Ground Provisions: Reading Camp as Refuge and Study

Ground Provisions is a reading camp founded by Stefano Harney and Tonika Sealy Thompson, operating as a refuge for collective reading and study. The camp, based in Barbados and active across the Afro-Asian century, offers reading residencies where participants read together in silence or aloud, fostering conviviality and entanglement. Harney and Thompson critique the official university for outsourcing reading to private spaces, turning it into piecework that individuates students and teachers. They draw on the concept of study developed with Fred Moten, emphasizing reading together as a form of social reproduction for 'our thing' rather than capital. The camp alternates between refuge and visitation, traveling to Asia and the Caribbean. Reading is positioned as a life-giving art, akin to dancing, cooking, and making art. Tonika's research on processions illustrates an Afro-Asian futurism where blackness entangles time, space, and motion. The essay was published in Afterall Journal 45 in March 2018.