Remembering the Dirt: Attunement, Residue, Salvage

Introduction by Cannach MacBride, editor
I first encountered Ash Arder’s practice in a long voice message co-editor Taraneh Fazeli sent me, in which she lovingly described the outdoor event “Shelter,” organized by Midnight Care Collective — a Black feminist transformative justice creative collective in Detroit, currently under the care of saylem mississippi celeste and Triniti (iii) — as part of their “Handle with Care” series in 2023. The event was a community effort to honor ancestors and create home together — with a library of local zines, and artworks and performances by bree gant, DAAY, Venusloc, saylem m. celeste, and Ash Arder — that took place on the plot of land that’s described in this conversation. Ash Arder’s sculpture Whoop House (2022), a solar-powered sound sculpture that can run musical playback and recording equipment, offered the infrastructure for performances to happen. At once a stage, a sound system, seating, and a community archive, Whoop House diffracts the directionality of listening, sounding, and performance into a form of shelter for gathering, for intentional generosity, protection, and community. Taraneh described the integration that came while listening to Venusloc sing from Whoop House while the sky opened up into cleansing rain and pulled people close under shelter, as if in appreciation of the community ritual.

Ash Arder’s practice is resonant and care-full. They attend to archives; they build prototypes; they listen with care to plants and the earth and music and people’s stories; they make space for Black togetherness. Whoop House is but one example of their materially diverse, rich, and sensitive practice; yet, in its attention to the social, the vegetal, the sonic, the weather, and the soil and stone of ground, and in its commitment to engineering as an everyday craft to be understood alongside other everyday crafts like storytelling or seed saving or friendship, it was a beautiful introduction.

For this issue of Shift Space, Ash Arder and Alexis Pauline Gumbs had a conversation via Zoom on March 11, 2025. They talked about ancestors, artifacts, and soil; listening to materials and being with them as they transform; mechanics and medicine; residue, salvage, remembering, repair; staying grounded in the dirt; attuning.

The transcript has been lightly edited for print. The audio version of this text is the original audio. Here and there, the two versions diverge slightly, but they arrive in the same place in the end.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs
So, who are you dedicating today’s conversation to?

Ash Arder
Today, I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad, who is an ancestor. He was a huge gardener. This time of year, he would always be planning his garden and starting seeds in the house. I always think of him as spring is starting to arrive; he’s been on my mind a lot lately and sending signals to me and my sibling. So, Milton Arder is with us today.

Alexis
Oh, wonderful. I’ve really been thinking about my dad, too — Clyde Gumbs — who’s also an ancestor. I always remember him saying, “Okay, let’s go beam in and be with the brothers and sisters in Detroit.” And I’m like, “Well, now I’m beaming. I’m beaming to you in Detroit.”

Ash
Absolutely.

Alexis
Just that sense of connection, you know? I appreciate that one of the things he taught me was that we are connected. We are connected to the folks everywhere. So yeah, bringing him here.

Ash
I love that. I love being in Detroit because it feels like Black people just know what’s up. Even if you haven’t been here, you know, it’s just a gathering space for all — maybe not all, but much — of the African diaspora in a way that feels so genuine, you know.

Alexis
Yeah, it’s a vibrational reality.

Ash
Okay, welcome to the kitchen. I don’t love these little white people on these posters behind us, but, you know, here we are.

Alexis
[laughs]

Ash
And let me show you this other problematic thing just while we’re here. We might as well do a show and tell. I don’t know what this means [gestures to poster]: “Coffee makes you black.”

Alexis
You know, April Sinclair had a book called Coffee Will Make You Black a long time ago. I think she published it in the 1990s. She was drawing on this colorist saying that Black people would tell each other, “Don’t drink coffee, coffee will make you black.” In her book, a person had to get free of that, obviously. But I never heard that saying. I mean, I don’t know. We didn’t really drink coffee at all in my family, but I don’t think it was because of that — I think it was more of a West Indian thing. So, that is the only origin I know of it, as a colorist statement, I assume from light-skinned people trying to stay light-skinned or something — I don’t know.

Ash
Okay, so let me be honest about how today has gone. Basically, I was at my house in the beautiful, natural sunlight. I live near the water in Detroit, a couple of blocks away from the river and this really beautiful place called Belle Isle. I don’t know if you were able to go there.

Alexis
Oh yeah, I’ve been to Belle Isle.

Ash
I live really close, maybe a ten-minute bike ride away. I was all set up, had my little treats, my decaf coffee, right? Because I’m not really on coffee these days, but I love the ritual of the decaf. And then my neighbors decided to demolish their back…

My neighborhood has a bunch of old houses, so people have carriage homes in the backs of their yards because you would historically enter through the alley. And yeah, they just decide they’re going to demolish that right now, so I was like, okay, this is not going to work. This beautiful environment is not the setting for this conversation, unfortunately. So I got in the car and went over to my studio, which is a warehouse building that used to be a site for building tractors and cars, right, and now it’s artists’ studios. I came here, got set up, it was a little quieter. And then the Wi-Fi started being tricky.

So I’m like, okay, well, it is a coworking building, there are conference rooms. The conference room I was going to use was full, of course, and so I was like, well, all right, let’s try to do it back in my studio. And obviously, the Wi-Fi was not functioning well in there. So now, having arrived back into this kitchen space with this “Coffee makes you black” moniker and uncomfortable portraits of white people I don’t know surrounding me, I’m trying to find the lesson in this journey for the day. You know?

Alexis
What is the lesson? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well… Who knows? Who knows?

Ash
Maybe the lesson is just that I’ve been re-familiarizing myself with some of your texts. It’s been a long time since I was looking at M Archive in particular. And maybe, if there’s something there, it’s just the general discomforts of associating greatness with the bounds of the reality of these bodies, right, when it’s actually so much more massive than that. I wrote: “Species at the edge of its integrity. Beyond human.” Maybe that’s it.

Alexis
Well, this question of home… I think that the possibility of home is really a question. And it’s certainly a practice, right? Like the homefulness of your coffee ritual, your windows, your setup. But I do think about it as this enduring throughline of a Black feminist question older than the words “Black feminism”: What are the conditions of livability? What’s a generative context for us to be able to be together? I mean, to me, that seems like the project, it seems like the question, and it has to be that, because it’s interrupted in all of these ways. So, it’s interesting, you know, that there’s hints of the colonialism, the anti-Blackness, even internalized anti-Blackness, and what I assume is the property improvement that your neighbors are engaged in, the engagement with space as property. All of those are things that have been interrupting our homefulness for centuries, but not completely stopping us from still being able to access homefulness all these centuries, also.

Ash
You know, we started this conversation with, “How are you?” and I hadn’t included all of that backstory in my initial response, right? It was kind of the CliffsNotes version. And then I had to come clean with a “No, for real.” I think there is something there with maybe taking the cool off, or the cloak off, for a moment, allowing myself to be seen, because that isn’t always easy. I don’t think I particularly enjoy being seen by everybody, you know? Like, I really only want to be legible to those energies that I feel might perpetuate my — our — survival.

Alexis
Right. Yeah. Which makes sense. Totally makes sense.

Ash
So, there’s some tension there for me, I think, in things like this, where it’s an award or acknowledgement of the work that I’m doing, or the process and practice that I’ve cultivated, which ultimately is not for anybody. It’s not for everybody, I’ll say. It starts off really just being because I have a lot of questions, and making — like a tactile way of asking — is just super natural to me. So there’s a buildup of residue or evidence of processes that I’ve gone through that people want to put in institutions or in exhibitions, and I think I’m still warming up to the idea that my experiments actually produce artifacts or relics. I think of it as residue often… I don’t think of residue negatively. Yeah, it’s fascinating to me that people are like, “Oh, what about this thing over here?”

And I’m like, “That dirt on the ground?”

“Yeah, what about that?”

And I’m like, “Oh, this is what it came from.”

It’s been a really fascinating six, seven, eight years of just learning what to keep and what to give away, and feeling more comfortable on stages and platforms where the conversations are often the kind that put technology in a positive light, that think it’s the thing that’s going to save us. It’s fascinating to be in and out simultaneously.

Alexis
Well, it definitely resonates. I mean, most of my residue is textual, but I do think this question of what to keep, what to share — it comes up. Right now, listening to you, I’m thinking about the difference between when it’s textual and when it’s material, you know? Like, I can, in a certain way, keep it and give it away or share it. And then it’s reproducible, so I can share it infinite times. Certain forms that you work in are digital, certain forms that you work in — the photographic — are reproducible. But certain forms you work in are not — it’s a singular artifact, which may have a specific relationship to place that can’t be reproduced if it’s moved to another space.

Ash
There’s this thing — a process, a practice — that I’ve recently started, which has been really fascinating to me. I don’t think I just started this process… I think I’m now thinking about it as part of my creative practice. It’s digging in the dirt and playing in the dirt and, you know, remembering the dirt. I spend a lot of time in archives, trying to understand either industrial processes and histories or ecological ones. Recently I was creating a project inspired by George Washington Carver, and I was looking at war vessels that were named for him — there were two in the US government — and with these war vessels, I was learning about the rituals that warships get. They get a whole baptism, complete with godmothers!

Alexis
Oh, wow.

Ash
And the godmothers of these two different ships, one was Lena Horne and the other was Marian Anderson. So, we have this ancestor, George Washington Carver, master of soil health, who was born into bondage, right? No rights. And then somehow after his passing, he is summoned again in the name of a ship that does have legal rights in this country, right? And you have a godmother now and your godmothers happen to be these phenomenal Black women who produce vibrations and sounds from inside of their bodies that so resonate with the world. So, because Lena Horne and Marian Anderson are both ancestors, and I needed to be with them in the restaging or exploration of these baptism ceremonies in my mind, I was traveling to places. I traveled to Danbury, Connecticut, where Marian Anderson had a homestead. I went to the site and I collected soil from the site and just sat with it for a long time. That just felt impulsive — it wasn’t a thing that I had ever really done before, but I think I needed to be with the spaces that the DNA of these ancestors had been with. It made me feel like… maybe soil as witness or soil as extension of them. And now, I get to be in community with that in some way. I still don’t all the way know what it’s about, but there’s something spiraling there for me in the mud and the depth of its meaning and all the DNA that’s in it.

Alexis
So many things are coming to mind. I thought of the image in Jewelle Gomez’s vampire novel, The Gilda Stories — the soil sewn into the lining of the cloaks. It always resonated so much with me in terms of, how do these immortal beings stay grounded and interact across the difference of mortality and immortality? And soil collecting has been part of this honoring of Harriet Jacobs that my friend, the incredible Michelle Lanier, has been spearheading. And then the artist Claire Alexandre has been making paintings using the soil from the different places that Harriet Jacobs has been.

But actually, what really occurs to me is, you spoke about your dad and the garden and this time of year and getting in the dirt. What do you think your dad would say about soil and your practice, its relationship to your practice? As somebody with a different view of your practice than I can have.

Ash
Mm-hmm, “About time.” Yeah, I think he would have the necessary, you know, anecdotes about what soil does and why it’s important. I think he would feel the invitation to teach in that moment. But I think he really has been waiting my entire life for me to stop being too cool to play in the dirt.

Alexis
[laughs] Yeah, about time.

Ash
Yeah, about time. And then probably he would have some directives like, “Since you’re doing that, how about you go over to these six sites, you know, since this is now a thing you’re doing. Here are some places to add to your list and report back.”

Alexis
Some more assignments.

Ash
Mm-hmm.

Alexis
I have a jar of dirt from Shinnecock — some of my ancestors are Shinnecock people; Shinnecock means “the shoreline people,” it’s where “the Hamptons” are now — that I keep on my desk. But recently, I’ve been writing my wishes, like in fact, even in this plant I have over here, it’s just the future that I’m writing into existence and it’s on this piece of paper with a picture of my grandmother. And I have another plant out in the living room with a piece of paper that’s kind of a circle of markered intentions. I’ve been thinking about Alma Thomas a lot for the past few years, so colorful circles sometimes emerge. But it was also impulsive of me to be like, I’m just going to put this in the soil that’s here with this plant. And all of this is potting soil from the store, you know, but now that it’s part of our home and now that it’s in energetic relationship, and we’re in an oxygen, carbon dioxide exchange with the plants that are in there and all of that… intimacy. What work is happening with the dirt in here? I know I’m grateful for it. And sometimes I just go smell it, you know, this particular inside dirt. And then the outside dirt here, we have a lot of moss growing, especially since Hurricane Helene, we have a lot of moss all over the yard, and I’ve just been admiring it.

Ash
I’m excited to get back. It’s been a really busy last few years with production, and this summer I’ve been really careful about what I’ve said yes to so that I can be in my garden.

I’ve been cultivating three parcels of land, not too far from where I live, in Black Bottom, which is a historically and culturally important site in Detroit. I like doing all of the landscaping by hand, just digging with my one shovel, because what happens is I unearth all these random doodads that I wouldn’t be able to convene with if I hired somebody to come in and excavate or level the land with large-scale machinery. There’s something really grounding…

So, some of my work is, like, pulling over to the side of the road and picking up car parts from a crash or something. I don’t know why I’m doing that, it just feels like an impulse I have. And that is what I’m often unearthing, all these electrical components, because the folks who had the house that used to be there — you can still see it on Google Earth, and I screen captured it because that will go away at some point — the last house that was there was, what I learned now are these two brothers…

Working the land, people will come up and down the street and they’ll spot me when I’m in the garden and they’ll talk. They want to talk and tell me why they used to be on this street. And one of the guys was… I think one of the guys had a girlfriend and his girlfriend’s son used to climb the tree that is on the property, so he was offering all these tidbits and stories…

And it was two brothers. One of them had a tow truck, apparently, and that was one of his side hustles. So, he would tow these vehicles and in the Google Earth image, you could see the two guys kind of like… you know how elders really get dressed to do nothing and sit on the porch?

Alexis
[laughs] Yeah.

Ash
So, they were just in there with their little suspenders and their little outfits on, just sitting out on the sidewalk in front of the fence, in front of the house, and then into the side yard were all these cars in various states of repair and disrepair. And because I know that was one of the things that was sitting on the land, it just feels like I owe it to them in some way to go slow and just feel and be with the land. I’ve started keeping all those little doodads. But I think there’s something there — the impulse, I don’t know why, it feels like a circular thing, right? It just feels like I’m in conversation or community with these ancestors I haven’t met but who brought a lot of joy, and money apparently, to the folks on the block. So, I have a bag of doodads that I dug up from the dirt and I want to see what else is there this summer.

Alexis
That’s exciting, those layers. My grandfather, my maternal grandfather, was a mechanic in Hartford, Connecticut — part of the Jamaican community there. I just remember his yard was like an outdoor studio for reconstructing, I think, his idea of the perfect, classic Jaguar. He was into Jaguars. And so there would be different Jaguars in different states of whatever and he was using them for parts for each other in this slow process that I think about. I write about him, his relationship to machines. I write about my other grandfather’s relationship to machines also. But there’s also this thing — What’s the kinship with medicine to make the car work again? What’s the kinship with sculpture? Or three-dimensional collage? — that’s happening with the arrangement. And then we went to this farm in Jamaica where he grew up — they call it Croft’s Hill — to inter his ashes after he passed away. It was like the Jaguar yard, except it was all trucks. And I was like, oh, these afterlives and half-lives of vehicles are substantial. And there are people, maybe the people who lived on this land, definitely my grandfather, who were intimate with these machines, down to their smallest components. I think it’s really beautiful that you’re archiving it. You’re archiving what they were working with and being with.

Ash
I love sitting with the idea of the question: What is the connection between the impulse to fix or repair or make whole or make better? These machines… what’s the connection between that and medicine or surgery? There’s this book I was reading last year, Autopsy of an Engine, by this Detroit author, Lolita Hernandez, who was working at General Motors for a long time and was also writing and teaching writing at the University of Michigan. She chronicles all these stories of folks who were working in the Cadillac plant. I was reading this kind of experimental biography, because I’m trying to understand more than just my own family’s proximity to the automotive plant as an organism or as a city. It definitely felt like a city inside of a city, with its own ethics and its own politics and its own way of doing things. She talks about this moment when she moves from one job to another and she’s actually performing surgery on the engines, and there’s a passage in it that treats the engine like an organ, ultimately. I mean, it feels like this tendency to fix or repair is related to some other tendency, and I think I’m going to be sitting with that for a little bit. I appreciate the invitation to loop back around to that: What were these elders, these men in our families, inclined toward, and what might they have been doing in past lives, right?

Alexis
Yeah, exactly. And what’s the relationship between that desire to fix and its fulfillment and continued longing, you know? Like for my grandfather, for example, what was fixable, what was not fixable? What does it mean to use what's not salvageable? Or to use what is salvageable from one car to add to the other car that’s only missing this part, whatever that is?

I mean, I really think I can count on one hand… maybe I’ve had five conversations with that grandfather that weren’t just like me being around listening to grown folks talking to each other. And one of those was really interesting: We were in Atlanta. He had come to surprise my mom at her wedding when she got remarried and it was a huge surprise that he was there, because showing up was not really the theme of their relationship — him showing up for her. So, he came, but then my mom and my stepdad went for their honeymoon, so I was just with him in my mom’s house and we listened to a song called “The Best of Me.” Who’s the singer? Anyway, it’s a song, and I guess in it, the person she loved is getting married to somebody else but they’re… I don’t know. And my grandfather was like, “I really love this song.” And we just had this conversation that was really unique in the set of our conversations, because the other four were just him telling me proverbs and advice on, like, how to live, or how not to live. But this was just this interesting, kind of wistful conversation about what happens with the relationships that don’t work out but you still want to send them good energy even if you don’t know if they can receive it. I just thought that was huge. And now when I think of it, I’m like, oh, this person whose life was so much defined by the question “Can I make it work?” also really had to acknowledge that sometimes you can’t make it work, and… But what’s the redemption? You know?

I have a friend here, he’s a… he’s everything: he’s a musician, he’s a forester… His name is Justin Robinson. He talked about how his mentor would do what you do, you know, reclaim the objects that he would find in his movement through the world. He would talk about it in terms of redemption, you know, the redemption of the object. And that’s what comes to mind when I think about my grandfather’s relationship to fixing cars — this possibility of redemption.

Ash
Redemption. What is the root of that word?

Alexis
It’s a great question. I mean, obviously it has theological uses. It has economic uses, right? You can redeem something, you can redeem a bunch of cans that you pick up for however much change you’re supposed to get for them. But I don’t know. I’ve never looked redemption up in the etymological sources.

Ash
That’s something… I feel… I’m trying to think if I use that word often…

Alexis
Mm-hmm.

Ash
I think I have this thing where, during this paradigm shift moment that we’re in where there’s a lot of ugly, a lot of dark, and a lot of painful, I’ve had a moment where it was seeping into my making — not that it doesn’t show up in my making — in a way that was cultivating darkness in my studio. And I had a moment when I was like, I can choose something else, right? I am cultivating. This is a space that I get to cultivate, and I can choose light. I can choose to cultivate light in the spaces that I occupy. And I think since then I’ve been with Saidiya Hartman, you know, not just restaging the scenes of the crimes, but actually teasing out what can be salvaged here. So, I think I’ve been thinking about it as salvage, but salvage even has this kind of like salvation…

Alexis
Mm-hmm.

Ash
Right? So, I don’t know… There’s some tension in parts of my practice where I feel, I felt, impulses to redeem, and yet, I feel hesitancy toward the framing of it as redemption for some reason, because I think I’m just careful about maybe going too far into darkness, if that makes sense.

Alexis
Yeah. This conversation with Justin, which was eighteen years ago or something like that, he was talking about his mentor making the thing into something else also, which is different than archiving. I mean it has a sense of saving and salvage, but the redemption was really about the next life of the object, not necessarily that…

Ash
Mm-hmm.

Alexis
In redemption, there can be this connotation of trash to treasure, that whatever it is now isn’t valuable and it becomes valuable in its next life. But what I really got from Justin saying that — and I never interacted with this mentor one-on-one or saw his work — was this sense of the sacred part not being the difference between what it was and what it would be, but the sacred part being what it is to play a role in the transformation of the world around you, in a physical way.

Ash
That resonates a lot, yeah, that resonates a lot. I think I’m such a process-oriented maker that… it’s just the journey. And I think of materials as active: they’re emitting energy, they’re not passive agents waiting for humans to activate them. Like Terry Adkins’ “potential disclosure” concept, where putting a bunch of objects in a room is a charged activity, right? And when you’re not there as the choreographer of those objects, they’re meeting with one another and convening. I truly believe that. I’m always trying to understand what the perspective of an object or an agent or matter is. I can obviously never fully translate, but I think that’s what I’m often trying to do. I’m trying to decenter a human frame and tap into some other frequency, like cycling through the pirate radio frequencies until one resonates and it’s like, oh, I think maybe this object operates on this frequency. That’s information for me. And then from there, I try to listen for other objects that are operating at that frequency, or other processes, and understand what my role is, and test out different roles for me. Is my role to be an activator? Is my role simply to be the flesh bearer? Is it just for me to show up with the flesh? I think materials have the capacity to hold flesh memory and prefer some flesh over others. So that’s a lot of what’s happening for me in my studio — trying to parse some of these things, what feel like impulses that I can’t often talk to very many other people about, right? There are some people, some of my maker friends and my healer friends, who can go there with me, and I really enjoy those opportunities to be in a new logic and have that be the logic of this particular thirty seconds of time.

Alexis
When I hear you say it’s the impulse, my experience is that I do feel like my impulses — while of course they exceed my rational decision of understanding why something makes sense and why it feels right to do a certain thing — are still responsive and operating in that field of frequency. And for me, so much of my archival practice is that. It’s an impulse toward communion with a frequency, it’s a recalibration inside a frequency of… maybe it’s objects a certain person has touched. I mean, when my grandmother passed, my first impulse was to really sit with her things and listen closely to certain objects, purses, passports, her glasses, her mirrors. You used the word cultivate, which may also have the complexities of all the other words, because we got cults and culture and all of that in there. But to cultivate that trust in the responsive impulse, I think of that as listening. For me, that’s really the core of my practice: trusting the impulse and going with it and continuing to listen. And it’s true that there is sometimes residue from that, but it may or may not be the case that that residue is part of a ceremony for somebody else to be in that vibrational frequency. It may or may not be that, and so it becomes another opportunity to trust, it becomes another place where it’s like…is this…? “No.” Does this want to be shared? Sometimes it’s like, “Nah,” sometimes it’s like, “Yeah, girl, that’s why.”

Ash
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Alexis
But I appreciate what you said about protecting your attunement. Because what you’re doing in your life, what you’re doing in your studio, is a practice of attunement, and you could feel the signal getting disrupted by certain noises, certain forms of pollution.

Ash
Yeah, thank you for that reflection. Yeah. Attunement. Atonement. Attunement.

Alexis
Yeah, yeah. See? All of it.

Ash
This is a really lovely place to land for today.