SPEAKERS
Charlotte Cooper is a psychotherapist working in East London. She performs as Homosexual Death Drive and is known for her work on fat. More at charlottecooper.net.
image credit ©Christa Holka
25th November 2020
10:00-17:00 GMT/11:00-18:00 CET
Conversations on expanded multi-dimensional ideas of anatomy, divination, geography and language, seeking to bring transformational movement to ideas of trauma and healing as they are shaped by oppressive systems and given form in our bodies
This DIY is run in partnership with Cambridge Junction
“hyper awareness is violence to myself / it is not a choice to be in a continual state of friction”
“What is this work and if it is survival work, why can it leave us feeling devastated? This is not necessarily a sign of growth or healing, or if it is a part of these processes, how can I/we support that? What do we do with it, how can we move through it?
I guess I want to think together about/allow a being in, this wake, hitting up against hostile architectures that exist inside and around us.”
We (Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin & Jamila Johnson-Small/SERAFINE1369) are hosting a conference with guest speakers working across different fields invited to discuss their strategies for and approaches to facilitation; on how embodying the work that they do invites an approach to and views on holding, guidance, navigating and working with language to support the communication and manifestations of their visions and intentions. The speakers are Charlotte Cooper, Kopano Maroga, Daniella Valz Gen and Selam Testfai.
We are thinking about expanded ideas of anatomy, divination, geography, and the ways that ideologies in/form language and bodies/gesture as ways to think about – and bring movement to – trauma as it is held in bodies and perpetuated by systems, including ideas of healing and the wellness industry.
Trauma and healing are two words come up often in the work that we both do, and we take issue with how they are situated within, and mobilised (sometimes weaponised) by, pop and queer cultural discourses and practices, and as such, absorbed into our lives, daily practices of relating and communicating and conceiving of ‘self’. There are lots of monolithic and slippery words that we would like to think about together and with others, untouchable unbreakable seemingly immovable shape-shifting looming objects of false promises and disguised violence.
The conference will be a collage of questions, predicaments, criticism, strategies and responses that come up as we navigate how to embody the things we aim to share as artists and facilitators. We want the day to offer some energetic cleansing, some poetry and the opportunity to speak critically, curiously and kindly as we think together about crafting and sharpening tools for the destruction of oppressive systems.
A public fragment of our ongoing conversations can be found here.
Charlotte Cooper is a psychotherapist working in East London. She performs as Homosexual Death Drive and is known for her work on fat. More at charlottecooper.net.
image credit ©Christa Holka
Daniella Valz Gen – I both hate and love to write. I resist and struggle with the process and frustrate myself with the idea that writing is a discipline. I’m not a disciplined writer, or artist. I write in spurts and I often let the creative stream of consciousness wash over me, unwritten, unperformed, unmade. I tell myself this is ok, healthy even. I’m more interested in the tactile, as in the things that I feel, that envelop me and others. My oracular practice centres Tarot and playing cards and I’m happiest when I can compose from this space. Sometimes I’m happy just looking and nurturing a practice of contemplation.
Kopano Maroga is a performance artist, writer, cultural worker and co-founding director of the socio-cultural arts organization ANY BODY ZINE. They are currently living in Brussels, Belgium and working as a curator and guest-dramaturge at Kunstencentrum Vooruit in Ghent, Belgium. Their debut anthology of poetry Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations is forthcoming through uHlanga Press. They very much believe in the power of love as a weapon of mass construction.
image credit ©Louis Kerckhof
Selam Tesfai – “I was born and raised in Milan by an Eritrean family, my father, a marxist involved in the Eritrean Liberation Front and my mother a wise pragmatic african woman. If people would ask me what I do, I wouldn’t know how to define all the things that matter to me, but people like definitions so I sometimes say: I’m a human rights activist.
I’m part of a rebellious community of people that daily fight to take back their rights and live with dignity against a system that would better like to rip us apart. My aim is to help this community to survive and do that myself too.”
Times below are in GMT/CET
10:00/11:00 – Intro/welcome/group practice (20 minutes)
10:20/11:20 – Presentation 1 (25 minutes)
Question/Note writing time (5 minutes)
10:50/11:50 – Presentation 2 (25 minutes)
Question/Note writing time (5 minutes)
11:20/12:20 – Pause (10 minutes)
11:30/12:30 – Questions (30 minutes)
12:00/13:00 – Break (1 hour)
13:00/14:00 – Presentation 3 (25 minutes)
Question/Note writing time (5 minutes)
13:30/14:30 – Presentation 4 (25 minutes)
Question/Note writing time (5 minutes)
14:00/15:00 – Pause (10 minutes)
14:10/15:10 – Questions (30 minutes)
14:40/15:40 – Break (10 minutes)
14:50/15:50 – Group conversation (40 minutes)
15:30/16:30 – Final words (15 minutes)
15:45/16:45 – Closing/group practice (15 minutes)
17:00/18:00 – END
The conference is open to anyone who is busy/in friction with/questioning the words trauma and healing in their practice/thinking/making/moving/facilitating ++, (ie. facilitators/therapeutic practitioners/body workers/activists/organisers/agitators/educators/divination practitioners/writers/doctors/health workers/energy workers particularly those with a creative and/or artistic practice);
We are holding a maximum of 18 places for participants, to sign up please follow this link.
We are wanting to ensure that there is a range of practices/knowledges/geographic locations/generations/race/gender.
Precedence will be given to BQTIPOC.
The conference will be in english and is free to attend.
Deadline for expressions of interest is Sunday 22nd November.
We will write back to confirm attendance by 12pm GMT on Tuesday 24th.
Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin is an artist, independent researcher and queer agitator of Armenian descent. Trained in dance, their work exists in the shape of movement, video, text, choreography, sound, gatherings and deals with narratives of hostility, rest, friction, sensuality, healing.
SERAFINE1369 (previously Last Yearz Interesting Negro) is the London based artist and dancer Jamila Johnson-Small. SERAFINE1369 works with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology.
image credit © F. De Isabella
image credit © Amy Gwatkin for The Wire
Banner image credit:
Image credit © Kamee Abrahamian
A list of the artist development workshops being run as part of DIY 2020.
Artistic practice as queer civics: a series of online encounters about making better worlds through lived experience, material support, fun, and mutation.
Read moreRestless Study will be a space for people to study which privileges restlessness and distraction over focus and concentration. We will generate, manipulate and circulate objects of study, including text, conversation, image, action, movement, and beyond. We will throw off the shackles of goal-oriented education to reclaim study as a vital, liberatory mode of being in dialogue with others!
Read moreA six-week collectively-generated course on and in Fat Performance for fat people.
Read moreThis DIY project uses performance informed by science fiction, magic, ritual and idiocy to explore how our relationship to the public realm has changed and will continue to change because of COVID-19.
Read moreSocial life marooned like Tom Hanks in Castaway? Don’t befriend a volleyball, get social at Live Art Social (distance) Club!
Read moreA 3-day remote retreat for six producers, curators and arts administrators who have had to undo their present and future work due to COVID-19. This DIY is run in partnership with ArtHouse Jersey
Read moreInterested in using Live Art to create lo-fi short films exploring mental health and queer culture?
Read more“… Money talks, Dirty cash I want you, dirty cash I need you, oho”
Read moreAutobiographical sessions for postcolonial diaspora. Bodies as places of legacy; voice as ancestral calling; sharing stories; rituals; being vulnerable together.
Read moreThat’s Governance! invites participants to interrogate conditions of governance, and propose, through roleplay, a non-human candidate for Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW)’s Board of Trustees.
Read more“We will each immerse ourselves in a nearby forest and co-generate shared experiences through a series of synchronous somatic exercises and collective reading online. These activities will be the departure point for writing ghost stories and erotica.”
Read moreWhite Vinegar Workshop revolves around the quote from leading New York artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”.
Read moreLeonie and Ishwari will be working to explore alternative processes of mapping time and landscape, moving away from ideas of linearity and colonial legacies of demarcation. Focussing on process rather than production, they will do this using plant-based darkroom printing, fermentation and chorus interventions.
Read moreMake like teenagers and build the Discord fanfiction version of Live Art from your bedroom, under the mentorship of real-life Discord experts (teenagers).
Read moreAn intimate online pleasure LAB for disabled queers exploring Kink as an artistic tool for self-care.
Read moreA workshop aimed at fans and future fans of the late great Katherine Araniello, a queer, crip, red-headed firebrand whose work lives on to disturb and tantalize in equal measure.
Read moreA workshop for artists who lost projects in 2020, sharing what we have lost, learned and gained, creating mourning rituals and (re)discovering our individual and collective resources.
Read moreAn online residency queerying ‘The politics of Intimacy’ within our bodies and lives as well as in our creative practice/s
Read moreA Way Away uses the mode of correspondence course to explore ideas around distance – spatial and temporal, physical and social, imagined and real.
Read moreTaking an experimental journey of gentle sensory under-load, progressively leading up to observing or participating in a full body wrap.
Read moreApply to participate in DIY 2020; workshops developed and lead BY artists, FOR artists
Read moreThe first in a series of workshop sessions for SWANA young people to find out more about creative careers, and exchange knowledge with not only each other, but boss industry professionals smashing it in their fields.
Read moreProfessional development projects – BY artists FOR artists – across the UK.
Read moreFuck your extraction economy
Read moreA symposium, on land and in water, for adapting to life on an inundated planet
Read more“We will each immerse ourselves in a nearby forest and co-generate shared experiences through a series of synchronous somatic exercises and collective reading online. These activities will be the departure point for writing ghost stories and erotica.”
Read more