Strata’s Origin Story

Every project name starts with a question. How do we communicate the character of an offering in a few short words? For Strata, we needed something that could hold the weight of the work — a word that spoke to culture, politics, history, and the people at the center of it all. Something that reflected the nature of these intersecting ideas. The conversation kept returning to one idea: that culture is not singular and that you have to engage something. That a plurality of stories helps people see more of what’s possible.

In this conversation, we are exploring the ways cultural organizations demonstrate their point of view on the world through what they do, how they do it, and who they do it with. How they engage with power, exploitation, and extraction, and move towards a world of dignity. From that, a single word surfaced. Strata. Layers of rock. Layers of strategy. Each one shaped by what came before, each one touching the one above and below it because culture and politics aren’t separate categories. They layer and wrap around each other to tell the story of where we’ve been and where we can go.

As scholar Steph Newell writes, it’s the way culture, including people’s attitudes, the media, and the arts, shapes society and gives rise to social, economic, and legal realities. That’s exactly what this series is built to explore: culture as societal arrangement, creative intervention as a tool for change, and the lineage and practices that ground it all. This is Strata: A Cultural Political Conversation — dig in, look closer, go deeper, and let’s have a chat.