Ear to the Ground: Cultural Infrastructure from Below

Words of ethical intent signposting the activity of Invigotate Hough, 6500 Hough Ave, Cleveland, OH 44103.

Urban space is not a backdrop but an active participant in building reparative futures.

Before anything is built, we listen.

What if the future of public culture isn’t built from typical growth strategies, but from relation, care and refusal of erasure?

This is the ethos that grounds Ear to the Ground, a civic and cultural project working at the intersection of public memory, grassroots resilience and creative repair. Led by Naomi Lord, a reseacher at Bath Spa University (UK), and grounded in deindustrialised sites like Cleveland, Ohio, the project moves through walkshops, co-created archives, site-responsive installations and dialogic gatherings.

More than a programme or exhibition series, Ear to the Ground is a proposition: what if the future of public culture isn’t built from typical growth strategies, but from relation, care and refusal of erasure?

I. Listening to Place

Informed by Donna Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” and Doreen Massey’s understanding of space as a constellation of relations, Ear to the Ground begins with attention. The project resists the logic of revitalisation as spectacle. Instead, it treats streets, sidewalks, vacant lots and lived memory as pedagogical terrain.

Through guided walkshops, community story exchange and site-specific interventions, participants don’t just observe, they inhabit, recall and co-author. This is what Haraway (1988) calls situated knowledge, knowledge shaped through place, experience and relation. It’s not detached expertise. It’s lived methodology.

II. Infrastructure as Relationship

It’s slow. It’s co-authored. It often arises out of necessity and persists through care. And in a climate of cultural policy rollback and institutional contraction, it’s urgent.

What sustains culture in places where formal support has receded? Ear to the Ground explores what Zara Cantillon and Deborah Stevenson (2023) describe as distributed cultural infrastructure: informal, often invisible systems of exchange, support and creativity. Think of co-ops, informal print studios, community-run gardens, youth-led performance spaces or mobile oral history archives in converted ice cream trucks.

This infrastructure is not always legible to institutions. It’s slow. It’s co-authored. It often arises out of necessity and persists through care. And in a climate of cultural policy rollback and institutional contraction, it’s urgent.

Here, the influence of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics (2002) becomes tangible, not as theory alone, but as a method of making meaning through shared experience, gesture, and presence.

III. A Translocal Ethic

Though initiated in Cleveland, Ear to the Ground operates across a translocal network of post-industrial cities each responding differently to precarity and abandonment. These are not replica efforts, but entangled ones. Like Anna Tsing’s “contaminated diversity” (2015), the project thrives on shared conditions rather than uniformity.

In Berlin’s ZK/U (DE), artists build long-term civic gardens in a former freight station. In Manchester (UK) and Detroit (US), young people exchange zines and music as cultural and climate tactics.

Across all of these, public space becomes pedagogical, not a neutral canvas, but an active collaborator.

IV. More-than-Human Archives

The archive, too, expands in this work. It is not simply digital or textual, it’s ecological. Ear to the Ground recognises non-human actors (plants, soil, insects, weather) as essential participants in cultural memory and restorative action.

V. Refusal as Survival

Cultural work under these conditions is not neutral, it is an act of refusal. It insists on the presence of lived histories deemed discardable.

The political context cannot be ignored. In spring 2025, major cuts to public arts funding in the US directly targeted BIPOC and LGBTQ+ led projects. Cultural work under these conditions is not neutral, it is an act of refusal. It insists on the presence of lived histories deemed discardable.

This is where Ear to the Ground aligns with Achille Mbembe’s framing of necropolitics (2019): the ways states manage life through abandonment. Against this, the project does not attempt heroic rescue. It seeks to support activity that refuses erasure.

VI. A Living Curriculum

Ultimately, Ear to the Ground functions as what Paulo Freire (1970) might call a civic pedagogy. It is a curriculum of rust and resonance, of weeds and walkways, of story and soil. It values constraint. It values collective authorship. And it proposes that the future of public culture might be made not through acceleration, but through slowness, reciprocity and situated imagination.

To follow the project: Updates and documentation will appear on eartotheground.art and eartothegroundlab over the coming weeks, as A Paradise of Displacement for Ingenuity Fest 2025 unfolds as a public invite.