“My Ideal Place”: Towards a Speculative Archive for Community Care
By Taylor Thompson, 2021
Community care practitioner and founder of NourishNYC, Tania Maree Giordani, describes an ideal place she intends to build, towards a more effective and robust community care infrastructure in New York City.
TRANSCRIPT:
Interviewer: [quietly] I always like to remember that Harriet Tubman celebrated the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States 3 years earlier than the emancipation was codified by law. She reportedly had a vision and when she came to, she announced: “My people are free!”
Interviewer: Oxford Language Dictionary defines Testimony as “Evidence or proof provided by the existence or appearance of something.” What appeared to Harriet Tubman —what she imagined and envisioned—became the proof she needed to testify to what was coming.
Interviewer: What this tells me is that what we imagine matters to the material world we live in. And so when I listen to what my narrators imagine—what they think brilliantly about, what they see in their mind’s eye—sometimes I like to take it as testimony.
Interviewer: This is a study in faith, in the tether, in testimony, in time, in our capacities to imagine expansively and radically, in our capacities to claim and name the love we deserve.
Tania Maree Giordani: My ideal place is to have like a huge loft building, or like a huge warehouse, by the water, in Brooklyn. And I want there to be the grocery stores: free.
Tania Maree Giordani: And on the first floor, like, we need a lot of third spaces, especially for like Black and Brown people. We need more spaces to go to, like a third space. And so I would love to be able to create a situation that has that. And so on the first floor, the grocery store on one side. And then I also want there to be like a cafe. And the cafe will also be the third space. And like all the first floor, like going around the building, I want there to be different salons. And so for one of the salons…
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Tania Maree Giordani: I really, really, really want to open a therapy center that is sliding scale— the first slide of the scale being zero for most people. I really would only want to charge the people who A) have the means to pay—so basically donation based therapy—or being able to charge insurance and us being able to subsidize the cost so that there is no copay for the patient. And I want them to be able to get long term treatment at the center if…