Biography
free feral works with sound, song and story to explore cultural technologies of survival and memory. They produced Last Call: New Orleans Dyke Bar Oral History Project and have scored dance, theater, and film projects for over a decade. In 2020 they co-founded Alphabet Sound Observatory, which offers free and affordable access to quality home recording equipment, mentorship, and training opportunities to BIPOC women and gender variant folk in New Orleans.
Annette Hollowell wears many crowns — mother, entrepreneur, facilitator and lawyer with a particular calling towards community building, peace work and Black liberation. Her storytelling is rooted in ancestry, culture and Mississippi’s long standing legacies of Black landownership.
Research
We are the Promised Land is a multimedia exploration of Black folk inheritance and the intercessory realm between ancestors and descendants. Season one’s perspective ripples out from the Hollowell family and their land, Foxfire Ranch in Waterford, MS. Over 100 years ago, Albert Hollowell bought 80 acres outside Holly Springs, MS. Over the last decade and change, Bill, one of Albert’s nine children, has returned to the land with his wife, Annie, and the two of them have developed the space into an entertainment and event venue, where they regularly showcase the music of the region, North Mississippi Hill Country Blues. Now, as Bill and Annie age, their daughter, Annette, is answering the call to take the torch and steward the family land and legacy, with a renewed commitment to center Black joy and Black healing. Through our seven episode podcast series, produced and hosted by free feral, we ride shotgun with Annette and interrogate what it means to create within us the afterlife our ancestors deserve. We bear witness to regional legacies and cradle the mundane mysticism of Hill Country’s cultural traditions in story, music and spiritual exploration.
