Built with listeners, thinkers, makers, doers and neighbours across constellations of cities.
A counter-narrative project rooted in community power, memory and possibility, resisting erasure.
EAR TO THE GROUND
Ear to the Ground is a platform that supports community-led creative work and helps share grassroots cultural voices. It brings people together across different places to build connections, share knowledge and develop ways of working that are independent of traditional institutions.
Through creative research, documentation and listening to people’s experiences, the work focuses on supporting cultural agency and helping communities shape their own futures. Current work is based in Greater Manchester, UK and across post-industrial cities in the USA.
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 — where spacetimemattering is lived and felt.
Ear to the Ground is a growing platform that listens closely to everyday life — to what is often overlooked, as well as what feels urgent and personal. Through stories, sound, images, poetry and place-based work, we gather what is often left out of official accounts — voices that risk being silenced or pushed aside.
We ask questions. We invite responses. What we hear shapes what happens next.
The project builds on long-term collaborative work across creative education, cultural practice and community-led development. It connects with others working across different places, especially where cultural life and education are under pressure or being reduced. It draws on approaches such as counter-archiving, radical listening, psychogeography and co-creation — ways of working that make space for reflection, resistance and action.
We want to understand how people reclaim cultural space and shape shared futures through care, creativity and resilience. We believe in the strength of grassroots cultural activity, and in listening as both a political and creative 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.
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 growing archive of field recordings and visual documentation from Greater Cleveland. It captures the everyday realities of change and resilience, creating a digital space where memory, loss and transformation are held together.
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 everyday observations across Cleveland and East Cleveland
EAR TO THE GROUND is a public humanities project rooted in Cleveland and connected to work in other cities. It reimagines post-industrial places as spaces of care, creativity and shared making, using walkshops, workshops and a digital archive 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: A shared form of storytelling where people shape the memory of their city through stories, images and reflections, inspired by Mass Observation but reworked as a participatory process.
URBAN IMAGINARIUM: A creative civic space, physical and digital, where people imagine and test new possibilities for their city.
REPARATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE: Everyday systems of care and cultural activity built within communities, supporting life beyond formal institutions.
SPACETIMEMATTERING: A concept developed by Karen Barad and informed by Doreen Massey, describing how space, time and matter are always connected and shaped through relationships rather than existing separately.
MORE-THAN-HUMAN: An idea that recognises agency and value beyond humans, including animals, plants, technologies and environments, and the interdependence between them.
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.
