The Forum 13 | Tracing Absence and the Lives We Inherit

She builds archives, conjures futures, and questions everything — Tamika Abaka-Wood on ritual, refusal, and the joy of cultural strategy. Tamika Abaka-Wood is a cultural anthropologist, conceptual strategist, and artist whose practice moves between community building, archival work, and spiritual inquiry. She’s the creator of Dial-An-Ancestor, an ongoing project that collects voice notes as offerings to the past, present, and future. Her work resists categorization, merging care and critique, and often asks: what are we remembering, and who are we remembering for?She explains:* Why she’s more interested in frameworks than mediums* How Dial-An-Ancestor creates a space for grief, communion, and speculative healing* The tension between facilitation and authorship in creative work* What it means to build archives that feel alive—not extractive* How refusal and withholding can be generative tools* Why she resists the singular identity of “artist,” and what she embraces instead* The ethics of visibility, looking, and representation in public programming* How joy and mischief shape her strategies for imagining otherwise(0:00) Welcome + Intro(04:15) Meet Tamika: cultural strategist, connector, world-builder(08:30) Refusing the artist title, reshaping the role(13:00) Strategy as creation(17:22) Dial-An-Ancestor: calling in future histories(26:08) Branding is not world-building(30:31) Building intimacy into the infrastructure(35:03) Refusal is not a pause, it’s a position(44:00) Grief, play, and spiritual maintenance(48:21) How to get involved with NewCritsWatch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube.Follow Tamikahttps://tamikaabakawood.com/https://www.instagram.com/tamikaka/?hl=enLearn more about Dial-An-Ancestorhttps://dial-an-ancestor.com/About The ForumThe Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here.Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio._Full TranscriptAjay Kurian: Hi everybody. Welcome to the July NewCrits Talk and Summer Party. Thank you all for coming!I met Tamika through my partner Jasmine, who's here tonight. From day one she was electric, a mile a minute, excited about anyone's excitement, game for anyone's game, a facilitator par excellence. Whatever you supplied, she'd give back threefold with tangents, detours, serious things and fun things, codified and color-coded. Tamika wants to help. She wants people to see their ideas through, and to excite them to build the worlds they're making and to believe in the possibility of a different tomorrow without blinders on. She's not deaf to misery or darkness, but somehow she manages to channel her best energies to maintain a joyful persistence.It's only recently that Tamika has felt comfortable calling herself an artist, and she probably wants to chime in right now and question the importance of the name. Anyways, she has self-identified as a cultural anthropologist and I think that's definitely true. Her ongoing project, Dial-An-Ancestor, is a beautiful testament to this where she gathers future histories into a building archive.But her work as a kind of conceptual strategist is also its own form of cultural anthropology. And I'm interested in people who are creating in multiple ways in multiple worlds. But really I insist on the term artist, not because everyone needs to be an artist, but because I think it allows her to momentarily assume the role of head creative and not facilitator.She's not alone, of course, but sometimes when you're in an ensemble, it's time for your solo. The group steps back and lets you play because what you have is special and singular, and the group knows you'll come back. But for that moment, it's about you, and this is a chance for that to happen. This is Tamika's world, and tonight we're all in it together.Please help me welcome Tamika Abaka-Wood.Tamika Abaka-Wood: That was so special, thank you. I feel so shy, I really do. That was beautiful.Ajay Kurian: Of course.Tamika Abaka-Wood: Thanks for having me here. It is still surreal.Ajay Kurian: What's surreal about it?Tamika Abaka-Wood: What is surreal about i