Foraging for Text

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A text is any object that can be read. To forage is to search for wild food provisions. Foraging for Text documents “language in use” out in the “wild” or in places other than books, such as awnings, street signage, user interface design, television/film, etc. This collection is organized by color.

Foraging for Text is a featured [Viewfinder] project on KJR Studios/Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Gather & Disperse platform. These viewfinders are guided by a desire to expand, extend, and interrogate how my attention has been trained to render some stimuli as signal and dismiss others as noise.

Gather & Disperse (G & D) is an ecosystem for Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s research and archival work. G & D includes special collections of “found” Black vernacular photographs and Black printed matter; research platforms on radical Black educational institutions and Black spiritual movements; infodumps on niche histories such as Eldridge Cleaver’s fashion line and the escape of Penelope the Platypus; and viewfinders that closely read shapes, textures, animals, and typography that we may typically overlook.