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Black Womxn Time Camp (004)

CampSite

Recorded Workshops

BWTC (004): Black Girl Magic: AfroFuturist Spirituality Workshop for Teens w/ Tonika Berkley
45:46
AfroFuturist Affair

BWTC (004): Black Girl Magic: AfroFuturist Spirituality Workshop for Teens w/ Tonika Berkley

Black Womxn Time Camp (004): Black Girl Magic: AfroFuturist Spirituality Workshop for Teens w/ Tonika Berkley The purpose of the Workshop is to learn about AfroFuturism and popular comic and fantasy characters that come out of that tradition, to learn about how popular BIPOC comic and fantasy characters use spiritual practices in their adventures, and to learn various spiritual practices to improve your connection to body, mind and spirit. We will begin by defining Afrofuturism, look at examples of Afrofuturism found in various genres and mediums and examine the themes that AfroFuturism explores. We will then answer the questions, What is metaphysical energy? What are frequency energies and how do they function in the body? We will discuss various comic book and fantasy characters that use metaphysical energy. At the end of the workshop, participants will be introduced to and practice with various types of bodywork that manipulate energy (ie. meditation, tai chi/qi gong, Reiki, sound frequencies and astral projection/lucid dreaming). Participants will be given resources to take home so that they can practice bodywork and metaphysical techniques at home. Ms. Berkley is a writer, educator, museum professional and a practitioner and student of metaphysical studies. Her former blog, Deeper Shades of Soul, served as an online resource for parents and educators working towards the intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual development of accelerated and multisensory-sensitive children of color. Her speculative fiction short story, “Bravebird”, about educating Indigo children, can be found in “Redlines: Baltimore 2028”. Ms. Berkley is a 20+ year fan of Afrofuturism, speculative fiction, comics and graphic novels.
BWTC: Creating a Score for Astral Projection w/ Jasmine Hearn + Angie Pittman
01:25:50
AfroFuturist Affair

BWTC: Creating a Score for Astral Projection w/ Jasmine Hearn + Angie Pittman

Creating a Score for Astral Projection: How to Leave the Body Listening w/ Jasmine Hearn + Angie Pittman at Black Quantum Futurism: Black Womxn Time Camp (004) Using vibration, voice, memory, listening, myth, and writing, Angie and Jasmine will co-guide a 90 minute experience that weaves embodied sound, somatic engagement, and lecture. Centering practical magic, they will offer creative prompts to be with imagination and the intuitively remembered. We will ask you to move your bodies. ​Angie Pittman is a New York based Bessie award-winning dance artist, dance maker, and dance educator. She holds a MFA in Dance and Choreography with a graduate minor in African American Studies, and is a M’Singha Wuti certified teacher of the Umfundalai technique. She currently dances with MBDance, Donna Uchizono Company, and Keely Garfield Dance. Angie’s work resides in a space that investigates how the body moves through ballad, groove, sparkle, spirit, spirituals, ancestry, vulnerability, and power. Angiepittman.com Jasmine Hearn is a native Houstonian holding their BA in dance from Point Park University, Pittsburgh, PA. A Brooklyn based performer, curator, director, choreographer, organizer, and teaching artist, she is currently a company member with the Urban Bush Women and a 2019 Jerome Foundation Jerome Hill Fellow. She collaborates with Alisha B. Wormsley, MBDance, BANDportier, Vanessa German, and Solange Knowles. While teaching, performing, and collaborating around the world, Jasmine has also shared her work at Danspace Project, The Kelly Strayhorn Theater, New York Live Arts, La Mama Theater, Pillsbury Theater and The Camargo Foundation. Angie and Jasmine have been working together in different capacities collaboratively since 2016 and are both founding members of the Bessie award winning Skeleton Architecture, a vessel of Black womyn and gender nonconforming artists rooted in the rigor and power of the collective in practice.
BWTC: Reparations for Black People Should Include Rest w/ Janine Francois
56:15
AfroFuturist Affair

BWTC: Reparations for Black People Should Include Rest w/ Janine Francois

Black Womxn Time Camp (004) - Reparations for Black People Should Include Rest w/ Janine Francois The transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery produced racist stereotypes about Black people such as being inherently lazy whilst forcing them into centuries of unpaid labour. One of the many legacies of chattel slavery is the "wealth gap," the disparity of wealth accumulation between Black and white people understandably this is where conversations on reparations focus on. However, North American research dubbed the "sleep gap" suggests that Black people get significantly less sleep than white people and according to the scholar Benjamin Reiss this is a legacy of slavery. This talk will discuss "rest’" as a social debt owed to Black people and should be considered as part of the reparation debate by drawing on the artistic and social practices of Tricia Hersey’s, "The Nap Ministry" and Fannie Sosa's and Navild Acosta's, "Black Power Naps." This talk will discuss how each artists conceptualises "rest" as a pleasure-based-strategy of not doing and as a critique on "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to quote bell hooks; drawing on the thinking of Adrienne Maree Brown's "Pleasure Activism," we will speculate how we can demand rest from white cultural institutions as Black people. Janine Francois is a Black Feminist, Cultural Producer and a Lecturer at Central Saint Martins. Her activist and cultural practices centres women/femmes of colour by establishing ‘safe(r)’ spaces as sites of resistance, co-production as well as ethics of care. Janine is undertaking a Ph.D researching, ‘if Tate can be a ‘safe(r) space’ to discuss race and cultural differences?,’ at Tate and University of Bedfordshire. You can follow her via twitter/instagram: @itsjaninebtw or her blog: itsjaninebtw.com

Camp Materials

Program + Zine

Schedule, presenter bios, activities, rituals

Portal Guidebook

A guidebook to the Black Womxn Temporal Portal

Kiana Marcus II Workshop

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Meditation as Tech

Futuristic Relics

DSM 215 Workshop

Black Girl Magic

Day 1 Soundscapes

Day 2 Soundscapes

Day 1 Presenters

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Karine Fleurima

Into the Afrofuture

An AfroFuturistic Sound + Vision Activation. While utilizing manipulated video and electronic rhythms/synths, a voice guides participants into a meditative state to contemplate a revisioning of the future.

Karine Fleurima is an Afro-Haitian writer, sound healer, composer, and Afrofuturistic performance artist. She believes in meditation as a form of resistance and as a means of healing intergenerational trauma. Karine is currently facilitating Ancestral Sound Healing sessions via IG (Wikkid_beat) and virtual BIPOC/LGBQTIA healing spaces. Website: www.karinefleurima.com

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Xenobia Bailey

PARADISE UNDER RECONSTRUCTION IN THE AESTHETIC OF FUNK

I propose to conduct a trend forecasting, 90 minute PowerPoint time traveling lecture & Conversation, of the Beautiful, Raw and Strengthening Aesthetic of the self-sustainable Material Culture, developed by the enslaved and emancipated African American Homemaker/Caregiver. For health, wellbeing, social and economic development. For the gifted, underserved, undervalued rural, urban and suburban communities.

"The early African in North America: Adapting like indigenous people, to the forest, wildlife. natural resources, frequency and vibrational energies for sustainable supports."

Sistah Paradise

My presentation will be inspirations focus on the evolution of the cottage crafts of enslaved African Americans.

1. There will be an introduction to the of traditional ceramic pot making women of Ghana, West Africa, and an introduction to a few contemporary African American Potters/Ceramic Artist, working and living in Philadelphia. I will be forecasting an industrialized trend, of mold making for mass production of domestic health and well-being ceramic ware, to be designed, created marketed and sold by community-based businesses in Philadelphia, operated by Black Women.
2. There will also be an introduction to handmade rug and textile boutique studios, in Philadelphia and around the world, by women of color, that have the potential to market their products to a well-respected, highly experienced, group of Black Interior Designers, that have designed and created for high-end clients, that are redesigning their homes as healthy, comfortable work/live spaces.

This workshop is created to spire ideas for the creation of small cultural equity design businesses, among the under employed African America Creative Community living in Philadelphia and globally.

Xenobia Bailey is a trash alchemist, a single stitch, urban crochet aficionado, designer, artist and community activist, whose practice industrializes the visual aesthetic of “Cosmic-Funk,” practiced by African-American homemakers since Emancipation, into utilitarian “Funktional” design. Media exposure ranges from an Absolut advertisement to a design consultancy with Disney World, and a subway mosaic commission from the MTA in New York. She has shown internationally, with such institutions as Creative Time, the Sharjah Art Foundation, and numerous U.S. Embassies. Her work is held by numerous museums, as well as in academic, corporate, public and private collections.

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dynanism

COME PASS - experimental sound travel for cosmic attunement

dynamism will be providing a sonic flying object for cosmic navigation and intuitive orientation. COME PASS will be a portal space for entrants to receive experimental sonic attunement for a shared ritual of calling in all directions. The ritual of calling in directions is a special key in unlocking and unwrapping the sparkling treasure chests of cosmic and ancestral information we tap into for finding our ways.

 

The sounds that I provide will be collected and selected beforehand and improvisationally curated live. Entrants are welcome and encouraged to create a cozy nesting spot to do and be as they please which could include nothing, napping, writing, listening, slowly eating, and safely tripping. I will intentionally open the portal and provide a brief introduction before activating travel. The nature of these sounds will be determined by the cosmic nature of each direction being called. Each direction is a notch in the COME PASS. We will COME PASS in 7 directions over the course of 30 minutes.

 

COME PASS may help to catalyze your inner sea faring, astro projecting bird selves. Please have a vessel of cool water to sip from.

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Soliana Habte

time is black

this is a love space

a resting place

a place to worship 

a place for healing

soliana is a non-conforming, afro futuristic, transdiscplinary artist. their work attempts to disrupt conventional constructions of racialized and gendered bodies, and to contest the obligation of legibility systemically demanded from Black figures.

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Imani Harmon

Astrological Technology for Marronage and Fugitivity: Wisdom of the 6th and 12 house

In this workshop my intentions would be to unpack interpretations of the astrological 6th and 12th houses and how they inform our experience and resistance to prisons, capitalism, slavery, and exhile. We will use our astrological makeup as a means to fulfill prophecies of Black liberation. 

 

In this workshop I will:

  • Unpack the relationship between these institutions both from a historical and astrological context and make ties to how these themes impact our lives today

  • Explore the ancestral technologies of marronage and fugivitity. 

  • Offer astrological insights on the relationship between mentioned themes and the individual birth chart. 

  • Introduce frameworks on how to approach a birth chart with the lens of resistance 

  • Provide practical examples on ways one can break from said oppressive systems through forms of resistance informed by 6th and 12th house placements and transits. 

In this workshop we will:

 

+ Apply astrological frameworks on analyzing birth charts with the lens of resistance

 + Do a journaling exercise on astrological interpretations of said themes and share personal insights of resistance that centers survival and liberation for black people.

 

Imani Harmon is an astrologer, tarot reader, and space alchemist based in Northern Virginia. Her astrological approach is one that centers collective healing and liberation, specifically the individual roles we have in freeing ourselves from the indoctrination of oppressive structures. She has a weekly podcast “A Movement Worker’s Guide to Astrology” in which she centers the use of astrology for both personal and interpersonal relationships we have to movement work using liberatory frameworks. She is also a student of plant medicine, enjoys art, lover of earth tones and bubble tea. 

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Ingrid Raphael

Webs of Care

We are now, more than ever, confronted with the questions: How do you take care of yourself during this time? How can we show up for ourselves AND others? What are the ways that we aren’t taking care of ourselves + others? What systems of care can we build both online and offline? 

 

In this workshop, we will be imagining and discussing systems of care that are sustainable, reciprocal, collaborative, and restorative. Via group discussion, meditation and movement and the creation of an online zine, participants will display, document and archive visual conceptions of new-alternative models of collaborative and communal care. Come prepared with any of the following: literature around care, visual representations of care, audio/song references of care, and a collaborative spirit. 

 

Ingrid Raphael (they/she) is a filmmaker and educator whose work is rooted in radical imaginings and experimental artmaking: including a list of self-curated filmmaking, photography, dance and archival workshops--with the aims of practicing non-hierarchical power dynamics in a learning environment

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Hannah I. Place

Decolonised Spacetime and Self-Love Portal

To be aligned with liberation is to be in a continuous motion of weaving decolonisation deeper into every last space in our minds and lives. Our very concept of time is not exempt from that decolonisation. 

 

Time is not an immovable object, but an empirical system of measurement. We do not rely upon time, we existed long before this measurement, but unlike us, racial capitalism does rely on empirical linear time, and we can be liberated by decolonising our concepts of time and self. In this workshop we learn how to create our own inter dimensional portal spaces which give us anchoring in decolonised spacetime and opens floodgates of decolonised self-love. 

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Camae Ayewa

 Anthropology of Consciousness

Anthropology of Consciousness uses  free style poetry to awaken past and future memories of a particular location, some of which are transformed into soundscapes and poetry zines. 

Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a musician, poet, visual artist and workshop facilitator, and has performed at numerous festivals, colleges, galleries and museums around the world, sharing the stage with King Britt, Roscoe Mitchell, Claudia Rankine, bell hooks and more. In late 2016, she released her debut album Fetish Bones on Don Giovanni Records with Fetish Bones poetry, followed by her highly-anticipated sophomore album Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes and accompanying Analog Fluids poetry book.

 

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Morena Espiritual

Stardust en el Sur: on musical heritages and unlocking new temporalities

This music history lecture and dance theory workshop will feature the music of Afro-Latinx artists that muse on ancestral inheritance to create new Afrofuturistic fusions like Liniker, Cima Funk and Nitty Scott. Their music will be used as a reference to answer the question: how can we use music and movement to engage ancestry and unlock multiple temporalities? Students will reflect on the cultural heritages that shape their relationship to movement as well as new ways of relating through movement they would want to leave as legacy. No prior knowledge or skill set required, this body affirming, gender expansive workshop welcomes the thought processes of people in all types of bodies.

Moréna Espiritual has performed at venues like the Brooklyn Academy of Music (2014) and New York Live Arts (2016), and their work has been part of an exhibition at the VisArts museum in Rockville, Maryland. They are a recent Teaching Artist Project fellow and have been a guest lecturer with Afrocomunicaciones in Ecuador, Azabache Arte in Colombia, ‌Sarah‌ ‌Lawrence‌ ‌College,‌ ‌Manhattanville College, the ‌Langston‌ ‌Hughes‌ ‌House,‌ and MetaDen among others.‌

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AnAkA

 AKTIV8 AnAkA Portal: Mantra Mixtape & Kazungu Short Film (Premiere)

AnAkA is an archivist, alchemist and artist creating in reverence of ancestral wisdoms and practices. As a reclamation of their ancestral wisdom, AnAkA practices herbalism, tattoo ritual, djembe, dance, film & photography. Her practices encompass the mission to remember the ancient practices of survival and knowledge that had been severed from her lineage. 

 

For this virtual experience, the portal will open with a sonic ode to Akae Beka AKA Vaughn Benjamin, a prophetic musician who has influenced AnAkA’s elevations greatly in the past few years. After this opening, AnAkA will perform works from her in-process music project entitled "Mantra Mixtape.” A project created with the intention of communal healing, Mantra Mixtape serves as a sonic tool to release fearful grief and fill the Spirit with rejuvenated faith. After, AnAkA will premiere a short film entitled “Kazungu,” named after the collaborator who is a traditional bamboo flute maker in Nairobi, Kenya. This short film is a part of a larger project entitled AKTIV8 Archive, a breathing visual archive of creators and healers whose sacred practices are preserved within. The AKTIV8 Archive currently protects stories of Afro-Indigenous peoples from across the US, South Africa, Madagascar, parts of West Africa, Saint Lucia, Kenya and Uganda. Both projects premiering in this way will intentionally slow time and AKTIV8 a portal of healing. Asé.

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Almah LaVon Rice

Nuclear Black Femmeiotics

Nuclear Black Femmeiotics is an Afrofuturistwomxnist reimagination of nuclear semiotics, which concerns itself with how to craft nuclear waste warning messages for generations 10,000+ years from now. How can we fashion ourselves as legible ancestor-projectiles? What might AAVE and other Blacklanguages sound like in the far Afrofuture? Participants will be transformed into atomic priest/esses for this workshop. Attendees will have the opportunity to play, write, emote, compose, deconstruct, and do real-time collaboration and dreaming together.

Almah LaVon Rice is a fairy marsh monster who lives in Pittsburgh with her flamingo wife. She writes creative nonfiction and uncanny short fiction in celebration of Black imagination and dreaming a new world many-petaled. Her forthcoming short stories focus on pandemic Afrofuturism. Instagram: agentsubrosa 

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Rasheedah Phillips

PORTAL SPACE: Recurrence Plot

Short reading and screening of short film The Family Circle from the novel Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales) by Rasheedah Phillips. 

 

Rasheedah Phillips is a Philadelphia-based Civil Rights attorney, artist, mother, and cultural producer whose speculative fiction writing and essays on time, housing, and law have appeared in Keywords for Radicals, Villanova Law Review, The Funambulist Magazine, Recess Arts, and is the self-published author and editor of several anthologies of experimental essays. 

Day 2 Presenters

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Chanelle Adams 

How to Use Meditation as a Technology for Liberation, Healing and Reparations

Meditation, breathwork and visioning are often sold to us as tactics to keep us numb, productive, and asleep. But revolutionary liberation rests on the other side of the technology of our breath. In this workshop, you will be guided through, step by step, how to write your own meditation script with the intentions of freedom, justice, and reparations. You will gain tools to practice resting and regulating through the breath to give more space to dream, vision, heal, and travel. Together, we create portals catered to our individual and collective needs to access liberation across time and space.

Chanelle Adams is a researcher, essayist, and translator committed to interdisciplinary work that weaves in and out of narrative, archival research, and 'natural' sciences. Her work has recurrently appeared in The Funambulist, NPR, and Bitch Media and she has presented on three continents. Read more about healing, diaspora, ghosts, and anti-colonial archives on Chanelle's Twitter at @nellienooks and on her website chanelleadams.info

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Joy Kmt

Maroon Futurisms

Constructing liberatory time circles through ancestral communications. Hood wizardry and the Keys to Freedom. Speaking languages that hold promise of alien futures. In this writing + ritual workshop, Joy KMT will go on an exploratory/excavation of timelines from points of chaotic instability & building futurisms that support the liberation of beings from world-trapped/word-trapped time loops of oppression. 

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Christina Springer  

Futuristic Relics & Motherboards Sacred

Proto-Egunographer, Christina Springer will walk you through a museum in her descendent's Black womanist future.  In this museum tour, we will focus on the early Abuela Engines and the womxn who created them as told to her by 31st Egunographers in Memory Transfer Sessions. 

Christina Springer is an Alt.Black artist who uses text, performance, video and other visual expressions. Her fourth collection of poetry, The Splooge Factory, was released by Frayed Edge Press in November 2018.  San Jose, Dayton and Pittsburgh recently exhibited Futuristic Relics & Motherboards Sacred: a collection of 80 paintings, fabric, mixed media objects and texts from a museum of our Black utopian womanist future. Springer serves as the Resident Elder for Black Dream Escape.  Cave Canem shaped her voice. Springer resides in Pittsburgh where she home educates her son. For a complete statement about Alt.Black: https://www.christinaspringer.com/home/artist-statement

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LaTierra Piphus - Womanist Working Collective

Kiana Marcus II: The Community Weaver

This workshop serves as an introduction to The Womanist Working Collective's Reciprocity Community Time Bank giving participants firsthand experience through a virtual Scavenger Hunt game and exploring the necessity of building our own systems when the current ones are both insufficient and fatal.

 

This workshop picks up where we left off in Kiana Marcus’ temporality in which she was nearly defeated by the Capitalist beast called Time Poverty. After falling asleep on the couch with her phone in her hand, she dreams that time freezes and that she is then sucked into her phone screen and lands on this virtual plane where all temporalities in which she, her family and community can thrive are possible...

 

During this workshop, participants will engage in a virtual scavenger hunt mission in our Time Banking Portal. On their missions participants will experience how to weave communities of support and safety through practices of self-determination, interdependence and community resource mobilization through mutual exchanges of time & talents. 

 

From an Ecological Justice lens, the act of a Radical Time Banking is a survivor-led people’s economy where all versions of our liberated futures are possible, tangible and ultimately rooted in dismantling the various systems of oppression (Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist CisHeteroPatriarchy) by centering the margins within already oppressed communities like folx who are low-income, folx who are experiencing housing instability, folx who are BIPOC, folx who are survivors, folx who are queer & trans folx, folx with disabilities, folx who are immigrants or refugees and folx who rely on the Underground Economy (i.e. sex workers, street pharmacists, undocumented, etc.). Radical Time Banking centers Womanist Praxis, Healing Justice, Just Transitions and Social & Solidarity Economy frameworks. 

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Janine Francois Reparations for Black People Should Include Rest 

The transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery produced racist stereotypes about Black people such as being inherently lazy whilst forcing them into centuries of unpaid labour. One of the many legacies of chattel slavery is the "wealth gap," the disparity of wealth accumulation between Black and white people understandably this is where conversations on reparations focus on. However, North American research dubbed the "sleep gap" suggests that Black people get significantly less sleep than white people and according to the scholar Benjamin Reiss this is a legacy of slavery. This talk will discuss "rest’" as a social debt owed to Black people and should be considered as part of the reparation debate by drawing on the artistic and social practices of Tricia Hersey’s, "The Nap Ministry" and  Fannie Sosa's and Navild Acosta's, "Black Power Naps." This talk will discuss how each artists conceptualises "rest" as a  pleasure-based-strategy of not doing and as a critique on "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to quote bell hooks; drawing on the thinking  of Adrienne Maree Brown's "Pleasure Activism," we will speculate how we can demand rest from white cultural institutions as Black people. 

Janine Francois is a Black Feminist, Cultural Producer and a Lecturer at Central Saint Martins. Her activist and cultural practices centres women/femmes of colour by establishing ‘safe(r)’ spaces as sites of resistance, co-production as well as ethics of care. Janine is undertaking a Ph.D researching, ‘if Tate can be a ‘safe(r) space’ to discuss race and cultural differences?,’ at Tate and University of Bedfordshire. You can follow her via twitter/instagram: @itsjaninebtw or her blog: itsjaninebtw.com

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Antonia Gabriela Pereira 

From the pharynx

It is a trilogy formed by three performances "Erotic Autonomy" "Mutation" and "Insurrectionist".  
From the Faringe weave the story of the insistence on existing through, with and within the voice, weave the story of the existence that comes from the flesh and the transmutation of the flesh and voice into energy and immaterial resources that black women bring from their maternal lineage. 

 

Antônia Gabriela Pereira de Araújo is an anthropologist, dancer and performance artist from the city of Fortaleza, Ceará (Brazil) and currently resides in the city of Rio de Janeiro. I work with black women boxers in the city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Havana (Cuba). I have experience with communities that suffer from State violence and that are criminalized by addressing the juxtaposition of oppressions such as class, gender, race and sexuality. Currently, I work with a group of black and mestizo women who resist gender and "race" violence in their communities (Complexo da Maré and Complexo do Alemão) with the performance of spoken/spoken poetry (Slam as Minas RJ). From my own life experience, as a black woman and intellectual I question various social statistics, taboos and stereotypes about my body and black female bodies. 

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Jasmine Hearn + Angie D. Pittman Creating a Score for Astral Projection: how to leave the body listening

Using vibration, voice, memory, listening, myth, and writing, Angie and Jasmine will co-guide a 90 minute experience that weaves embodied sound, somatic engagement, and lecture. 

 

Centering practical magic, they will offer creative prompts to be with imagination and the intuitively remembered. 

 

We will ask you to move your bodies. 

Angie Pittman is a New York based Bessie award-winning dance artist, dance maker, and
dance educator. She holds a MFA in Dance and Choreography with a graduate minor in African
American Studies, and is a M’Singha Wuti certified teacher of the Umfundalai technique. She
currently dances with MBDance, Donna Uchizono Company, and Keely Garfield Dance. Angie’s work resides in a space that investigates how the body moves through ballad, groove, sparkle, spirit, spirituals, ancestry, vulnerability, and power. Angiepittman.com

 

Jasmine Hearn is a native Houstonian holding their BA in dance from Point Park University,
Pittsburgh, PA. A Brooklyn based performer, curator, director, choreographer, organizer, and
teaching artist, she is currently a company member with the Urban Bush Women and a 2019
Jerome Foundation Jerome Hill Fellow. She collaborates with Alisha B. Wormsley, MBDance,
BANDportier, Vanessa German, and Solange Knowles. While teaching, performing, and
collaborating around the world, Jasmine has also shared her work at Danspace Project, The
Kelly Strayhorn Theater, New York Live Arts, La Mama Theater, Pillsbury Theater and The
Camargo Foundation.
Angie and Jasmine have been working together in different capacities collaboratively since 2016 and are both founding members of the Bessie award winning Skeleton Architecture, a vessel of Black womyn and gender nonconforming artists rooted in the rigor and power of the collective in
practice.

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Tonika Berkley

Black Girl Magic: AfroFuturist Spirituality Workshop for Teens

The purpose of the Workshop is to learn about AfroFuturism and popular comic and fantasy characters that come out of that tradition, to learn about how popular BIPOC comic and fantasy characters use spiritual practices in their adventures, and to learn various spiritual practices to improve your connection to body, mind and spirit. We will begin by defining Afrofuturism, look at examples of Afrofuturism found in various genres and mediums and examine the themes that AfroFuturism explores. We will then answer the questions, What is metaphysical energy? What are frequency energies and how do they function in the body? We will discuss various comic book and fantasy characters that use metaphysical energy. At the end of the workshop, participants will be introduced to and practice with various types of bodywork that manipulate energy (ie. meditation, tai chi/qi gong, Reiki, sound frequencies and astral projection/lucid dreaming). Participants will be given resources to take home so that they can practice bodywork and metaphysical techniques at home.

 

Ms. Berkley is a writer, educator, museum professional and a practitioner and student of metaphysical studies.  Her former blog, Deeper Shades of Soul, served as an online resource for parents and educators working towards the intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual development of accelerated and multisensory-sensitive children of color. Her speculative fiction short story, “Bravebird”, about educating Indigo children, can be found in “Redlines: Baltimore 2028”. Ms. Berkley is a 20+ year fan of Afrofuturism, speculative fiction, comics and graphic novels.

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Jasmine Newton

Continuing Octavia's Brood

What does a world where gentrification doesn’t exist look like? What about a world where prisons aren’t “prisons” but are rehabilitating institutions? What does that feel like? What does it mean for our children and their children? In this workshop, we will explore how our creativity and imagination allows us to conceptualize worlds without social injustices and worlds where the histories of the marginalized are rewritten by us. The purpose of this workshop is to feel empowered by your pen, your thoughts, and your words. We will be reading an excerpt from Octavia’s Brood (which is an anthology of short stories inspired by the legacy of Octavia Butler and Afro Speculative Fiction) we will discuss the works to gain a better understanding of how to utilize science fiction to address social injustices. As we gain this understanding, it will allow us to reimagine the world and understand what steps we can take to mobilize and collectively create our own stories. I hope this workshop will inspire womxn to not only dream about equity for themselves but articulate ways to act on them. With permission, I hope those willing to participate can record the stories they create as a dope audiovisual archive we can share. Let’s continue to dream. 

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Ras Mashramani + Mel Brown - DSM 215 Collective

Black Muscle Memory: Exploring Black Womxn's Labor 

A workshop that excavates ancestry as it relates to labor, work and movement building while interrogating anti-black class violence. 


Goals for participants: For Black womxn to leave with the tools to begin healing racialized economic trauma, for divesting from capitalism, and weaponizing it in support of a sustainable collective future.

Ras Mashramani is Cali born, Philly fed, and Guyana blood. She is co-founder of the around-the-way DIY sci-fi collective, Metropolarity. Inspired by the collective action of the Occupy Philly movement, Ras Mashramani had a vision that a new form of sci-fi would emerge--one that is active, accessible, and grown from the block. Ras Mashramani believes that sci-fi is a technology that allows those without a way forward in the violent machinery that is our economic, criminal justice, and cultural systems, to build futures where they are alive and thriving. Ras Mashramani writes about altered states, state/community/sexual violence, alien abductions, life online, clandestine sanctuaries, queer utopias, and systemic paranoia. In a parallel existence, she is a mental health worker. Her name is a celebration. She is a job well done.

Mel is an exhibiting visual artist and costume designer that founded a non-profit vintage retail shop, formerly located in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia, called Colored Vintage. She’s currenly a co-director for a queer youth-led artist residency called the Young Artist Program.

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Joe Hatton

Healing and Catharsis Through Comics and Illustration

Sometimes there are nagging problems or feelings in our lives that elude practical solutions.  In this workshop we will pair meditation and drawing to create a memory where we actively resolve a troublesome issue in a way that gives us closure, allowing us to move past it.

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