Circulate started as a 100+ page idea document shared between myself and my close collaborator, Lola Lafia. She and I began to meet weekly over zoom throughout 2020/2021, when our desires to create and organize together demanded attention beyond the confines of Covid’s oppressive lockdown. At first we hadn’t a clue what we were building, but our sense of alignment became increasingly clear through countless sessions of brainstorming and co-dreaming. We eventually arrived at Circulate — a fully-funded, live-in, artist residency in upstate New York with a group of seven strangers, young artists of differing mediums. After interviewing 50+ candidates, we selected our members and spent three weeks together in Accord, NY at ArtFarm. Together, in the spirit of distributed leadership, our crew decided on intentional limitations to bracket and deepen our creative and intellectual processes. Circulate was completely void of internet and cellphones. Between blocks of independent work time, we devoted substantial space to community work: morning care check-ins; workshops led by each member (book-making, clothing design, performance art, to name a few); nightly sessions of “Writing and Thinking” using an anthology of all our favorite short stories, poems and essays; outings to local nature sites; group film screenings. Every single meal was homemade and shared on a rotating schedule.