 My project JOKO means Connections in Wolwaf, which is the prominent language spoken in Senegal as well as here in Little Senegal in Harlem. JOKO celebrates the Senegalese community and it also focuses on the connections between the Senegalese community and the African-American community. JOKO is a really important world in our vocabulary and in my country everything is about communication but the communication is so natural over there. We've always been living in community. I'm interviewing and taking photographs of restaurants and beauty salons and businesses at the African mart and along 116th the corridor that really represents Little Senegal. You kind of know people unless they talk about themselves, they talk about the experience, you don't know like who they really are. But when we were like sharing stories with other people in some way I was kind of shocked like to hear a lot of things that they say. They may say I don't like them or I don't know about them or I'm afraid because they don't know because there's no connection, there's misconnection. When thinking about creating one of my art pieces, one of my sound sculptures, one of my magic sound boxes, I reference African masquerade costumes and I use craft aesthetics like sewing and beading and I utilize African fabrics as well as fabrics that are really associated with my ancestral culture like cotton and burlap. We're really happy about what's happening in this project to show more about what the Senegalese people are about, how they're really ready to open their culture, how they're really ready to live, to be a part in Harlem and then how they really to transport everything they have back home over here so everybody can share it, everybody can be part of it. Before my time with the Lingerman project I realized I was just scratching the surface and what I've learned is that community engagement is about really getting in there and doing something that we learned about called deep listening and really gaining trust by showing up and being involved but also I'm learning how to trust community members as well and it's about building something with the community together. People who hear like people telling their stories, they see the misconnection and they really want to go through it and try and open themself. It's bigger than our artwork, it's bigger than the product that we produce, you know it's about the people, we're the people, the community is the people, it's about building bridges that bridge from me, that bridge from my studio to the street and back and beyond.