Say hey to Seren Sensei's [unhurried] {witness} 🐣
Today we are so pleased to share the beta of Seren Sensei's [unhurried] {witness}! The project is a space that invites you to slow down and explore play and playfulness of Black life. It also includes a virtual community guestbook, where visitors can leave their own memories and impressions of the site.
Working as an artist, filmmaker, and cultural preservationist, Seren Sensei writes that the [unhurried] {witness} project is "a digital exploration and 
visual representation of analog games such as card games, dice, dominoes, paper crafts, and rhyming hand games/hand motions, as healing cultural process among Black Americans.
Play is critical to Black life, Seren notes, and it is thus "important for the work of Black Study, as Black Americans especially need more research on ways to induce healing, slowness, and a sense of calm, safety, security, and peace in the world that we live in. As a cultural preservationist, I’m interested in studying the use of these slowed-down forms of play for calm, relaxation, meditation, healing, and as a form of collective 'witness' [of our culture] in the arts and humanities space.
When I was young, my mother taught me to play the singular card games FreeCell and Solitaire using a deck of real cards; in school I learned rhyming hand games such as Miss Mary Mack and Jiggalo (also known as Pop Si Co), and paper games such as Fortune Teller and creating paper airplanes..."
Click here to learn more about the early stages and motivation for Seren's project!
We also invite you to take a moment to sit with Seren discussing her work with AADHum graduate assistant Christin Washington, which contextualizes the work of [unhurried] {witness} in relation to the archival impulse underlying her art and research.
About Seren
Seren Sensei is a filmmaker, writer, and artist. Her writing has been printed in such publications as NAACP’s The Crisis Magazine, NYLON Magazine, Kweli Journal, and Riot Material, and referenced in Jacobin Mag, Vulture, Complex, Newsweek, AJ+, People, Netflix, Vice, Walker Art and more.
Specializing in race, culture, and sociopolitical theory, she has released three seasons of the web series ‘The [Black] Americans’ to explore and archive Black American cultural narratives. She was a 2016- 2017 cohort with ‘at lands edge’ pedagogical program to combine art and activism, and in 2020 was named an Indie Memphis Black Filmmaker Resident for her screenplay, ‘Kitt.’ She was also named a 2020-2021 “Time, Space, Money” HRLA Resident, exhibiting a video installation on police brutality protests at Actual Size Gallery in Los Angeles. The first chapter of her speculative fiction novel, ‘Blue Zone,’ was published digitally through Arch Street Press, winning the 'Meet Me @ 19th St.' literary award.