Abstract

World View: Global Ciphers for Dialogues Across Difference asks whether one of humanity’s oldest meaning-making practices—call and response—can be redesigned as a tool for repair amid global and political rupture. The project joins two complementary bodies of work: Rosalind McGary’s cipher practice, developed through Sepia Collective, the Compton Arts Project, and Cakecutter, which adapts hip hop’s artist-led call-and-response circle into structured cross-difference exchange; and Anya Booker’s scholarship on call and response as a lieu de mémoire and mechanism of diaspora literacy. Using Resetting the Table’s Train the Trainer methodology as facilitation scaffolding, the team will co-create and pilot a documented cipher protocol and companion facilitation tool with student and professional artists, treating each exchange as both art-making and curriculum. The pilot lays research groundwork for LA28 World-Wide Cipher: Artists Without Borders, a planned global call-and-response exchange among artists in cities worldwide, culminating in Los Angeles during the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. By documenting how artistic response functions as bridging practice, the project offers the Bedari Kindness Institute an empirical model of kindness as structured, teachable, and transferable infrastructure rather than aspiration.

Field

Arts and Architecture

Extramural Partners

Sepia Collective, the Compton Arts Project, Cakecutter

Team

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