Built with listeners, thinkers, makers, doers and neighbours rooted in localities.
A counter-narrative project grounded in community power, memory and possibility, working against erasure.
EAR TO THE GROUND
A co-creative practice working with communities in Cleveland, OH to explore place, memory and participation.
Ear to the Ground is a project that supports community-led creative work and centres grassroots cultural initiatives. It brings people together within and across localities to build connections, share knowledge, and develop ways of working independent of traditional institutions.
PEOPLE & PLACE SPEAK
A co-creative practice rooted in place, where memory and possibility are lived.
WHAT WE DO: We work with people, in place, to gather stories, sound, images and voices often left out of official accounts, co-designing future possibilities and sharing skills through collective making and learning.
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.
HOW WE WORK: We ask questions. We invite responses. What we hear shapes what happens next. Through multi-arts, community-led processes, we bring people together to reflect on their lived experiences and imagine what comes next, using writing, sound, visual making, and shared activities to create space for reflection, exchange, and collective visioning. The work connects across localities and draws on counter-archiving, radical listening, psychogeography and co-creation.
WHAT'S HAPPENING NOW: Making Room is a participatory arts project in Cleveland, bringing theatre, sound and visual practice together to create a shared work with the St Clair-Superior community. This is an open, evolving archive. Your voice helps build it. Your story adds a new layer.
A co-creative practice rooted in place, where memory and possibility are lived.
WHAT WE DO: We work with people, in place, to gather stories, sound, images and voices often left out of official accounts, co-designing future possibilities and sharing skills through collective making and learning.
A co-creative practice rooted in place, where memory and possibility are lived.
WHAT WE DO: We work with people, in place, to gather stories, sound, images and voices often left out of official accounts, co-designing future possibilities and sharing skills through collective making and learning.
live photographic archive
Rustlight Radiance
Rustlight Radiance is a growing archive of field recordings and visual documentation from Greater Cleveland. It captures everyday change and resilience, holding memory, loss and transformation together.
Rustlight Radiance is a growing archive of field recordings and visual documentation from Greater Cleveland. It captures everyday change and resilience, holding memory, loss and transformation together.
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EAR TO THE GROUND is a public humanities project. It reimagines post-industrial places as spaces of care, creativity and shared making, using walkshops, workshops and counter-archiving to turn listening into collaboration and lived experience into culture. The following terms describe how the project works and what it stands for.
MASS WITNESS: When many people see, hold and speak what is happening, together.
REPARATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE: Structures that support repair, redistributing resource, voice and care.
COUNTER-ARCHIVE: A record of what is usually left out, produced by the people who live it.
COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION: Thinking forward together. Shaping what could be, not just what is.
PLACE-BASED PRACTICE: Work that begins with where we are, the histories, people and conditions of our places and spaces.
LISTENING: Paying attention to what is said, unsaid and overlooked. Responding carefully.
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.
