Samora Pinderhughes

Yeah, I am a musician, composer, filmmaker, multidisciplinary artist.

I work across basically every artistic discipline except maybe movement, which hopefully one day we'll get to, but not right now.

I also founded and run an organization called The Healing Project.

We are an abolitionist organization that works on creating a world based around healing rather than punishment.

So a lot of my artistic work is about deconstructing narratives around criminality, around who has the right to violence, around structural violence and the effects that that has on our society.

And also on building opportunities for people who have been traumatized by the prison industrial complex, where they can find spaces to tell their stories, but also to find material and communal support there.

from each other and to devise the worlds that we want to build that are these alternatives to these systems that we know are deeply violent.

I wanted to perform pieces that would feature my choir.

I have a choir called the Healing Project Choir.

They're all amazing artists in their own right, songwriters, vocalists, my community that I collaborate on this work with.

So I wanted to...

do songs that feature their amazing voices and also pieces hopefully that would speak to the complexity of what it is to be a human being and to find this honest place of being able to engage in some questions, some messiness, some things that I think people are trying to weed out of the human experience but I think are very important.

And to connect that with also speaking to some structural realities that I think we need to confront.

Sure, yeah.

The ones that come to mind most immediately, there's a song that I did called Masculinity, which is, I think, important.

Yeah.

Speaking to these questions about, you know, what are these patriarchal structures that are so deep that we have to really investigate both the loud and the quiet violences, which is a phrase I got from the author Kiese Leiman.

I think the line in that that I would focus on is...

Masculinity.

And I also, there's actually a section I added in that's not a part of the original song that I said that's Are You Gonna Let It Go?