thinking with: is a series of conversations rooted in study as a collective practice that exceeds institutional forms even as it moves through them. Engaging questions of collapse, abolition, solidarity, and survival, the series foregrounds thinking as something done together, in the midst of constraint and struggle. Conversation here is not a platform for positions, but a practice of holding open ways of instituting otherwise.
Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and cultural strategist whose work explores how power is learned and reproduced through everyday life. Working across food, film, and lived archive, his practice traces how kitchens, tables, gesture, and correction shape hierarchy long before it is named as politics or law. He is the founder of the BlindianProject and a steward of South Asians for Black Lives, and his work has been presented across community, academic, and cultural spaces in the UK, US, Europe, and South Asia.
For more on Jonah’s sessions at the school, see here.
Meenakshi Thirukode (MT): Your work often speaks through sensory registers—food, ritual, memory, and the table as archive. In a moment when formal systems of knowledge and education are being targeted or eroded, how do these embodied forms of knowing function as archives and sites of resistance?
Jonah Batambuze ( JB ): In my work I often refer to Reconstruction Studies (RS), a framework I developed to think about how communities living in the afterlives of colonialism, enslavement, and indentured servitude carry histories that were rarely preserved in traditional archives.
RS begins from a simple premise: the body itself is an archive.
Food, gesture, and ritual are not simply cultural expressions. They are storage systems for history. Long before many communities were granted access to formal institutions of knowledge, memory moved through the senses—in recipes, in the way a hand moves, in how elders teach a child to sit, eat, or pray.
The table becomes a site where those archives are activated. When people gather around food, they are not just sharing a meal; they are rehearsing histories of migration, survival, and adaptation.
At a moment when formal systems of knowledge feel fragile or contested—and when many people are turning toward Indigenous and traditional knowledge systems—these embodied archives become even more important.
They are difficult to erase because they live in practice, repetition, and the body.
What we often dismiss as ordinary gestures are, in fact, dense archives—quietly carrying entire worlds of memory.
MT: You’ve created works that resist formal institutional structures (“No MFA. No gallery. No gate. Just truth”), and instead foreground kitchens, gatherings, and sensory experience. How do you think about building alternative institutions of learning and memory outside traditional systems?
JB: As someone who developed much of my practice outside traditional institutional structures, I don’t reject institutions outright. What interests me is what becomes possible when our work is not overly dependent on them.
In recent years—particularly as some institutions began restricting the teaching of subjects like Black history or critical race theory under political pressure—I found myself questioning how powerful these structures really were if they could capitulate so easily.
The phrase “No MFA. No gallery. No gate. Just truth.” came from noticing how much validation we often seek from these systems—and how that reliance can sometimes prevent people from trusting their own creative instincts and beginning the work.
Rather than waiting for permission from institutions, I think about building structures that allow people to gather, share stories, and encounter knowledge in ways that feel immediate and lived. Sometimes that looks like a supper club. Sometimes a diagram. Sometimes a film installation.
Over time, these practices can become institutions of their own. But they begin with something simpler: people sitting together, paying attention, and recognising that knowledge is already in the room.
MT: In your work with the BlindianProject, and more broadly in your writing and art, you trace Black and South Asian diasporic histories and solidarities. How does tracing and sharing these histories contribute to new forms of collective memory that defy erasure?
JB: One of the most powerful tools of erasure is the idea that communities have always been separate—often reinforced through narratives that serve the interests of the state. However, when you begin tracing diasporic histories carefully, very different stories emerge.
You see Black and South Asian activists organizing together across East and South Africa, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and the United States. You see shared struggles against colonialism and racial hierarchy. You see relationships that have been forgotten, ignored, or deliberately obscured because of what they were able to achieve.
Part of the work of the BlindianProject is to make those connections visible again—and to give them permanence.
When people encounter these histories, something shifts. The present begins to look different. Conflicts that feel inevitable begin to appear manufactured. Solidarity becomes imaginable again. New possibilities begin to emerge.
In that sense, tracing these histories isn’t just about the past. It is about expanding the political and emotional possibilities of the present—and offering a template for uncovering other hidden solidarities among marginalized communities that have also been separated, forgotten, or deliberately obscured.
MT: Building on the idea that sustainability is not just about securing resources but about sustaining relationships and care: how do you cultivate community and care within your practice whether through food, ritual, or collaborative histories?
JB: Sustainability in my work is less about infrastructure and more about relationships.
Projects endure when people feel seen, respected, and connected to one another. Food has become one of the ways I cultivate that environment because it naturally slows people down. It encourages conversation. It creates a shared sensory experience.
But the deeper work is about care: listening to people’s stories and creating spaces where vulnerability feels possible. In the early days of the BlindianProject, we became one of the few platforms intentionally highlighting stories and connections that had often been overlooked or pushed aside. As a result, community began to form organically rather than strictly through formal programming.
Many of the strongest relationships in the BlindianProject began not through events, but through small gestures—messages, shared meals, and introductions between people who might not otherwise have met.
Over time, those gestures accumulate. They form a kind of social architecture that sustains the work.
MT: Institutions often struggle not because of lack of ideals, but because of the everyday difficulties of sharing power and sustaining vulnerability. How do you think artists and cultural practitioners can hold space for vulnerability and transform it into collective strength?
JB: Vulnerability is often framed as weakness in institutional spaces. But in practice, it is often the beginning of collective intelligence.
When people are able to speak honestly about uncertainty, confusion, or discomfort, new forms of understanding become possible. The role of the artist or cultural practitioner is not to eliminate it, but to hold the space long enough for something productive to emerge.
In workshops, installations, and conversations, I try to create structures that make that possible—simple prompts, shared rituals, and moments of reflection. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that not everyone is ready to be vulnerable on demand. Creating those conditions often requires patience, trust, and time.
In many ways, that approach reflects Reconstruction Studies in practice—an understanding that memory and vulnerability cannot be extracted on command, but must be given the time and conditions to surface on their own terms.
When vulnerability is held collectively rather than individually, it stops being something to hide. It becomes a resource—a foundation for building trust.
And trust is what allows communities to imagine different futures together.
MT: Finally, as someone whose work actively remembers and reimagines histories, what does it mean to build otherwise in this moment? Where do you see potential for new practices of knowledge-sharing and preservation that resist collapse and erasure?
JB: To build otherwise is to refuse the idea that collapse is the only story available to us.
Communities have always developed ways to carry knowledge outside dominant systems—through oral histories, ritual, art, and collective memory. These practices are not relics of the past. They are blueprints for the future.
What I see emerging now are hybrid forms of knowledge-sharing: artists working alongside scholars, community archives existing alongside museums, and conversations moving fluidly between kitchens, classrooms, and digital spaces.
My work lives in that intersection.
The task is not simply to preserve history, but to keep it alive—to create conditions where people can encounter it, question it, and carry it forward in new ways.
Because when memory is carried collectively, it can outlast the systems that once tried to erase it.