Flowers in the Basement (FITB) is the name of both a project and a collective consisting of Kite, Mel Elberg, Alisha B. Wormsley, Frances Ines Rodriguez, Tsedaye Makonnen, and Amy Ruhl formed to create new work and speculate on insurgent, utopian living. Using the “demon text” of second-wave feminism, The Dialectic of Sex (Shulamith Firestone, 1970), as a jumping off point, the project offers a contemporary, polyvocal response to revolutionary demands for gender abolition, artificial reproduction, nonmonogamy, child liberation, and “cybernetic communism.” Bringing together a group of core collaborators working in vast fields of inquiry — Afrofuturism; queer, speculative, intersectional and Marxist feminisms, Lakota epistemologies, and African migration narratives — their mode of collaboration forges collectivity while respecting the autonomy of each artists’ individual praxis. Their devising/scoring strategies for live performance range from traditional means of workshopping and improvisation to generating AI texts based on mutual input.
Inspired by multi-artist performance pieces including Every Ocean Hughes' "A Gay Bar Called Everywhere" and the collective, Courtesy the Artists,’ "Popular Revolt" (which Ruhl co-directed with Alexandro Segade), the project employs a variety show structure that includes both collaboratively generated performance as well as individually authored pieces by each contributor. Finding vast potential in this mode of collaboration—one that holds space for dissension within the collective and allows difference to flourish—the resulting evening-length performance will set the 1960s/70s variety show’s form, aesthetics and affect in entropy. The ensemble scenes start out hyperbolic and absurdist in tone: the cast play members of a nascent commune experimenting in alternative forms of human reproduction and child-rearing. Gradually, the performance sheds its original form and tone as each member steps out of the narrative to seriously ponder the future of kinship and social reproduction.