Show up for the Black Community!

Breathing | Being | Praying exercise # 23

Companheires,

As you know, I have been making these breathing | Being | Praying exercises for the last months to center, to be in touch with our breath, to excavate sensations on my body that often go unnoticed, to enflesh feelings. To have feelings that think and thoughts that feel, as Claudio Carvalhaes has taught me. Coke Tani invited me to think about the shape and movement of body prayer. Years of work with the healing arts through the teachings of Caroline Vigery, Veronica Iglesias, Mae Sandra, @anaeloisas, Eliad Santos, Débora A Junker, Divane Agra, aunties, grandmas, and cousins have taught me to let the body breathe, be, and pray. I transferred these knowing into to this drawing practice. And here is how it typically goes:

Take a deep breath. Take a moment to center yourself. Maybe create sacred space. Maybe meditate for a few minutes. When you feel grounded, identify a phrase that crystalizes a thought or sensation that wants to come to the surface of your skin. Write that in the center of the page. Breathe into this deeply and slowly. Trust your hand and the movement it wants to make, where it wants to take you, what it wants to reveal to you, as Elaine Panagos reminded me once. Draw one line as you breathe in and one line as you breathe out. After about 20 minutes of this exercise, do a bit of noting and writing based on the insights from the drawings.

The insights that accompanied this particular drawing today developed for me as a series of questions:

What am I committing to doing today? Within the next week? Next month? Next semester? Next year? Next decade? What will be my commitment as I do my life’s work?

I will continue to call for justice and gather resources. For Breonna Taylor. I will continue to breathe; continue to care for myself and communities. I will financially support the work of Oluwatomisin Oredein (venmo @Oluwatomisin_Oredein) one of the most brilliant educators and scholars I know. The work of Tamisha Tyler (Venmo: @Tamisha_Tyler), another badass scholar. Check her #WhyIsSheSoDope Series. I will continue to redistribute income. Donate to bail funds. I will give up white power and privilege.

Continue to undo and give up the power proximity to whiteness has afforded me. I will carry Cheryl Harris’s words with me and share it widely, every day: the Americanization project is fundamentally anti-black—the LAW has afforded holders of whiteness the same privileges afforded to other types of properties, as it’s an aspect of identity and a property interest used to exercise power.

I will continue to question:

After the performance is over when the streets are empty when our throats can’t chant words anymore, our eyes can’t cry, our arms can’t hold up signs any longer, what is left? Who am I? How will we show up?
Ericka Hart (venmo: @ericka-hart)—non-binary Sex educator, Racial, Social, Gender justice disruptor—asks us with white privilege what are we going to do? Will we give up power? Authority? Visibility? Will we understand that our whiteness and commitment to it is lethal? Will we admit our complicity in anti-blackness and racism? Are we willing to lose friends, have difficult conversations, put bodies on the line, lose our jobs? Be rendered as the dissenting voices wherever we go?

Will we redistribute income? Will we pass on job opportunities? Will we demand our Black siblings are properly compensated? Will we work toward reparation? Will we continue to confront whiteness in our board of directors, the board of trustees, our institutions? Will we work toward reimagining and recreating community strategies for life beyond capitalism, for safety, emergency response, collective care that does not require police presence? Will we continue to fight for abolition? Will we advocate for Black presence? Will we reach for our pockets? Will we follow Black leadership? Will we check on Black friends? Will we protect Black lives? Will we not rest until our families friends and communities are educated about the implications of anti-blackness?

Black Friends:
You have the right to be, and to be free, and to be safe, and to be feeling, and to be creating, and to be dreaming, and to be healed, and to be resting. I will not stop fighting for these rights. I continue to offer reiki sessions. Hit me up if you need one. #healersforblacklives #whitenessislethal

To The PSR Graduating Class of 2020

Breathing | Being | Praying exercise 21
To PSR’s graduating class of 2020:

Dear Comrades,
I write to you during a time that is full of complexities, losses, mourning, sadness, and impossibility. I stand in solidarity with you: I, too, was also unable to “walk” and be “present” for my graduation ceremony this spring. .

We are surviving a global pandemic.
No other graduating class at PSR has lived through anything quite like this. We don’t know what will be the toll of these months on our bodies, spirit, communities, the environments and all our relations. .

We are living between the shadow of the now and the possibilities of our dreams for tomorrow. As Anzaldua put it, we are living in a moment mientras la sombra y el sueño. The exercise of re-membering important aspects of our trajectories helps us bear this moment and conjure up a future that is not yet here. .

Let’s face it, you have navigated cishet patriarchy & sexism, colonialism, racism, extractivist capitalism, white supremacy, phobias, violence, trauma, and so much more. re-membering these shadows is also an exercise in naming how far you have come. These memories testify to how you’ve resisted, how you have desired, dreamt another future for yourselves. What were the communities, the bodies, the relationships, the shared meals, the movements, the cries, and pleasures, ancestral wisdom, familial bonds, acts of kindness, places, generosities that were extended to you? Which authors, artists, art forms, theories, field work, communities, classes, hallway conversation, educators kept your heart pulsating all these years? Your curiosity and wonder alive? These people and places and beings and moments and memories have inscribed within y/our skin invaluable body-knowledge of how to reinvent existence in the face of impossibility. They are witnesses and blueprints of how you have been able to imagine, build, and create worlds where none seemed possible. .

May you re-member them. Always. Know that you are sacred, ferocious. .

You are Holy. .

You are love. .

May God bless and protect you as you move into the four directions of your future. .

With love and affection, Dr. Yô

PROFESSORS OF PRACTICE--EPISTOLARY PRACTICE--SESSION 4

During the month of April, Jeff Chang and myself co-taught the module “Living Democracy: Image and Culture” of the Professors of Practice course at the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley.

Below is the epistolary practice I closed each session with—entitled Love-Lectures—in hopes that these letters could bleed from my heart to yours. Here is letter #4.

Breathing | Being | Praying Meditation 6

Yohana Junker, March 21, 2020

Beloved Comrades, Beloved Friends, if I may,

It’s me again.

I have been thinking a lot about the end of our journey with you and wanted to extend a gift. I have been practicing this breathing-being meditation and one of them was around something I have been grateful for… virtually exchanging many “I see yous” with folks on this journey. This phrase, A troca de olhar, involves a bit of invocation, it entails an exchange of gazes, of deep regard, a scanning, probing of one another’s being, a profound act of presence, of saying I see the entirety and the miracle of you. As I drew each of these eyes, I offered a prayer to you, a silent exercise of slow and deep seeing, a prayer for our collective well-being, and I extend that to you today.

I have also been thinking a lot about this word: Acolhimento. And I offer that to you. It lives and breathes in the embrace we receive when the load is unwieldy when experiences are felt-with. It’s sort of a deep regard, too, an honoring of all that we are and go through. It’s a welcoming. A word that condenses the “Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” How have we practiced and offered each other acolhimento in our relations?

Breathing | Being | Praying meditation 17
Yohana Junker, April 30, 2020

One of the ways I do that is through the practices of writing letters. You’ve heard a couple of them so far. Not the type where you give some kind of news on the state of affairs. I’m talking about the letter we write to be-with. To feel-with. To move against loneliness, to share beauty, joy, music, musings. The delight of eating. That desire to have my hand touch yours. I want this sheet of paper I am touching right now to be touched and handled by you—I have nothing more important to give you but a troca de olhar, my full intention, which is filled with deep meaning. Beyond everything you will hear from me today, my most singular hope is that you feel held. Acolhide, hugged, touched. Letter writing reminds me of aspects of this pandemic. A hand that writes a letter wants what is absent. A connection betwee two lonelinesses. Rubem Alves taught me that long ago. He said that letters stores words we can come back to when loneliness hits us hard. Think of yourself holding this letter to your face. Could anything be more tender? More loving? More sacramental? A palpable presence of that which is invisible and physically inaccessible right now? They are ways of archiving our deepest hungers, our most intimate desires… and the blasphemies of our times…

Letters are not neutral. They are filled with what makes us pulsate. They encapsulate the worlds in which we live. Right now we are living through the scandal of this Pandemic. This letter not only holds tenderness, acolhimento, but the disaster that ensues from holding on to the myths of power… of perpetual growth, expansion, unlimited progress, displacement, disease… Some of us have transformed our relations into transactions. We are living through illness. Despair. Angst. Instability. Hunger. Death. Pain. Trauma. I am metabolizing all of this as I write to you. And I know deep in my bones that the foundations upon which we have built our societies are not all right.

I hope this letter offers you a material way to reflect while assuring you that you are not alone. I have read many letters these past few days and would like to share some excerpts with you that bear an infinity of traces about how life is going for some of us. This is what Freire called an archeology of our pains. These letters were gifts of prophetic discernment, as my mom, Debora Junker put it, of being simultaneously aware of the word and the world, that denounces the myths of power, supremacy, settler-colonialism and the illogic of neo-capitalism. These are letters from folks who are carrying a lot of heartaches, indignation, political rage. May we listen to these powerful voices with presence.

“I spent countless summers in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Precious days of my childhood were spent stooping and working alongside my parents, brothers, and cousins. We were essential links in a supply chain that kept America fed, but always a step away from detention and deportation. Today, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Mexico and Central America are doing that work. By the Department of Agriculture’s estimates, about half the country’s field hands — more than a million workers — are undocumented. Growers and labor contractors estimate that the real proportion is closer to 75 percent. Suddenly, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, these “illegal” workers have been deemed “essential” by the federal government. America still wants it both ways. It wants to be fed. And it wants to demonize the undocumented immigrants who make that happen.”

*These words are from Alfredo Corchado and his writing featured here.

“Hey…. So…. I heard you were reading letters to folks over there in the North. Um…

And I don’t really know how to put this… But I guess, I’ll just do it.

I want to tell you of Admário Lucena. Could you add him to the cloud of witnesses you are gathering? Can you let folks where you live that down here in Recife, Adamario was born in 1951. He passed away just a few days ago due to covid, though the record will never say so. Our government is a shit show right now. IT WAS COVID. We all know it was. No need to lie and pretend is was respiratory insufficiency that stole his last breath. My dad was a very emotional man; I can’t even begin to fathom how painful his death was. Not so much because o the physical pain. But the pain of not being able to say goodbye. Yeah.. His young soul was always the life and laughter and light of any party. He wouldn’t miss a carnival for anything. He was such a proud papa. I loved him so much. He was so tender. He was going to be a grandpa to Vicente in just two months. We love you, Dad. We miss you and ache with your absence in unutterable ways. Your daughter, Rebeca.

**This is letter is an loosely based on the memories described by Rebeca, which is featured on this website—an online memorial project dedicated to the stories of each of the Victims of COVID-19 in Brazil.

“I saw this hand-drawn note from another chaplain who has been leaving notes to patients in the ICU here at the hospital. She told me that it’s her way of showing presence in the face of calamity. The Coronavirus pandemic has changed how we grieve. As a chaplain, I have become an intermediary between patients and their families. I try to offer spiritual support by being an emissary of drawings, letters, anything that can be seen through those glasses. Oh, and the hospital staff right now. They are exhausted. Acutely. I asked an elementary school teacher, who is a friend of mine, to inquire whether their students would be willing to send me pictures of messages they would send to their patients. There is just so much power in the hands of children. I woke up to more than 64 images in my inbox. I printed them all out and spread throughout the hospital. Children are so precious, they are so present. One asked how was he to draw something to someone he didn’t know the patients’ names. He demanded we send them a list with names. I sent that list to Miranda yesterday. One note read: I can’t see you but I can hear you. I will pray for you.”

***This letter is loosely based on this report.

“So I heard you are reading some letters, and I am writing with words that are not my own. They come from Indigenous activist Nick Estes. It struck me deeply. I hope it touches you as well. He said in an interview, and I quote: “the primary organizing principle of a settler society is the elimination of the Native, whether it is in Palestine or the United States. Thus, the organizing structure of the United States’ economy and its political institutions is based around disenfranchisement of Indigenous people — politically, economically and physically. There is a common myth in U.S. history that most Indigenous people did not die because of active killing, warfare and genocide, but rather as a result of outbreaks: smallpox, measles and cholera. However, these epidemics occurred and intensified in times of war, which meant mass forced starvation, depravation of resources, such as access to sanitary conditions… The conditions of war were created by design to intensify these outbreaks of contagious diseases. In fact, epidemiologist Dean S. Seneca claims Indigenous people have the most experience with bioterrorism as it relates to infectious disease. If we look at the response now to COVID-19, it has some parallels to this history. When you examine the Navajo Nation, which is larger than the state of West Virginia, you have the third-largest infection rate after the states of New York and New Jersey, higher not just on the reservation but also off it… Change from within is an illusion. That is simply how class works. We need to construct power from below by elevating a candidate who is a product of social movements, not the corporate party structure.”

****This letter is retrieved from this interview with Estes.

“Hi. My name is Emilia Brandão. I am an artist, a photographer, and I am have been photographing nurses in the frontlines here where I live, in Madrid, Spain. When I picked my camera to memorialize these processes of living and dying amidst COVID-19, I was expecting to hear stories of losses, of how nurses and doctors, and healthcare workers were attempting to provide cure and assurance to the population. What I witnessed, instead were professionals who were sacrificing their lives. They are exhausted. They are working 16, 18, 20 hour shifts. We have been calling them our heroes. They are not. They are people like you and me. They are suffering, this word puts an incredible pressure on them. They are so close to collapsing, you wouldn’t believe it. All of them. One of the nurses in particular described having to stop nursing her daughter because she said she chose to be with patients right now. She hasn’t touched her baby in 4 weeks. Doctors have left their homes weeks ago in fear of contaminating their family members. One of them told me she gave up being a mother momentarily. She needed to be there in the frontlines for her patients. And the grave tone in her voice made me cry as she confirmed that she knew the bill was going to come for her, at some point in the future. She was ready to face her children’s resentment in the face of her absence. They say they don’t know where they are conjuring up so much strength. I say I know. It’s love.”

*****This letter is based on the work of photographer Emilia Brandão, which can be found here.

“Dear Human Siblings, I hope this letter finds you enjoying a cool evening breeze. Our grounds and lands have been invaded this past month by the deadliest beings we have ever seen. I am still disoriented from it all. I witnessed the death of thousands of our kinfolk. They were all decapitated. Yes, you read it right. Thousands of us were decapitated—in a mass murder of unprecedented measure. The screams, the chaotic buzzing, the fear. I really don’t know how we can begin to grieve this loss, let alone deal with this trauma. You may not know this, but your existence is intimately dependent on ours. We will not be here on this side of the country to pollinate our land if you don’t commit to protecting our lives from these murderers, these giant hornets. This mass murder has shaken us in similar ways COVID-19 has changed your and our lives. You must reconfigure the ways in which your understand ourselves, our bonds, our lives, our values, ways of being, and our relationships to one another and the earth. I hope you think of us next time you hear us buzzing close to your gardens.”

******This letter is based on this report.

Breathing | Being | Praying Meditation 8
Yohana Junker, March 24, 2020

Alas, these are but a few of the ten thousand voices that are heard through the distance. Let us keep these memories alive, let them be the records of our longing, may they archive what we love, create an archive of that which we love and want to safeguard most deeply. Let them be the fire that ignites our capacity for ethical transgressions, for fierce protection of what is most precious. As I bring this letter to a close, for know, I can taste the saudade in my mouth, that sweet alchemy that mixes our melancholia that is drenched with hope, a joy that aches, a hunger that wants to be reunited with that which we love, an acknowledgement of what we have lost but will perhaps one day return to us. Saudade. Rubem Alves said that God exists to soothe this saudade in us. As we think about these peoples, their stories, the place names, their bodies, their ancestral knowledge, may we create strategies for belonging. May we celebrate the life that is still ours to live, our inherent right to live a dignified, free, and creative life. Transformation depends on our ability to hone in and develop our politics through a deep democracy, to be fully present in symbolic, spiritual, and practical ways so that we disturb and trespass the registers of power that don’t allow us to fully be. May the words that were read today become breathing and enfleshed testimonies, archiving the past with traces of infinity, divinity, and presence. We can’t think of tomorrow without engaging deeply with what terrifies us. And we can’t be encouraged to create new worlds if we don’t testify to this deep love we have for life and all our relations. May we find ways to dribble the unbearable isolation we currently find ourselves to become poetic-prophetic presences in the world, as my mom once wrote. May we be responsive, present, aware, drawing from the wisdom of our embodied and pulsating imaginations. Let the wisdom of our desires and joys carry us forward. May we find ways to be together and to feast and to remember the flavors of our dreams, the cadence of our songs, the prophetic- power of our creative work.

And, until we meet again, may we remember that miracles emerge in our communities when we come together to love deeply, commune radically, and act urgently.

With love, tenderness, and an already growing saudade,

Dr. Yô.

PROFESSORS OF PRACTICE--EPISTOLARY PRACTICE--SESSION 3

During the month of April, Jeff Chang and myself co-taught the module “Living Democracy: Image and Culture” of the Professors of Practice course at the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley.

Below is the epistolary practice I closed each session with—entitled Love-Lectures—in hopes that these letters could bleed from my heart to yours. Here is letter #3

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Favianna Rodriguez, Mother Earth Demands Action, 2018, Collage

Beloved Children, 

I come to you today to share a bit about our journeys together because, as one of your siblings has put it, “you know so little about the worlds beneath your feet.” (Robert Macfarlane, in Underland) You also have difficulty in accessing what lies billions of miles away or what has been overlaid through cycles of hundreds of thousands of years. I have noticed you have this tendency to see what is only on topsoil, on the surface… But I want to help you see is underneath this shell that you stand on. In the deep recesses of the earth, there lies an amalgam of stories, histories, and memories of peoples, lands, your sibling rocks, woodlands, and animals, and fungi, and bacteria, viruses, and fluvial systems, spirit worlds, and the traces of their engagement with one another. Though these systems and geological epochs may seem sedimented, the tales they tell are not inert: they await the precise opportunity for engagement and I hope that you feel invigorated to look for these stories because it is not like the past subsides or goes extinct. It resurfaces and re-emerges, sometimes spectrally, to haunt the site of its omission. And in being so, Beloveds, the past is right there beneath your feet.

I am writing this letter to you because I would like to urge you to seek an under-standing of what is beneath the surface of your present moment, of the places upon which you settle your feet, your heart, your prayers, your homes, your communities. I know that there are bodies, stories, lands, ecosystems, ways of knowing, and memories that continue to breathe beneath the surface of concrete you have built your homes. I can see them pressing up against the shell, waiting to be heard from below. You see, as you can probably guess, by now, this crisis that we all find ourselves in reveals, to me at least, that your ways of under-standing the world have little to do with an exercise of going deeper, of sinking low. And in order to develop a more expansive vision of what is emerging right now, you must lower you bodies. You must put your ears to the very shell of this earth, to the skin of this planet. Only then will you be able to hear the message we are attempting to relay to you for hundreds of years now. What I am trying to urge you to do today, in this language that is not mine and that seems less than capacious (for our eyes speak, the ways we move speak, the humming of birds speak, where you place your heart speaks), is to get curious about the genealogy, the histories of choices, decisions, and actions that you have taken. They have privileged some bodies and epistemes to the detriment and obliteration of others. And this is not my mode of being or speaking at all. I speak through the emergence of plants, the swarming of birds, the eruptions of volcanoes. There were at least seven major eruptions last month. Did you pay attention to them? An earth in heat.

I bet not.

But I know that you find yourselves right now in this strange place of academic-learning-taken-to-zoom, so I will retrieve some of the folks who have, within these disciplinary boundaries, engaged with me, with us.

One of the things I must point you towards is that many of your kinfolk have long been enamored and seduced by this idea of progress, of unlimited use of resources, and, in being so, you have hurt and desecrated me in unutterable ways. This illusion of progress you have is based on other deceptions: That I can be used and abused as an infinite resource rather than THE SOURCE of your being. Because many of you do not under-stand that everything is circular in this here place, you have projected a life that is based on the accumulation of these resources, despite your incredibly short journey on this planet. Your idea of “a maximum of profit with minimum investment in the shortest possible period of time” is lethal, Leonardo Boff warned us in Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor.

What kind of delusional thinking is this? This machinery of production, of unending doing-ness, places you ABOVE things and not ALONGSIDE all living and nonliving beings on this planet, which is actually where you have always been. You are very latecomers to this place; do you ever remember that? And as latecomers, Beloved Children, you have to ask yourselves whether the metaphors and images and knowledge systems you have envisioned and protected bear the fruit of affection, reciprocity, and continuity or whether they overlay and weigh planet with images of accumulation, destruction, trauma, and violence. You must wake up from this self-deceptive and selfish dream you are dreaming of! (See Ruther’s, Gaia and God)

You are living through a pandemic right now. And I want to remind you that you have access to vessels from your ancestral kin that contain holy wisdom, codices, of who you have always been and who you will continue to become. You are capable of reinventing realities, transforming worlds, lest you forget. This historical and sacred knowledge is inscribed in your DNAs, your skins, your bodies, your gut. Remember the seismic force that was Gloria Anzaldúa? She wrote pages and pages of poetic and shape-shifting recipes that teach you how to develop a capacity to reinvent life through sweat, pus, tear, blood, joy, touch, art, and bodies that move and breathe and commune and eat and love. With me. Through me. If you go back to her Neplantera art, you will re-member yourselves and all that links you to life, to sensation, to place, to me.

Did you have a chance to connect with your breathing today?

To the energy that surges up and down through your body?

Can you hear the whispers of the land?

The gentle noise that travels from a humming bird’s wings into your ears?

And can you imagine, imagine freely, what life could be after this moment of deep hurt? A world post-capitalism, post-pandemic? You may be hurting today, Beloveds, but you are “not impoverished of experience!” as Anzaldúa said it so well in Border Arte: Neplanta el Lugar de la Frontera. Artists and images help you access your histories, your knowings, roots, strength, medicine, that which you have lost, forgotten, disposed of. You are vested with the ability to make art, to find the sound of your voices, the sound of God. Art will help you touch one another in times of isolation. Art is, in her words, “the locus of resistance, of rupture, implosion, explosion, and of putting together the fragments and creating a new assemblage.” Arte cambia el punto de referencia, as she puts it. It disrupts the neat separation between you and others. Eres mi otro yo. Art bleeds, is porous, tears apart, rebuilds.

Indigenous symbols and myths like Coatlicue contain wisdom, knowledge systems of how cultures and prophets and bodies and peoples have survived diabolic forces. They are technologies, mechanisms of resistance that work against oppression and assimilation, and erasure. They provide continuity across time/space/place. They should compel you to sift through the debris, the discomfort of pain so that you can activate an imagination that is ancestrally rooted and sacred. Art is the materialization of the Nahuátl word Neplanta—the terrain of uncertainty and suspension that you find yourselves in. They have helped you set traps against coloniality, imperialism, corporatism.

Take a look at this image from Mariana Ortega. Have you learned to have thoughts that feel and feelings that think? As Carvalhaes urges you to do? To wear your hearts right there on our minds? Can you identify what this bird medicine is doing to you? Do you listen to their teachings?

Mariana Ortega, Cómeme el Corazón, 2007 (Detail).

Do you know that some of these birds live in ancient forests, that these forests have roots go deep and spread outwards, that their medicine heals, and support your life on earth? That these forests help you restore your heartbeats to a healthy cadence?

And how about this image from Yadira Cazares? What does healing look like for you?

Yadira L. Cazares, Invocation, 2018.

Some three decades ago, one of the most prophetic voices that has walked upon me, Vandana Shiva, exposed that this idea of progress, of development, was never a liberating project because the movement affirmed the “neutrality” of capitalism, when, in fact, it harvests dispossession, violence, deprivation for most while very few accumulate power and affluence. Her essay was published in Women Healing the Earth. She spoke plainly: progress is a colonial project that “emerged from centers of western capitalist patriarchy,” reproducing patriarchal structures within families and their relationship to land, subjugating, exploring, and devaluing women and their efforts to maintain life on this planet. Disregard for women’s bodies and to me walk hand in hand. Around the same time Anzaldúa and Shiva were putting words to paper, so was Winona Laduke, Anishinaabe leader, and thinker. If you are not familiar with her work, I urge you to learn from them because her Indigeneity is also a container for ancestral knowledge you need to drink from. Her people, who have been systemically subjugated to this day, know in the bones. No. in their marrow, in their ceremony, that animals, fish, rocks, water system, fauna, flora are “brothers, sisters, uncles, grandpas.” She wrote: Our relations to each other, our prayers whispered across generations to our relatives are what bind our cultures together. The protection, teachings, and gifts of our relatives have for generations preserved our families. These relations are honored in ceremony, song, story, and life that keep relations close. . . . These are our older relatives—the ones who came before and taught us how to live. Their obliteration by dams, guns, and bounties is an immense loss to Native families and cultures. . . .” (see her All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life) In the same vein, Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan also reminded you that what you have rendered absent, buried, and secretly obscured is manifesting as presences through pandemics of catastrophic proportions. In her book Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, she writes “The underside of our lives,” she writes, “[g]rows in proportion to what is denied. The darkness is made darker by the record of light. A screaming silence falls between the stars of space. Held inside that silence are the sounds of gunfire, the wailings of grief and hunger, the last, extinct song of a bird. The dammed river goes dry, along with its valleys. Illnesses that plague our bodies live in this crack of absence. The broken link between us and the rest of our world grows too large, and the material of nightmares grows deeper while the promises for peace and equality are empty, are merely dreams without reality.”

The Indigenous perspectives from these two women are asking whether you are able to envision and to live all your relations as kinship, as sacred familial bonds. And I ask you today, Will you continue to other nature as though you “stand” somewhere outside of it? You must ask yourself continuously: “what value can ever be spoken from lives that are lived outside of life, without love and respect for the land and other lives?” Hogan envisions an insurgency rising, “the people of the earth are reaching out,” she writes. “We are having a collective vision. Like young women and men on a vision quest . . . We want to live as if there is no other place as if we will always be here. We want to live with devotion to the world of waters and the universe of life that dwells above our tin roofs.”

“Relatedness,” Ivone Gebara writes in Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation, “points to the vital power of the interconnection among all things,” while opening up “Eco-justice is the kind of justice we seek and live out when we affirm our bodies as part of the Sacred Body of the universe.” That is my body, your body. Melanie Harris, another prophetic voice, has written in her Ecowomanism: African American Woman and Earth-Honoring Faiths that in order to resist the logic of domination, patriarchy, environmental racism, and a culture of violence, ecowomanism is asking you to honor my complexity and to recognize that all life and non-life within this home I yield to you are sacred and that you all bear eco-memories, and eco-stories that can reinvent your relationship to me, that can resist systems of oppression and terrorist patters of white supremacy and cishet patriarchy. 

To Ailton Krenak, you have got to recover your profound bonds with ancestral memories. These memories sustain your identities and subjectivities that Capitalism has tried to steal from you. To him, the very idea of humanity is wrong. It’s an illusion that alienates you from me. And creates the myth that we are not one and the same. He is part of the Krenak people in Brazil. Kre means head and nak mean grounds. They are the people whose minds have never left my grounds, the earth. They are profoundly connected to place. Their identity and history and subjectivity are determined by place. Their world ended in 2019 when a dam that broke completely killed the land and biotic that composed their ecosystems. He says that the river, that is, their grandfather, is in a coma right now. And to think of a river in any other abstraction is to relate to it not as a living being but as a consumable thing. Beloved children, I urge you to resist being part of machinery that kills your subjectivity, your alterity, that makes you into clients in transactions, not as spirit beings that you are, with meaning, with the right to a dignifying and fulfilling life. Full of imagination, creativity, art; that bears the right to desire, to care, joy, and pleasure! The arts are one of the most profound ways for seeing, for taking the blinders off of your eyes. It’s how you practice resistance, you stop the bleeding, you imagine what recovery and redemption may look like. Collective acts of creativity put you back in touch with me, with creation, the breath, the courage, and all that is HOLY. May you find me in your dreams and may this dream allow you to commune, listen, and create sanctuaries of remembrance, safeguarding the cosmic nutrients that will sustain your and our life here on earth.

With all my love and affection and vigor,

Your Mother.
Earth.

Professors of Practice--Epistolary Practice--Session 2

During the month of April, Jeff Chang and myself co-taught the module “Living Democracy: Image and Culture” of the Professors of Practice course at the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley.

Below is the epistolary practice I closed each session with—entitled Love-Lectures—in hopes that these letters could bleed from my heart to yours. Here is letter #2

“Spaceboys” - Aisha Shillingford | Story by Tammy Johnson - “Wakandan Love Letters”

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     Dear Comrades,

Here I am again with this urge to write to you. I hope you are fairing well since you last heard from me—my last letter went out to you about a week ago… This desire to write you this time around came from a very vivid dream I had last night. Despite its intensity and vibrancy, it seemed to be taking place thousands of years ago. The images that you will see dispersed throughout this letter were shared by a good comrade, calvin Williams, and they will perforate the weaving of these words offering yet other worlds. The land in this dream was so vast, expansive. People seemed to cross boundaries of time, space, culture, experience. I woke up thinking that McFarlane was right, after all: we must shelter what is precious in this life, dispose of what is harmful. I have been thinking that one of the ways we could engage in this is through the sheltering of our songs, our dreams, our images, our histories and the precious messages they convey. 

They seem so fragile, at times, but they have enchanted many stories from our ancestors, so many peoples across this vast earth. I have also been thinking about how we are to dispose of trauma, the violences we are living through, the poison we have been given, the secrets we can’t bring into light. Those ancient people in my dream seemed to believe that words were enchanted beings that carried power. Words were enunciated with a sense of desire, of embodiment, of material fullness. It was like they could blossom into something so full of grandeur. They were uttered by way of invocation, it seems, as though they were practicing the incantation of possibility. They spoke and things would emerge: poetry, heavy magic, prayer, utopia, worlds. All of it overflowing with desire. Sorcerers they were. The folks I saw constructed their worlds through words, and those words became objects, and material expressions of love, of beauty, of laughter. It was as if that desire spoken through words had the power to gestate other possibility for the world. 

It reminds me a bit of what the theologian-poet-prophet-analyst Rubem alves says… temos que dizer o nome das coisas que nao sao pra quebrar o feitico daquelas que sao… 

We must say the names of things that are not yet

 To break the spell of the things that are. 

One of the most vivid images of this dream is that there were people just being. This guy was walking across what seemed to be a city of dead bones. Another was watching a banana slug move from one side to the other of a leaf. Oh, there was this child laying on grass looking at the sky, and an elderly women trying not to bother bees too much as she reached for the honey. There was this other person watching the sky so intently. I don’t think I spotted any consumer “goods,” mercadorias. I think I prefer the Portuguese word here, that which is made for markets. Dressing those products with this imprudence word “goods” plays tricks on our brains. I digress. My point is: there was no shadow of profit, I think, in this dream. Lots of play, lots of desire, though, lots of being-ness, and time to contemplate beauty. I don’t recall sensing confinement there. Prisons. The doors were always open, sometimes not there at all. There seemed to be a language that spoke of interdependence, of love, of convivencia, to live with. The doing-ness was an extension of a pulsating body that inflated and created life with this earth. The dream reminded me of this idea of theopoetics, an artistic articulation of the character of God. Folks were doing what Claudio Carvalhaes told us to, to listen to the words we were never taught. To hum songs, beat drums because the words we know are unable to say what we need to convey. When night fell in this place, Folks were concerned mainly with listening to the sounds of the earth, the language of the rivers and the trees. Night wasn’t time to only recharge so that they could continue to work work work work the next day. Night was where theopoetic holy energy would surge, would be transformed into Holy presence. Like Kurt Elling sings, they seemed to be raptured by the questions like why does coal sleep in darkness, do dreams live in apart-ness? Where is the soul of water? Is love motion? Where lies the holy sparks that animates us? Holy dream, holy vision, holy scheme, holy mission. Holy one to another, holy me, holy other. Holy lives, holy blending, holy start, holy ending. 

People in this dream I am describing to you, dear comrades, were dreaming better dreams at night… not of themselves, as Brazilian Yanomami shaman Kopenawa warned us…  They were engaging with what Ailton Krenak was suggesting we do: to reach for the imaginative capacity that Indigenous peoples have been sustaining since first contact: the pleasure of being alive, 

of singing, 

and dancing together, 

of tolerating pleasure, and the fruition of life, 

of not giving up on dreams, 

and of dreaming better dreams that are capable of postponing the ends of the world, for it has ended and reemerged numerous times for those who have survived colonizers.[1] On of the most profound teaching Indigenous cosmologies can offer us is to holify, sacralize our relationship to the world, to teach us how to exercise an ongoing reverence to the earth and all our relations. Like that spider I told you last week, our ways of being, according to indigenous scholar  Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, needs to be spun out of an expansive “web of connections to each other, to the plant nations, the animal nations, the rivers and lakes, the cosmos, and our neighboring Indigenous nations,” in what she describes as an ecology of intimacy.[2] 

How do we think with our whole bodies and develop a more capacious understanding of siblingship, of kinship? The ancestral relations I saw in this dream were the fruits of a living that was based on “deep reciprocity, respect, noninterference, self determination, and freedom;” on a knowing that “the earth gives and sustains all life” and that “natural resources are not natural resources at all, but gifts from Aki, the land.” According to Anishinaabeg teachings, we should “give up what we can to support the integrity of our homelands for the coming generations. We should give more than we take from it.”[3] This is a movement that radiates outwards and inwards in a “rebellion of love, persistence, commitment, and profound caring.” Working together to “create constellations of co-resistance,” radical alternatives are found and which are based on reciprocity, community, and refusal of lethal colonial projects and all its iterations.[4] And for that, people of this dream seemed to be working, to create myths and languages of presence and love. First love, then knowing. Knowing, as Alves says, is erotic, it becomes impregnated, and it needs desire so that bodies can move towards love, towards care, towards embodied fluidarity (as Catherine Keller once put it), and towards balance, justice. What stories are we telling ourselves? What myths are we embodying and what do they reflect about our desires? When I think about this dream of people living thousands of years ago, I am saddened. Myths of love seem to have escaped us. We are left with the myths of power. Theopoetics and myth and stories help us ask questions that will orient our ways of being. They are mystical and help us perform offerings, honor the living, honor the dead. Help us inspire and conspire. How do we heal the wound that is the lack of Love, Perez will ask us? How does one return from being violence, violated, betrayed, wounded, individually, socially, culturally, historically? With a plan for social justice, for carrying on through hope rather than despair? How and should we bounce back? It was in this mythical homeland that I saw our forebears and future kin. What is love and what does it want from us? Perez asks. She says that love is an ofrenda in the face of negation. An entity that is available to us at the crossings. A resurrection of dreams that found their ways into the flesh, returning, becoming, emerging, resurfacing, evoking. 

Every poetic act of ours is a testimony to these other ways of being. Totalitarian regimes today are fond of giving us a clear map, defining visibility—no place for mystery for questions, for the generative darkness of the womb. No saudade, no desire that longs for another way of being. These images you have seen thus far are images of saudade, of a longing to be in a different way. They are ways of inventing worlds, of bewitching our experiences with other perspectives of feeling, doing, thinking. 

I am thinking now that the Atlantic is a vast chamber through which many stories made their crossings. Deterritorialization, breaking down and apart of identities. Colonialism and imperialism created death, the extermination of peoples, of ways of knowing, of symbols. Peoples that were sequestered from their lands in the continent of Africa and disembarked in Brazil, for example, understood that death happened when forgetfulness was installed. Their commitments with ethics and aesthetics, their politics and their epistemologies, cosmo-logics and their spiritual practices had to walk hand in hand with creative acts, with their religiosity. In the Candomblé tradition, which was outlawed in Brazil through the 20th century, orixás enchanted the everyday transmuting stones, trees, rivers, at the sound of their drums. The earth, the forest continue to be homes to fields of possibilities, where rituals are performed and the somberness of disenchantment is driblado, dribbled. They dribble and transgress the colonial structures of power, offering ambiguity, a knowledge that lives in the interstices of western ways of knowing. As Simas and Rufino remind us: we must learn to read the poetics of Candomblé if we are to understand the politics of Candomblé. Tomorrow, in brazil, we celebrate São Jorge, Saint George. In Brazil, this saint is seen as the warrior, the ultimate activist who not only seeks but secures justice for all, by all means necessary. 

Luang Senegambia is a visual artist from brazil who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Since 2014 he has dedicated his art-making to interpreting Afro Brazilian religious traditions. His process involves coalescing in collages political realities, images and symbols that speak to being black in Brazil, and listening to songs that mark the syncopated rhythms of the orixás. Syncope is an unexpected alteration in the rhythm, an interruption of the regular flow of rhythms. A placement of rhythmic stresses or accents in unexpected places. Simas and Rufino speak of syncope as breaking constant, predictable sequences in music, giving us a glimpse of the void, of the emptiness, of silence. Syncope is at work here in this artwork. We expect Sao Jorge and Luang Senegambia gives us Ogum. Responsible for bringing the earth into being, for the secrets of iron, for being a warrior of justice for all, Ogum is an important orixá in Brazil. 

In this other work, Luang Senegambia is centering the story of the Brazilian council woman Marielle Franco who was elected by the city of Rio de Janeiro and was brutally executed on March 14th, 2018. As a black, lesbian, single mother—born and raised in the Maré favela—she worked against racism, inequality, and homophobia in a country mired by the consequences of white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, feminicide, and neo-capitalism. We see Franco here syncopated with Oyá the female warrior orixá who rules the rays, the winds, and tempests. Eparrei oya. She seeks justice for all, carries a sword. She dances snd from her swirls winds of change are created. She has the right to bear a sword to protect her children in the world, and when needed to assumes the form of a buffalo who is ready for battle. 

In some of these dreams and stories, Oyá encounters Ormolu. He’s dressed in straws as if to hide his body. There is shame all around. No woman wanted to dance with him, except for Oyá, who wanted to have a dance with this orixá from the earth. Oyá lifted the straws and discovered that Omolu was beautiful. Sure, his body was covered in dis-ease, with open wounds. And yet. He was beautiful. The story goes that Oyá breathed wind unto his skin and his disease became popcorn that fell onto the grounds. Omolu controls the cycles of diseases and cures, especially during pandemic like the ones we are living through. He reminds us that many are the healing cycles of the earth and that it offers itself to us, so long as we are willing to access its ways of knowings and cosmo-logics. You see, knowledge systems that are closely linked to the earth have emphasized for millennia that there is no “out there,” we are all inter-related, inter-connected, complicit, and accountable to all of our crisis. And being so, we must apprehend this moment, weaving together perception, emotion, imagination, bodies, and action,” bringing back to our body-knowledge that which is invisible. To religious traditions across the planet this is precisely the task of providing a witness to, of offering a testimony, of ritualizing, of creating acts of mourning, and worship, and gratitude, with the arts, music, and imagination.

  As Octavia Butler has put it, “the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.” Spiritual teachings, social consciousness, and our social gospels, as Butler has puts it, expand our notions of solidarity, redefine and rediscover the human spirit, and devolve us to our bodies. The images we have seen today, the music shared by Jeff Chang and Calvin Williams and these images that created a visual narrative they illuminate into the past and the present and the future towards forms of life that are worth living. A world without capitalism, prisons, violence. A world that is ours to imagine, speculate, rehearse, create. As Andrianne Maree Brown has told us, there are multiple and multivocal worlds inside of us. Can the murmur of our collective efforts be heard across time, and space, and place and tradition? Can we fossilize capitalism? Compost our longings and desires so they keep birthing other worlds into being? I sure hope so, Dear Comrades. Our visions must be layered and cumulative, inscriptive, full of overlays of bodies, memories, histories, materials, mediums, genres, bodies, so that we work toward a presentism and away from forgetfulness. Death. Erasure. May we imagine, conjure, multiply, proliferate, find traction, and fight for visibility, resources, power, May we contest the privatization of our lives. The propertization of our relations. The high jacking of our rights to be and desire and love and create. May we vision, claim our spaces for action. May we confront, organize, run wild. May we stand in the power of our discourses, epistemes, cosmo-logics, religious and body-knowledge. May we create a world in our own terms, where all of us are free. And may this world be full of beauty, full of bodies that move, whether internally or physically or emotionally or spiritually. May we forge new images, stories, futures. Until we meet again. May we walk humbly, agitatingly, and softly upon this earth, in the company of those who visited in my dreams and those who are yet to be. May spirit breathe life into our tired bodies. Our tired eyes. And may we create. Create profusely. And dangerously.

In mutuality, and with affection,

Dr. Yô

[1] Ailton Krenak, Idéias para Adiar o Fim do Mundo (São Paulo: Compahia das Letras, 2019), 26–27.

[2] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 8.

[3] Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 8.

[4] Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 9

Professors of Practice--Epistolary Practice--Session 1

During the month of April, Jeff Chang and myself co-taught the module “Living Democracy: Image and Culture” of the Professors of Practice course at the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley.

Below is the epistolary practice I closed each session with—entitled Love-Lectures—in hopes that these letters could bleed from my heart to yours. Here is letter #1

Lavagem do Bonfim. Foto: Fábio Marconi.

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In the midst of dismay, alienation, unhealthy bodies, and worldviews, loneliness,  isolation and desolation, I feel an urge to sit with these feelings. One of my favorite writers, a formidable human being, has been teaching me about the worlds of words and imagination since I was around 5 years old. His name is Rubem Alves. One of the earliest memories I have from his teachings was this idea that we would do well by striving to be like the primordial artist we all know well—the spider. They create these beautiful works of art, structures that are fragile, beautiful webs made out of threads and gossamer and a leap into the unknown. The thread is hidden inside her body and when she plunges into the void, the weaving begins. The web is within. Even before she leaps, it’s already within. Part of my invitation today is to weave a web over the voids we have before us: distance, social isolation, angst, profound anxiety, groundlessness, a ribcage that seems to be caving in, lack of touch, sadness, unknowingness, fear of what kind of world we will walk into in a few months... One of the ways I stare at this void is by doing a bit of breathing and drawing exercise that Jeff Chang endearingly called doodle therapy. Would you be willing to join me? Think of a word that reveals itself to you when you look within. Take deep breaths. Plunge. Write the word on the center of a sheet of paper. Take one deep breath as you draw a line from one side of the sheet all the way to the opposite corner of the paper. Exhale as you draw a second line. Fill the page with lines as you breathe in and out. As you come to the end of this practice, notice whether your heart and thought frequency has changed… 

            When I was thinking about what I wanted to say to you today as we end our time together, I thought about the epistolary practices that have connected peoples across space and time. So ancient, so distant, so close, so potent. Several religious traditions use these writing practices. Think of Apostle Paul as he wrote to so many beloved communities in response to specific crises… And here we are, sitting and thinking and feeling our way with blinders through a pandemic. I felt compelled to write you, longhand, as so many of our ancestors with poetic-prophetic verve showed us… Think of all the folks who survived and lived through exiles… imprisonments… Paulo Freire, from whom I learned a lot about education, the necessity to name our worlds and to imagine it anew, wrote a lot of what later became known as his scholarship through letters. So here is my offering to you:

Dear Comrade,

Latin American has lived through horrific totalitarian regimes in the 60s, 70s, 80s, where the shadow of the angel of death hovered over our lives, houses, communities, schools, churches, streets, cities, countries. This angel, dressed as a military dictatorship instituted Martial Law and kept us from gathering in public places, imprisoned, and had our moves controlled by surveillance, confiscating so much that gave us life. I am a child of these horrendous times. And yet, here I am. Living proof that creative animus saves us from the treacherous waters of social instability. Like Brecht, who came to the cities in a time of disorder, as hunger reigned, as turmoil rose, proclaimed: I live in desperate times. Artless, foolish times—with folks without grooves of worry on their foreheads. A time of much silence in the face of pain and terror. And yet, he wrote. Poeticized. A poet-prophet as my Mom, Débora Junker wrote once. Doris Salcedo, another poet-prophet memorialized what she lived through in the period of la violencia in Colombia. Another dictatorship. Her site-specific artworks seem to engrave in our memories and bodies stories that would otherwise be forgotten. Macarena Gómez-Barris calls this artmaking a kind of archiving for the future. You see, art has this power Dear Comrade. It drenches our bodies, brains, memories, spirit with stories that are wet and dripping, as Freire would put it. Art memorializes, commemorates, invents new ways of being when everything around us says we can’t be. When the Colombian government refused to acknowledge the 284 deaths due to the siege of the palacio de la justicia in 1985, some two decades later, Doris Salcedo staged a performance and memorial to mark the 17th anniversary of this horror. Starting precisely at 11:35, on November 6th, 2002, she lowered 284 chairs, marking the tempo of the death of each victim who was shot. The chairs, she explains “are statements of absence, allowing us to be aware of the fragility of life.” Dear Comrade, how will we memorialize all of the deaths we are seeing as Covid-19 continues to kill across the planet, without the rights to a proper burial? Like folks who were tortured and disappeared with during periods of dictatorships in Latin America, we must conjure up all the strength in us to convert these deaths into memories, bring them into the present, and maybe more: into a presence. How do we dignify these stories, make sense of this moment?

            Another possibility for resistance comes from the colonial period in Brazil, where colonizers roamed freely in our territories, robbing and enslaving peoples. The story goes that a group of enslaved women in Bahia were charged with the duty of washing the step of a church after the catholic feast of Three Kings. They were to clean the church and have it ready to be used on January 7th. The insurgent spirit in them, their radical imagination transformed this master’s command into an act of religious-performative resistance. These women practiced the Brazilian Yoruba tradition of Candomblé and used the act of the washing of the steps as a ceremony to bless each other and to offer prayer and praise to the Orixá Oxalá. This feast, known as Lavagem do Bonfim is still active in Bahia today and has become an interreligious engagement joined by thousands of people every year. On this day, the church doors remain closed and gifts and prayers are offered to Oxalá. These women resisted their enslaving by setting traps to the colonial nexus that has allowed for this practice to endure. 

This procession in the streets of Salvador looks a lot like the artistic intervention Lygia Pape envisioned, namely, Divisor. It was created in 1968 while Marshall was still instituted in Brazil. Groups of two or more people gathered in the streets were seen as conspirators and ran the risk of being interrogated and possibly taken by the police. Through this act of imagination, Pape created the possibility for 200 people to gather at the same time in the streets. The artwork consisted of a wearable cloth with two hundred holes where people’s heads could come through. It was right here that bodies prohibited from gathering were able to do so and move freely through the streets of Brazil, marking their presences, their right to come and go, to impede the death-dealing forces of dictatorship to confiscate their imaginations. Our classrooms, our virtual spaces of the gathering are charged with the power of joy, possibility, and imagination. Laura Pérez Says that they are laboratories for creating new ways of thinking, imagining new ways of conjuring experience, new ways of being. Imagination and spirituality send electric currents through our bodies that bear the power of transforming us into tools for the revolution. 

We are on a journey right now, seeking and understanding of what reality is beyond a pandemic, the collapse of democracy, the deterioration of the earth. Are we able to dig into this toolbox to find the textures of our brushes, to exercise and educate our hope, as Frere puts it, to give form and function to our dreams and learn to love radically, with philia, agape, and eros as Pérez urges us? To respect, care, and live with joy? To rehearse what is yet to come, our personal power, to find the sanctity and the sound of the genuine in us? How do we find homes within our comes? Home as the domestic site for healing, as Elisa Facio teaches us? Not in a romanticized manner, for as Anzaldúa reminds us, homes can be dangerous, too. The home within our home is an attempt at growth, Conocimiento. An invitation that is circumscribed with the physical, spatial, ontological, spiritual, temporal. A site that knows of its disappointments, betrayals, violence, and anguish, but that continues to seek negotiation of these different dimensions of being. How are we to move and enter into these journeys without being able to leave our homes? How do we heal? Through internal pilgrimages? Art and religion do bear this capacity, to cause and internal travessia, a movement of spirit, body, mind, the personal, the social. Art helps us move away from deceptive journeys and toward experiences that help us awaken, to feel, to weave the imperceptible back into the perceptible. Art requires our being to be in bodies that co-create our realities anew. Art illuminates our poems, our metaphors the body-knowledge that is inscribed in our beings. It helps us to strategize and smuggle humanity back into our days, setting traps to settler colonialism, racism, sexism, classicism, phobias, and loneliness. It helps us find the places of our own possibilities. And it is right here, Comrade, that we can practice new ways of organizing and intimating the world differently, subjectifying it, not objectifying as Ursula Le Guin reminds us. It is here that we can practice political education, finding the archeology of our pains, as Freire taught us, educating our longings and hopes, expanding our relations into what he calls ones of sibling-ship. I end this letter to you with Alice Walker’s words:

Fear is real. 

But so is love. 

From you co-dreamer, co-conspirator, co-creator,

 Dr. Yô

On The Consequences of Hate Speech Art Exhibition

During the months of December and January, I had the privilege to participate in the group exhibition “On the Consequences of Hate Speech.” I contributed with the work “WordQuake: A Cartography of Hate Speech,” which juxtaposes maps of the Washington, DC, and Brasilia so as to visually posit 45's occupation of the presidential office as the epicenter of a hate speech catastrophe that is plaguing both countries. Words from Trump and Bolsonaro's pronouncements (in English and Portuguese) delineate the map. These words are drawn from Trump's and Bolsonaro’s exact pronouncements made publicly over the past few years.  

The artwork visually articulates how both presidents’ elocutions sanction violence. Such seemingly abstract language moves across the landscape, revealing often hidden socio-cultural processes, raising questions of whether one can identify the impact such seismic "hate speech waves” leave in our bodies and communities.

A catalog of the exhibition can be found here. A big THANK YOU to the Jewish Art Salon for putting this timely and pressing exhibition together!

CIVA's Seen Journal XVIII on Hope now available

SEEN Journal XVIII: Hope is now available with guest editor Taylor Worley who compiled a series of great essays from artists, and presenters at CIVA’s 2017 biennial conference.

My essay focuses on Colombian artist Doris Salcedo and unravels how her memorial aesthetics functions as site for remembrance of suffering, resistance to injustices, and healing of civic woulds. Some of Salcedo’s installations afford viewers the opportunity to face the pain caused by civic trauma, calling forth acts of public witnessing so that a new and more hopeful future may be communally forged. Artworks that hold the complex tensions of distress and possibility for renewal provide an experience that invites openness, irresolution, and a “collecting of beauty,” despite the tragedy the work encapsulates.

You can get a copy of the journal here.

Doris Salcedo, Noviembre 6 y 7 2002, two hundred and eighty wooden chairs and rope, dimensions variable ephemeral public project, Palace of Justice, Bogotá, 2002. photo: Sergio Clavijo, image courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.

Your Last Chance to See “Dear Listener: Works by Nicholas Galanin,” at Phoenix’s Heard Museum

During the month of August, I conducted research at the Heard Museum and had the opportunity to see this outstanding retrospective, which will be on view only until Monday, September 3rd! If in Phoenix, Arizona, go see this! If not, below is a sneak peek, including an interview with the artist himself, phenomenal images provided by the Heard Museum, and several links to learn more about the multidisciplinary work of Nicholas Galanin.

"Dear Listener: Works by Nicholas Galanin," at the Heard Museum. All images provided by the Heard Museum.

Nicholas Galanin, a Tlingit/Unangax̂/ Multi-Disciplinary artist who currently lives in Sitka, Alaska, has been described by the New York Times as a “standout” artist in the contemporary art world. His retrospective, Dear Listener: Works by Nicholas Galanin, exhibited at the Heard Museum is a fierce clapback at the face of Empire (for this metaphor, I thank Alan C. Palaez Lopez, who coined the term during a workshop at the Indigenous Americas Working Group at UCBerkeley in 2017). Through his work, Galanin sends out a ringing sound wave, directly addressing his audience:

“Dear Listener," he writes, "My work is a sovereign creation as communication, transmission of knowledge and continuum that has existed since time immemorial. I continue the cultures I descend from and live within, listening and contributing thanks to the teachers who have shown me good ways to follow. . . . You signal your coordinates, I signal mine with this work. . . .

Gunalchéesh”

We Dreamt Deaf, polar bear taxidermy, 2015 | Axes in Polyrhuthm, When My Drums Come Knocking They Watch, wood, cotton, silk, jute, woodchips, collaboration with Nep Sidhu, 2018.

The opening piece to the exhibition, a polar bear taxidermy that vanishes before our eyes (We Dreamt DEAF, 2015) is flanked by the monumental collaboration with Nep Sidhu, Axes in Polyrhythm, When My Drums Come Knocking They Watch (2018), setting the tone and ushering us viewers into a space that is as ground shaking as it is integrative.

God Complex, glazed porcelain, 2015.

One of his ceramic sculptures, God Complex, features the all-white riot gear of a police officer, which assumes the posture of the crucified Christ. His is a visual commentary on militarization, securitization, and police brutality against Native Americans and other POC. God Complex exposes and criticizes the prison-industrial complex, which continues to profit at the expense of incarcerated BIPOC. 

A Supple Plunder, ballistic torsos, two-chanel video, collaboration with Jerrod Galanin, 2015-2018.

The exhibition also includes works such as A Supple Plunder (2015-2018), a collaboration with his brother Jerrod Galanin, using the pseudonym Leonard Getinthecar. The nine ballistic torsos and two-channel video honor the twelve Unangan men who were bound together by Russian invaders and were experimentally shot to see how many human beings could be killed with a single bullet. As an anti-monument, this work marks and remembers the deaths endured by Indigenous people.

White Noise, American Prayer Rug, wool, cotton, 2018.

The prayer rug White Noise (2018), the Imaginary Indian, Totem (2016), the US flag and ammunition The American Dream Is Alie and Well (2012), the male performer White Carver (2012-present), the Indian Children’s Bracelet (2014) all denounce the colonial project while honoring and celebrating the cultural agency sustained by his community.

Imaginary Indian, Totem, wood, floral wallpaper, paint, abalone shells, 2016.

White Carver, velvet rope, wood stump, wooden platform, white male performer, 2012-present.

Indian Children's Bracelet, had-engraved iron, 2014.

Galanin's works confront the brutality of the American colonial desire while denouncing the ways in which cultural theft is institutionalized, packaged, and sold for consumption. They also provide a strategic tactic of “Survivance.” reinserting Indigenous art as equals in the cultural production of this country.       

The American Dream is Alie and Well, U.S. flag, .50-caliber ammunition, foam, gold leaf, plastic, 2012.

Working across mediums, geographies, and generations, Galanin demonstrates how Indigenous bodies, land, and cultures have been "handled," “contained,” and essentialized as a function of white supremacy and colonialism. The artist's oeuvre demonstrates that to decolonize (in the context of art institutions) entails the sharing of power, visibility, and authority with colonized subjects. “Culture,” he writes, “is rooted in connection to the land; like land, culture cannot be contained. I am inspired by generations of Tlingit & Unangax̂ creative production and knowledge connected to the land I belong to.”

What Have We Become?, 2017.

Galanin understands his work as engaging across cultures in a continuum that resists romanticization, categorization, and limitation of the Indigenous subject. He explains that he uses his work “to explore adaptation, resilience, survival, active cultural amnesia, dream, memory, cultural resurgence, connection to and disconnection from the land.” Galanin also believes that it is through the passing of this art practice and knowledge to his apprentices  that his culture will continue to hold the keys to creative sovereignty and “reject the dehumanizing erasure of Indigenous knowledge, land, and culture, all of which are interwoven genocide.” 

Creation with Her Children, collaboration with Merritt Johnson, 2017.

Dear Listener runs through September 3rd, 2018 and can be visited Mondays to Saturdays from 9:30am to 5pm and Sundays from 11am to 5pm. The Heard Museum, which is committed to advancing American Indian Art, is located at 2301 North Central Avenue in Phoenix, AZ 85004. If you can’t make it to the exhibition but would like to learn more about it, you can purchase the excellent catalog here (which includes a vinyl from the artist’s band Indian Agent!). Lastly, a resounding OBRIGADA to Nicholas Galanin for generously agreeing to be interviewed on August 20th, 2018.

Em Resistência,

Yohana A. Junker

She in Constellation Medicine Form, No Pigs in Paradise, Series, 2, Collaboration with Nep Sidhu, created under the collective Black Constellation, 2018.

Michelle Angela Ortiz: An Aesth-Ethic of Combat

Contemporary visual arts have been powerful tools in responding to times of sociopolitical instability and repression. Although multi-vocal and extraordinarily diverse, artists across the Americas have continued to create collective artworks that denounce asymmetrical power relations, resist the scandals of colonialism, dictatorships, and the systemic ways in which neoliberalism and white supremacy continue to exploit the Global South. These public performances stage acts of resistance while allowing for a praxis of collective testimony in the face of political oppression. Their artistic accomplishments reinsert suppressed narratives into the public sphere, establishing an inescapable relationship between artwork and viewers as witnesses. Throughout the last fifty years, artists such as Tania Bruguera, Lotty Rosenfeld, Nicholas Galanin, Michelle Angela Ortiz, Robin Bell, Favianna Rodrigues, have resisted and exposed oppressive political regimes, genocidal policies, and fascist governments while showing our complicity in remaining silent in the face of horror. 

Meet Michelle Angela Ortiz

A visual artist, skilled muralist, community arts educator, Michelle Angela Ortiz confers dignity and visibility to the stories of communities that have been erased, co-opted, and often lost. Through her art, she creates a space for dialogue, transforming spectators into participators who must move forward collectively, in response-ability, resistance, and solidarity. For over 18 years, Ortiz has used the arts as a tool to bridge and build communities. She has created over 50 large-scale public works in the U.S. and abroad and has led community building initiatives for social change in several countries. In 2015, she completed the first U.S. State-funded public art project since the re-opening of the U.S. embassy in Havana. You can read more about her work here.

Photo Credit Jose Mazariegos. Ortiz installs the words of Ana, a mother formerly detained the Berks Detention Center. Joining her are undocumented families/ community members from Juntos.

One of her projects, Familia Separadas, “is a series of temporary site-specific public artworks that mark locations and documents stories of immigrant families affected by detention and deportations in Pennsylvania,” Ortiz explains. The artwork consists of several phases, the first one having been installed on October 2015, in which temporary large-scale, site-specific public works were unveiled in several spaces in Philadelphia, including the Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency, Compass Rose at the City Hall Courtyard, Love Park, and 9th Street Market. During this phase of the project, she worked with undocumented youth and families in partnership with Juntos, a Latino immigrant rights organization.

Photo Credit Jose Mazariegos. Alma and her children stand in front of Ortiz's art installation the ICE building. Alma who fought against the deportation of her husband, Javier.

With the support of the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, Ortiz is developing the Phase 2 of the project and is interviewing mothers and children formerly detained the de Berks Detention Center. The Berks County Family Detention Center is a prison in the US where young children at the tender age of two weeks have been incarcerated. Ortiz is working closely with the Shut Down Berks Coalition and with mothers from the fourteen families that were detained at Berks for more than 2 years. She explains that “during that time the mothers organized labor and hunger strikes as they fought for their freedom. Ten families were deported back to their home country returning to the violence they were fleeing, and 4 families were released in the United States still fighting against their possible deportation and living through the trauma of being detained.” Currently, the Center continues to detain families as their license continues to be challenged in court. Even though the Center has a laundry list of human rights abuses and testimonies of the detained families have gone public, Governor Tom Wolf (PA) has not issued an Emergency Removal Order (ERO) that would ensure that families are not detained in the facility while the appeal case continues."

Photo Credit: Steve Weinik. "We Are Human Beings" installed in front of the ICE building in Philadelphia. 

It's time to listen to Ortiz as she incites, provokes, and summons us to speak truth to power, occupy the streets, organize, call our representatives, learn, reflect, conspire, and combat these atrocities through an aesth-ethic. We have to be responsible for keeping these conduits of memory alive. We have to be critically awake (and conscious) to hear the sound or our collective voices beyond 45's weaponization of words and violation of life. As an actor friend reminded me, Bertolt Brecht described art not as a mirror to society, but a hammer (or machete) through which to reshape and reform it! To Brecht, the arts have to provoke us so much that we are left with no other choice than to act. Will you move out of complacency and complicity to join Michelle Angela Ortiz in denouncing and fighting against these atrocities? Here is an informed call to action if you want and can be involved in shutting down Berks, provided by Ortiz.

Get informed, organize, and act:

https://action.aclu.org/petition/separating-families?social_referer_transaction=900571&ms=sbsocial&cid=ICEdetention

https://familiesbelong.org/

https://mamasweekofaction.org/

https://unitedwedream.org/

https://www.theyoungcenter.org/

http://familiasseparadasproject.blogspot.com/

http://www.ourfamily.org/

Exhibition at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, in Evanston, Il

Friends in the Chicago/Evanston area:

Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary is featuring a sneak preview of my upcoming Fall exhibition from April 21st to 26th. They are located at 2121 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL, 60201 and you are welcome to view the work from 9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday, at G-ETS's chapel entrance.

Please help spread the word!

Em resistência e paz,

Yohana

“Graced in Sacred Ground: The Hour of Forgiveness”

CollaborationColaboração. “Graced in Sacred Ground: The Hour of Forgiveness” is the second section of a book-length pilgrimage that began when two colleagues dared to become fellow peregrinas & subsequently recognized the other as a kindred artistscholar. Our collaboration has been just that—our time spent getting to know one another; our support of one another, even when geography has attempted to work against us; and most importantly, the communitas that continues to drive our selection of the Words. Words—single moments in language that reveal the human condition—live at the heart of our project. We pilgrimage together through language—dictionaries, thesauruses, & personal stories—to arrive at seven words that resonate, reveal, and reflect the hour’s theme, here “Forgiveness.” We collaborate on words, we take our own artistic, yet parallel journey, towards those words, and we arrive at a liminal space in which word&image slide one onto the other creating our collaborative experience.

Nicole De Leon is a poet&scholar. She earned her B.A. & M.A. in English from Sonoma State University. Currently, she is working on her Ph.D. in Historical & Cultural Studies of Religion at the Graduate Theological Union. Her dissertation focuses on two 20th century poets, Marianne Moore & Denise Levertov, and the ways in which they construct their poetic worlds so as to create imaginary spaces where readers can pilgrimage (to, from, within, and through). 

Flora Assumpção, Cativa [A natureza da natureza], 2018

“Não importa quão alienados nos tornemos, continuaremos a produzir padrões que espelham o mundo natural” Trecho da obra de Victoria Vesna, ‘Mind and Body Shifting: From Networks to Nanosystems,’ 2002.

Foto da exposição de Flora Assumpção, Cativa [A natureza da natureza], Galeria Janete Costa, 2018. Fotografia: Flávio Lamenha.

Foto da exposição de Flora Assumpção, Cativa [A natureza da natureza], Galeria Janete Costa, 2018. Fotografia: Flávio Lamenha.

As obras de Flora Assumpção aqui reunidas propõem um atravessamento da membrana frágil que separa o natural do artifício. Em Cativa [A Natureza da Natureza], a instalação complexa que se estende por todo espaço da galeria re-desenha e re-apresenta padrões encontrados na natureza, nos convidando a ruminar sobre o caráter da intervenção humana nela. Será que integramos e sustentamos os ambientes que habitamos ou também os desestabilizamos, dominamos e des-naturamos? Por meio da manipulação de materiais do cotidiano—produzidos industrialmente e modificados manualmente—Flora nos confronta com tais interrogações.

Foto da exposição de Flora Assumpção, Cativa [A natureza da natureza], Galeria Janete Costa, 2018. Fotografia: Flávio Lamenha.

Num mundo tão fantástico quanto exuberante que a artista nos proporciona, a percepção do espaço, da arte e da natureza se emaranham. O material—que em outras instâncias seria considerado inerte e não-responsivo—passa a incorporar vitalidade, complexidade e dinamismo, como os seres imaginários de Borges. À medida em que seguimos o percurso destes materiais pela galeria, passamos a esquadrinhar um labirinto de possibilidades no qual a relação com a matéria se caracteriza mais por movimento, fluxo, oscilação e volubilidade do que por forma, propriedade, permanência e estabilidade, como sugerem Deleuze e Guattari.1 A obra de Flora também nos remete ao pensamento de Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway e Jane Bennet: todas sugerem que objetos naturais e artificiais estão sempre em estado de alteração, emaranhados numa vibrante teia de relações e colaborações pegajosas, voláteis.2

Foto da exposição Cativa [A natureza da natureza], Galeria Janete Costa, 2018. Fotografia: Flávio Lamenha.

Na simulação híbrida que consubstancia a natureza, o cotidiano, a tecnologia, o industrializado, a maleabilidade e a rigidez, as obras confundem a expectativa do observador, enevoando os limites entre forma e função, familiar e fantástico, o lúdico e o crítico. As estruturas de folhagens artificiais que demarcam a galeria, por exemplo, podem ser descobertas como trepadeiras, plantas rasteiras, tentáculos animais, uma cascata ou cachoeira camufladas que abalam o espaço como ondas, maremotos. Sua investigação artística traz experimentos que delineiam e articulam uma cartografia da proximidade. É no entrelaçar das formas, das repetições, dos materiais, das cores, das texturas e dos corpos (sejam eles animais fantásticos ou humanos) que um convite nos é estendido para que tateemos e re-imaginemos as possibilidades, mutações e limites da interação humana com a natureza.

Foto da exposição de Flora Assumpção, Cativa [A natureza da natureza], Galeria Janete Costa, 2018. Fotografia: Flávio Lamenha.

Tal convite-provocação desloca o animal humano da posição de centralidade criativa: somos tão fundamentalmente nativos quanto recolhidos da natureza—tão fabricantes quanto fabricados por ela. Para Bachelard, é no tocar dessas formas e ramagens que podemos compreender a realidade: cada gesto poético capaz de penetrar a membrana da matéria encontra, do outro lado, a beleza e o “cerne do ser.”3 Na lírica de Bachelard, a matéria possui dois valores: um de elevar e outro de aprofundar a imaginação humana. Isso se desdobra num movimento vagaroso, doloroso e potente como articula Jacques Bousquet: “Uma nova imagem custa à humanidade o mesmo labor que uma nova característica custa à uma planta.”4 No labor humano da imagem, Flora introduz a dimensão do trabalho manual em sua instalação—frequentemente ligado à atividade doméstica e à arte popular—ressignificando e reposicionando a criação artesanal num circuito artístico de fine arts. Esta manobra permite o desalinhavar de práticas artísticas tidas como dominantes, costurando uma relação complexa entre o centro e a periferia que se dá na superfície de cada Hydra.

Foto da exposição de Flora Assumpção, Cativa [A natureza da natureza], Galeria Janete Costa, 2018. Fotografia: Flávio Lamenha.

Nesta vasta instalação, as dobras desencadeiam inúmeras reações: elas esticam, encolhem, alargam, misturam, desdobram, conferem densidade e flexibilidade não somente à matéria, como também à memoria e à imaginação.5 Em cada um dos milhares de vincos presentes na obra, a periferia encontra o centro, as extremidades tocam o eixo central e a energia produzida pela tração das mãos no plástico, no feltro, no papel, encharcam esses materiais de potencialidade. As sobreposições das dobras da artista capturam as contrações do tempo, as contingências da história e evidenciam a advertência de Latour— de que não há pura cultura, tecnologia, ou pura natureza, tudo flui e contamina as diversas dimensões desta labiríntica rede.6 Ao perambular por esses espaços da galeria, talvez delineemos uma praxis transformadora e criativa às urgências de nossos tempos de modo a nos reintegrar tanto à natureza, quanto à produção— sustentável—do artifício. E, para que isto aconteça, sigamos Hydra—que vem para limpar a névoa que encobre nossas percepções. 7

Foto da exposição de Flora Assumpção, Cativa [A natureza da natureza], Galeria Janete Costa, 2018. Fotografia: Flávio Lamenha.

1. Deleuze e Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, (1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
2. Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 2010; Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, 2001; Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble, 2016.
3. Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les Rêves, (Paris: José Corti, 1942), 1-3.
4. Ibid.
5. Como articulam Michel Serres, Atlas (Paris: Éditions Julliard, 1994), 47-8 e Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trad. Tom Conley (Londres: Athlone Press, 1993), 3.
6. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature (1999) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
7. Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, citada por Bachelard em L’eau et les rêves (Paris, José Corti, 1942), 1.

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Yohana Junker, doutoranda em história da arte e ciências da religião na Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. Pesquisa arte contemporânea nas Américas, com ênfase na convergência entre arte, ecologia, espiritualidade e produção artística indígena.

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Flora Assumpção, Cativa [A natureza da natureza]. 2018
Instalação. 1500m2
Plásticos e tecidos diversos.
Galeria Janete Costa. Recife - PE - Brasil

Instalação site-specific / work in progress composta pelas obras:
Rastejantes [ou Cascata]. 2015-2018
Plásticos translúcidos coloridos e grampos. Dimensões variáveis.
Hydra. 2018
Tapetes de feltro sintético e tecidos diversos coloridos. Dimensões variáveis.
Teia [Ananse Ntontan]. 2018
Linha prateada, pregos e escada em espiral. Dimensões variáveis.
Mboitatás I e II (versão II). 2009-2018
Grafite sobre parede. Dimensões variáveis.
Serpente Beija-Flor, das Criaturas Híbridas. 2014-2018. 
Impressão digital. 2,8 x 7,55 m

https://floraassumpcao.blogspot.com.br/2018/03/cativa-natureza-da-natureza-2018.html

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Textos críticos de Yohana Junker e Icaro Ferraz Vidal Junior

Fotografia e produção de Flávio Lamenha

Agradecimentos: Flávio Lamenha, Yohana Junker, Icaro Ferraz Vidal Junior, Fabianne L'Amour, Luciene Torres, Marcela Dias, Carlito Person e equipe do educativo da Galeria Janete Costa, Lucas da DAC LTDA e Edelandia da Avil.

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Muié Rendá

I come from a long lineage of women weavers. I believe they have weaved their way into freedom. From violence, poverty, misogyny.

Here is one of them—Muié Rendá.

Around their weaving circles, they/we speak of losses, of memory, of hope, of despair.

They/we pray to God.  We become witnesses to a life that holds all kinds of irreconcilable contradictions, all kinds of knots.

As we co-weave and co-create and undo the gnarly configurations of these threads, we speak of accountability, of hope, of transformation. Our songs speak of an ethics of combat and resistance, in which there is room for the delicate cotton thread, the thin needle, and—sometimes—the knife.

How Can We Keep the Love of Teaching? Waking up and Positioning Ourselves

Image: Lygia Pape (Brazilian, 1927–2004). Divisor (Divider), 1968. Performance at Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, 1990. Photo by Paula Pape. © Projeto Lygia Pape

You can read more here:

How Can We Keep the Love of Teaching? Waking up and Positioning Ourselves

Crossings/Mojándose: Works by Sandra C. Fernández–On Weaving “Fugitive Identities” and Strategies of Resistance

You can read more here:

Crossings/Mojándose: Works by Sandra C. Fernández–On Weaving “Fugitive Identities” and Strategies of Resistance

Ghost Ranch–Susurrus from the Landscape

You can read more here: 

Ghost Ranch–Susurrus from the Landscape