This is a project about exchange, story telling and the quiet of life. I was born Haitian, and I grew up in the Bahamas. My family life has always been a fracture separated by a body of water and hundreds of miles. As archaic as it sounds, there was a time precell-phone when my family communicated via cassette tapes. I was sent to the local Chinese store to buy a cassette for one dollar. My mother would sit in her bedroom quietly and speak into a one-way recording via a radio and cassette recorder. She would speak into this void about family, money, immigration, and where her mind meandered. This tape was then shipped to Haiti, and a reciprocal tape was returned in response to her message, the cassette sealed in a white envelope. I loved the croaky voice of my mother’s mother and hearing the sounds of my country of birth.

This beautiful dance always reminded me of humankind's earliest ancestors conjuring stories by fire. With its bright embers and intense heat, fire is portrayed as a force of evolution, energy, and progress, but can we think of it also as a unifying force? Something softer and intimate? For this project, We Once Told Tales By Fire And The Quiet Drop Of Rain, I want to engage a global network of storytellers who will have an open platform to share stories, exchange ideas, recipes, and other forms of verbal exchange that can exist for Uncommissioned. This project proposes a slowdown. We consume so much media in so little time, but how much of it is substantive? What parts of the aural tradition, recipes, and cultures are being lost? I imagine that there is space for stories of tragedy, joy, indifference, learning, empathy, and many other human possibilities to exist in this project. This isn’t a work of totality and isn’t meant to be encyclopedic but rather an intentional space of auditory engagement. The cassette format, although poetic and beautiful, feels important but somehow impractical. I am open to this as an oral archive