title
format
role
client
publication
contributors             
Precious Time
Discussion
Host/Facilitator
Wales Bonner & Nordstrom
winter 2023
Grace Wales Bonner & Antwan Sargent


“Precious Time” Grace Wales Bonner in conversation with Antwaun Sargent moderated by Zion Estrada and hosted by @nordstrom @nordstrommen .

People have organized themselves around the concept of Time for centuries. We can speak in a grand and philosophical way about Time but I wanted to expand the sense of the possible in the here and now on a cultural level.

In this conversation I explore the idea of precious time as a metric used within the Black arts creation and process space.

Questions included:
  • What identifies a thing as precious?
  • Does the categorization of precious do to Black identified item?
  • How has the idea of precious life as a tool in fashion and high art for Blackness?
  • We often speak about Africa and Europe in only one historical context. Yet Africa and Europe have been intertwined and in conversation for far longer and in much more layered and complex ways.  In what ways have your latest collection spoken to this relationship?
Zion Estrada (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist researcher living on Gabrielleno/Tongva/Chumash Land. Her work flows between archival assemblage filmmaking, sonic collage production and experiential design centering human and more-than-human (re)connection.

Zion’s  experimental collage language in film and sonic works often use layering of field recordings, found sounds and carefully curated sound clips that score a line of discourse that complicate temporality, history and meaning making. Her practice is informed by the palimpsest and Pauline Olivero’s Deep Listening. 

She is most interested in the non-verbal and more-than-human qualities of storytelling from the African diaspora (specifically the Caribbean) and how sounds hold the spirits of the past and the alchemic power to magnetize communities, movement, moods, and healing. She draws from the traditions of Black Trans abolitionists care making, sex worker solidarity,  doula presence practices and movement architects love of release.

Zion is currently is practicing in emergent transformative justice work with Abolition Dream lab practicing in radical learning communities how to prepare, account, release and re-story the harms we have caused, the roots the harms have in culture and systemic violence  while centering care, healing and rest.

Zion is the Creative Director of Black Discourse, co-founder of Wild Grass Design + Research Lab and owner of BZE Consultant LLC.  She holds a M.A. Ed focused in participatory research and linquistics.

PREVIOUSLY
Director of Programs at BLD PWR; holds 10yrs as educator and curriculum developer.

CURRENTLY
Board member at Citizens of Culture
Exhibitor at the Ghetto Biennale in Jacmel, Haiti 2024
Participant in MIT Worlding Project Community 2023