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. 

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. 

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. 

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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

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. 

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. 

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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

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. 

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. 

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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.

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.

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. 

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.

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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.

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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.

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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