Witnessing Refusal

This essay presents a six-week ethnographic study of The Thread, a participatory installation art project installed in Vernon Park in Philadelphia’s predominantly Black Germantown neighborhood in the summer of 2024. Framed by its creators as a sacred space for collective grief, the installation invited parkgoers to engage with a disconnected rotary phone to talk to the deceased and contribute to a memorial mosaic. Yet across 60 hours of fieldwork, I observed sustained public refusal of this installation. Drawing on performance studies, critical qualitative inquiry, and theories of aesthetic autonomy and over-solicitous care, I argue that the community did not simply reject the artwork but refused its moral script and therapeutic authority. Situating this refusal within the cultural performance of ecumenical Black spiritualities, including the Nation of Islam, Pentecostal prayer, and everyday rituals of survival, the essay shows how existing sacred, racial, and cosmological frameworks already organize grief, memory, and relationships in Vernon Park. In this context, refusal emerges not only as disengagement but also as a spiritually and politically grounded practice through which publics assert sovereignty over how urban loss is lived, named, and remembered.