Date and Time: Friday, May 24, 2024, 6-9pm

Where: Recess 46 Washington Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205

Please complete this form to register your attendance and participation in this workshop. You will receive an email with detailed instructions a few days before the event.

Join OlaRonke Akinmowo of The Free Black Women’s Library for a writing workshop that interrogates the possibility of afro-futurism, daydreaming, and worldbuilding serving us as portals towards safety, community, and liberation. In this workshop we will read and discuss, Octavia Butler's first published short story, Speech Sounds (1983), set in a post-pandemic, Los Angeles dystopia in which an undisclosed illness had left its survivors without the ability to speak, read, or write. Please read the short story prior to arriving at the workshop.

OlaRonke Akinmowo is an interdisciplinary artist who makes collages, handmade paper sculptures, monotype prints, stop motion projections, and interactive installations. Through her artistic practice she explores, shapes, conjures, and creates moments that center and celebrate the expansive nature of Blackness and Black womanhood. In 2015 she created The Free Black Women’s Library, a social art project that has grown into a collection of over 5,000 books written by Black women and Black non-binary writers, a free store, a period pantry, a virtual Reading Club, a weekly book swap, and a wide array of workshops and free public programs based in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. 

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This workshop is part of a larger project by Interdisciplinary artist Helina Metaferia. The Meeting Place is a site for transformative gatherings by and for Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) women (cis and transgender), who wish to engage in embodied and somatic practices as a way of activating epigenetics in order to release lived or inherited trauma of systemic oppression stored in the body. The project is designed to provide a supportive structure to an open-ended question: what does rest, love, care, and liberation look like for BIPOC women in the 21st century? The project takes as inspiration the many meetings that women have historically organized throughout the global diaspora to strengthen each other in community, including the rituals of celebration, family gatherings, places of worship, protest, political organizing, and care work. Metaferia has invited several BIPOC women led organizations to facilitate workshops as part of this project.

OPTIONAL: All participants who identify as QTBIPOC women/femmes (cis, trans, or GNC) have the option to sit for photographed portrait which will be used for Helina Metaferia’s signature collages at the conclusion of the workshop. 

The workshop is for adults 18 years and older, though minors 12 years and older can attend if accompanied by a parent or with a parental waiver form. 

Deadline for registration is Wednesday, May 22, 2024. Registration is required, space is limited.

To learn more about the artist, visit: www.helinametaferia.com