In its fourth year, Force and Motion’s August 2023 season engages artists in the task of collectivity. How do the relationships we build in turn build the work we engage in? This year around and within SCAFFOLD, three Chicago-based performance collectives in different iterations of collaboration populate the public lawn with work that examines our relationship to one another and the possibilities that can be tapped into through those relationships.

LOVESPACE, performed at Links Hall for SAIC IN/FORM Performance Festival, 2022. Photography by Ricardo Adame. Chicago IL

Suspended Culture is an emerging Black art collective based in Chicago, IL. A Suspended Culture is a culture on pause, a movement interrupted, a dream deferred. As a collective of visionaries, our work together inhabits the liminal space of a dream. Time is no longer necessary here; rather, time collapses into an ever-expanding radical presence. In a Suspended Culture, we play. We rehearse the future and we invite love to bind us to what liberates us. A Suspended Culture considers love a revolutionary practice through which it can conjure anything required, and a Suspended Culture exists in an alternative reality rooted in love. A Suspended Culture embodies Afro-surreal interpretations of Black futures, embraces the absurd, and thinks with the body. A Suspended Culture uses pleasure as its map and sinks into the portal of “Yes, and…”. A Suspended Culture is a moment of rest!