DIT 2026: Sym Stellium – Our Bodies Are Flooded With Entangled Histories

What

Sym Stellium will host workshops across three days exploring site-specific, intuitive and ritual-based performance practice. Held at different sites in Birmingham and using intuition and ritual as starting points, we will feel through the city’s entanglements with imperialism and colonialism – and how our individual dis/connection to these spaces can inform our artistic practices and attempts toward liberation and collectivity.

Day one

An evening for breaking bread, meditation, mugwort tea, automatic writing and decompression.

Day two

Group visit to the Birmingham Gun Barrel Proof House, followed by a meditation walk.

Day three

A collective ritual performance in a nature space in Birmingham, with each other and the trees as witnesses.

Within cultures of disembodiment, disempowerment and increased polarisation, we can create interventions that could aid us in further disentangling ourselves from colonial thought, process, performance practice and psyche. 

Where

Activities will take place in person in Birmingham, at the following locations: Fierce Festival office, Birmingham Gun Barrel Proof House, and outdoor spaces within Birmingham including Birmingham canals.

When

• Tuesday 28 July, evening (5-8pm)
• Wednesday 29 July, morning/afternoon (10am-3pm)
• Thursday 30 July, morning/afternoon (11am-1pm)

Who

This workshop is open to artists and practitioners engaged/interested in meditative practices, and engaging in critical thinking around British colonialism.

Four of the six places are ringfenced for practitioners based in Birmingham or the wider West Midlands. This means that at least four places will be offered to local practitioners, and the remaining two places are open to artists based anywhere.