In Conditions of Fresh Water is a multimedia history project that aims to collect the oral histories of historic black towns and communities in North Carolina and Alabama, specifically the communities of Buckhorn, Perry Hill, White Level, West End (Alamance County), and the town of White Hall, AL (Lowndes County). The project has four goals:
- To record the histories of communities in Alamance and Lowndes Counties through interviews, visual data collection and neighborhood visits.
- To understand current environmental conditions in the communities through their histories.
- To imagine the future of these communities, using the lessons of history, and the desires of community members.
- To create new space, both physical and virtual, for communities to connect to one another.
Visual artist Torkwase Dyson will partner with Danielle Purifoy, a lawyer and Duke University Nicholas School Ph.D candidate studying racialized spaces and environmental inequality in the American South. Dyson and Purifoy will be joined by two community-based collaborators: Omega Wilson, a native of Alamance County, North Carolina and founder of the West End Revitalization Association, and Catherine Flowers, a native of Lowndes County, Alabama, and founder of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise.
More information can be found here: arts.duke.edu/artsjournal/taking-environmental-legacy-racism
