The People's Archive: Beyond The Past Tense
Inspired by Black Quantum Futurism's Black Hole Spacetime Machine—a community-driven time capsule and future-visioning project in Philadelphia—this session explores digital justice as a practice of temporal sovereignty. The Black Hole Spacetime Machine invited residents facing displacement to deposit memories, predictions, and messages across time, challenging the violent erasure that gentrification imposes by creating an archive that refuses the colonial logic of linear progress. It asked: what if communities under siege could preserve not just their past but their futures? What if we could archive dreams, warnings, and visions as rigorously as we document harm?
We examine how digital tools can help us break free from oppressive timelines that treat Black and Brown communities as disposable, always past, never future. Through dialogue with digital archivists, we explore questions of data sovereignty, algorithmic justice, and how we build technologies that honor non-linear time, ancestral knowledge, and future generations simultaneously. When the archive becomes a portal—collapsing past, present, and future—how do we use it to resist displacement not just of our bodies but of our temporalities? How do we code liberation across time itself? This session treats digital justice as speculative practice: the right to remember forward, to be archived in the futures we're building now.
ASL interpretation will be available during this event.
ABOUT THE PANEL
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez is the Archival Collections Manager at the Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora at CENTRO. Cristina’s work focuses on participatory, slow, and non-hierarchical approaches to knowledge-seeking and making through archival practice. In addition to her work at CENTRO, Cristina is the Grants and Giving Manager for We Here's Dream-Shaping initiative, is a founding member of Archivistas en Espanglish, a collective dedicated to amplifying spaces of memory-building between Latin America and Latinx communities in the US, and co-runs Barchives, an independent outreach initiative that brings archivists to bars to talk about New York City’s archival collections and local history. Cristina has taught at various graduate Archives programs in NYC, and previous to CENTRO, was the Institute Archivist at Pratt Institute and is a former fellow for the National Digital Stewardship Residency for Art Information. Cristina holds a BA in Geography from Universidad de Puerto Rico Recinto de Río Piedras and a Master’s in Library Science with a certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials from CUNY Queens College.
Syreeta Gates
Syreeta Gates is the founder of Most Incredible Studio, an independent creative house that designs limited-edition cultural collectibles using LEGO® bricks as a medium. She makes memory tangible; translating legacy, identity, and everyday culture into artifacts you can hold, display, and pass down.
Raised in South Jamaica, Queens, with a camera in one hand, playing The Sims and a Source magazine in the other, Syreeta has spent her life preserving the stories we live. She doesn't follow blueprints. She builds them.
As the first Black woman on LEGO® Masters (U.S. Season 2), her appearance ignited a cultural reckoning that challenged assumptions about who builds, who creates, and who gets taken seriously in creative spaces. That momentum became Most Incredible Studio, where she's partnered with institutions like the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP), brands like Nike and Adidas, and cultural archives like Black Archives to create compositions that honor culture and the symbols that shaped generations.
Beyond the brick, Syreeta is an archivist, producer, and cultural conductor. She's led research and produced award-winning documentaries, including Netflix's Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop, Peacock's Black Pop: Celebrating the Power of Black Culture, and The Remix: Hip Hop X Fashion.
Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, Forbes, Black Enterprise, ABC News, NPR, and more. She's been published in books including Fresh Fly Fabulous, BLK MKT Vintage, and Stand Up!
Whether she's designing a cultural composition, delivering a keynote, producing a documentary, or curating an experience, Syreeta's north star remains the same: How do we make memory visible? How do we create what's missing? And how do we build a future worth remembering?
Most Incredible Studio is her answer.
Sharon Mizota
Sharon Mizota (she/her) is a researcher, metadata consultant, and art critic who works to improve diversity and inclusion in the historical record. Recent projects include research reports for the Community-Centered Archives Practice program at the University of California, Irvine and for Critical Minded, an initiative supporting cultural critics of color. Metadata and vocabulary collaborations include work with the Arab Image Foundation, Curationist, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and Outwords Archive. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, ARTNews, and other publications. She is a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers' Grant and a coauthor of the award-winning book, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art. Sharon is a settler on unceded Tongva and Chumash lands in Southern California.
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