transformation coexist.
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Rustlight Radiance is a permanent, evolving repository of field recordings and visual documentation from Greater Cleveland. It preserves the textures of decline and the frequencies of resistance, offering a digital space where memory, entropy and transformation coexist.
Rustlight Radiance is a permanent, evolving repository of field recordings and visual documentation from Greater Cleveland. It preserves the textures of decline and the frequencies of resistance, offering a digital space where memory, entropy and transformation coexist.
a living archive of situated observations of Cleveland and East Cleveland
EAR TO THE GROUND is a public humanities project rooted in Cleveland and resonating globally. It reimagines post-industrial cities as spaces of care and co-creation, using walkshops, workshops and digital archives to turn listening into collaboration and survival into culture. The following key terms help frame the ethos and methodology of the project, grounding its practice in shared language and intention.
MASS WITNESS: A participatory form of testimony where residents co-author urban memory through stories, images and reflections. This idea riffs on the spirit of early UK sociology, particularly Mass Observation, but shifts to a participatory form of testimony where residents co-author urban memory through stories, images and reflections.
URBAN IMAGINARIUM: A creative civic space — physical and digital — for rehearsing alternative futures of the city.
REPARATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE: Grassroots systems of care and culture that sustain life and meaning beyond formal institutions.
SPACETIMEMATTERING: Coined by Karen Barad and informed by Doreen Massey’s work on relational space and time. A concept that fuses space, time and matter into a single, inseparable process of becoming. Drawing from Barad’s quantum feminist theory and Massey’s relational geography, spacetimemattering emphasises that entities do not pre-exist their relations but emerge together through dynamic interactions—social, material and temporal. It challenges fixed notions of space, linear time and passive matter, highlighting instead their entangled, co-productive nature.
MORE-THAN-HUMAN: A concept that expands agency, value and subjectivity beyond humans to include animals, plants, technologies and environments. It challenges human-centred thinking by recognising the interdependence and co-agency of human and nonhuman life.
An open invitation to connect & co-create.
Join us as a member and stay close to the hum of what's emerging.
As part of the network, you'll be first to hear about workshops, gatherings, provocations, and opportunities to shape the work.
