 First of all, New York Theatre Workshop saved our bacon, or whatever. We lost the space where we were meant to be, and they stepped forward and gave us their theater. And this is their news of the world. They're incredibly grateful. For those of you who don't know the Foundry Theatre, we don't have a theater. We are a theater company, and we are here to make things. So having a home meeting for a couple of hours means a lot to us. I just wanted to say that about 21 years ago, when the Foundry was first started, we had done one show, and it was the time in which the massacre in Srebrenica was occurring, and nobody knew what to do, or at least that's what it felt like for a while. And I thought, well, what should we do? How do we think about this? And so we had a big gathering at my friend Coco McPherson's house, and it happened to be that that was the first Foundry dialogue, and that was about 21 years ago, almost to the day of this time. And so for many years, the dialogues were about, I think, unpacking, you know, they were like these giant pause buttons going, OK, wait a minute. This is happening. Do we know this is happening? Is this what we need to be happening? And so a lot of those first dialogues in the first years of the company were about really trying to understand what the issue was. And I'm happy to say that in the second decade, after I went to the World Social Forum and saw really how much was going on, and I had no idea in terms of proposals for how else to think about these issues beyond there being catastrophes. I was so inspired, and practically Cartwheel Hope for Brazil. And our dialogues began to change in such a way as we began to invite people who were actually working prefiguratively as opposed to strictly in protest. Not that we shouldn't be protesting the structures that exist, but there are so many people who are actually living the future with the living of their lives. And so that has become a big part of our dialogues for the second 10 years of Foundry dialogues. So I'm not sure if I'm supposed to keep talking till people come in, but I also wanted to, so I wanted to thank you for the opportunity to invite you to this and for your coming. And I now would like to introduce the curator of these dialogues who herself is a prefigurative creature on this planet. And her name is Nana Sen. Today I wanted to take a moment to tell you a little bit about the entire dialogue series. This, as you know, is the first in the series. This year our dialogues are inspired by the larger context of climate change and environmental justice. This came out of several conversations, but largely it was also inspired by the fact that Foundry later participated in a big way with the right to city contingent in New York with the last fall. So a lot of the conversations that came out of that encouraged us to curate this series. This is a four-part dialogue event that examines the ways in which our relationships to sites of power have to change given the larger context and the crisis of environmental justice. So today we're talking about how to re-imagine our bodies in relation to that. And then in the next couple of weeks we'll be talking about re-imagining our communities, our countries, the actual construct of the nation. Come back and stay for those dialogues as well. In case you missed it, the program this year is a digital one. We have the QR code on the door over there. So you have to just scan it. And I just want to take another few minutes to actually talk a little bit about Ebony and Aurora, whoever will be with us. And we'll also send you the program tomorrow. Exactly. For those of you that are having trouble, definitely. Thank you. So Ebony Noelle Golden is an amazing artist and cultural organizer based out of Carla Clare. She works at the Intercepting Pathways of Arts, Culture and Education with individuals and organizations pushing for community-powered cultural change. Her creative practice, her organization called Betty's Daughters Arts Collaborative, which is a cultural arts direct action group based in New York City. And Betty's Daughters offers a slate of services designed to instigate, inspire and incite progressive change for individuals and artists. Aurora Levins Morales, some of you might have heard of her already. She was born in Puerto Rico, to Puerto Rican and Ashkenazi Jewish parents. As a woman with chronic illness and disability, she has learned to invent creative ways to engage with the world through writing, visual art, conversation, mentoring, ritual and more. A lifelong feminist and radical artist and activist and historian, her writing bridges the gaps between the intimately personal and the global and the passionate witnessing of our traumas and a profound belief in the possibilities of a just and joyous world. Aurora is also the author of medicine stories, her medios, and most recently, her book Kindling Writings on the Body, which was published by Flat Repress. We are so excited to have them here in conversation with each other. It's just the highlight of our whole lives, as we all like so. I'm going to just start clapping and hope that they'll be happy. You've been dealt with hard. Mostly the hard. Well, let's just start. No need. No preface. We can get. So... Yeah. Okay. What in your own life and your work path leads you to engage with environmental issues? Little question. I grew up in a rainforest. My father, who was an artist and an amateur naturalist, so that for me and my parents were activists from before my birth, my mother was also a painter and a writer. So I kind of came into a world with those things used that art needs to engage in the world that the world includes people in the natural world. It never was really a question for me. I grew up in a colonized country whose natural landscape was being decimated by foreign companies taking homes in it and cutting it up so that for the beauty and aliveness of my own land was always intricately involved with activism. So I was born and I was raised in Houston, Texas, in the city. And some of my finest memories in terms of growing up centered around being outside. I'm from a generation of people who played outside a lot. And so, you know, I remember climbing trees and laying on my back in the grass and looking at the sky for hours and hours and hours. And most recently, though, environmental justice has shown up in some different ways in terms of why I'm doing the work that I'm doing now. Because I'm seeing environment as more, as including the natural world, but also all of the spaces we inhabit. And so because of the state violence that's perpetuating against folks in my communities, our environment and justice in our environment in particular has taken me on a kind of a winding road considering what police brutality and what environmental justice have to do with each other, what has reproductive justice happened to the climate justice. So it's just like, you know, a remixing of how I came into the world and just like being a little girl laying on our back looking at the clouds. It's changed, but it's still just as important. And for me as somebody who identifies as a Latin American, the questions in this country, there's been more of a tendency for environmental activism to be separated from other kinds of activities and not really to be fused together. In Latin America, that's not as much the case. People are very clear that the assault on the environment are deeply connected to international relations and racism and gender issues, so that you have indigenous-led women's organizations tackling these things together and talking about planting trees and about reproductive rights and about food. There was a sign recently in a women's demonstration, I think in Bariwai, that said feminist land reform is the answer to world hunger. Land reform takes into account the deforestation of the land. It takes into account foreign companies doing mining that's destructive and poisoning the water. And often women, neighborhood cultural communities and rural communities are the first ones to notice the signs of environmental degradation. They work with the land in an intimate way where often men are traveling for work and women are reducing food right here in those samsarama farms. So it's more integrated in other places over here. Tell us more about your creative work. What art do you make? What inspires you creatively? And what disrupts you? Fire, water. You were born a fire sign, red like your father and mouthy like me. At your naming ceremony, the priest wanted to call you Shako Olukun. I just sucked my teeth and fastened my seatbelt for an 18-year ride. Fire, water. Only present and flattening. I knew you would break ice because your eyes only spoke the truth. In your seventh month, you dreamed new worlds with me. There was water and fire and water alive like the elements pressing asphalt against shore. You said, pack everything up with the pirouette on my cervix. By the time the midwife was done removing her mask and gloves, we were in Barbados, spooning fish stew over rice and peas. I knew you would ask me before you came, rushing down what concrete I broke in your name. So, I have prepared a list. I hope it suits you. One, never walk without joy perfuming your collarbones. Two, see the world your mothers could not see. Three, you are here because I loved myself. Four, tomorrow is brilliant because we are alive. Five, there are many parts to this story. I could never stop loving you. Six, I am your mother. You are not a project. There is light here. What I'm saying is, when we made you, we pressed oil out of banana leaves onto our thirsty banks. You came because the farmer's market sells the sweetest onion and the biggest knots of ginger. When we made you, our spines were soft and supple and curbed around the currents. We smiled, our tongues, our toes lunging closer to home. You are not a survival tactic. You are here because we loved you. You are not a mistake. You are not a miscalculation. You are not an incident. You are not an accident. You are not a statistic. You are not a rap sheet. You are not a rap sheet. You are not a prison sentence. You are here because the three of us made a choice. So, that is why I do my creative work. That is a little bit of the creative work that I do, taking an opportunity to provide a deeper lens into the intimate worlds we inhabit. And, yeah. And some of the things that come up in that poem are the things that disrupt my artistic practice. So, creativity and having a creative practice in some ways is a response, but those of us that were in that great workshop on Friday night tried to move beyond being reactionary as creatives, whether we make art or not, you know. And that is, I think, mandatory for me at this time is to use all of the things that I have, tools at my disposal to create the world that my mothers could not see. And so that is where I am right now. Yeah. What about you? Well, from long lines of storytellers and long lines of radicals. And really from an early age, I understood how stories construct the world, how what we're capable of imagining is what we're capable of creating, and that where our imaginations are constricted, we can't build until we tell ourselves the story of something we can't embody and we can't make it happen. And so for me, I began with poetry. I write a lot of prose poetry. I write personal essays. I'm beginning to do more visual art. And all of it is a summoning of possibility on one level or another. And really what disrupts my work is the same thing that provokes my work. Being alive in contested territory, pushing for the creation of societies that sustain all life. And sometimes the poetry takes me down paths that are about celebration and some of them are about fury and some of them are both. And there's the line of the grass and the beauty and the smell of the grass and you need to celebrate that connection to the living world and there's the rage comes. We were talking backstage earlier I had the opportunity to be paid to be a poet commentator on the news for Pacifica Radio right after 9-1-1. And every day I would read the headlines and go, where can poetry open something here that the headlines don't? And what poetry opened was a personal connection. So the headlines that said, you know, bombs falling on Baghdad, people couldn't numb out too. But the poem that I wrote that particular day was about women who were pregnant in Baghdad and inducing labor so they wouldn't have to go to the hospital while the bombs were falling. That's a personal visceral body story about war that unnumbs people. And so all of what I do is to bring a bigger sense of possibility and to reinforce aliveness in the face of whatever comes at them. And my art is both disrupted by disability and chronic illness and what I have learned over the course of my life as a working artist is that every barrier when you tell a story about it becomes something else. The story of what is broken is a thing that's whole. The story about why I can't write today is the story I needed to tell that day. Yeah, so yes. And there's something I think I would love to hear you talk about around the body being a space of creativity and being kind of at odds with because of all the environmental factors that we're talking about. Like the body being the site, the original site of creativity and the biggest hurdle to creativity. And that might be, maybe I'm not phrasing it correctly but having to negotiate all of those things and in a world where disembodiment is so much the status quo to not be connected, to not want to be connected. Actually, to not manage. Absolutely, and I just finished putting out a book this last year called Kindling Writings on the Body which I wrote while I was lying flat in bed with a pinched disc in my back. And as I wrote about there are days that I do not want to know about my body at all. But the stories that are enlarged in my body are sometimes so painful and how the process of being able to get myself to listen to my body's stories. You know, it's not simple. What's the famous quote about writing is easy, you just sit down for a bit of day. Let me backtrack. I think that we come into the world attuned to our own flesh and attuned to what is around us and systematically become alienated from those stories in us and stories in the world and the relationship between them. There are myriad of ways that we are taught to override the needs of our bodies in the service of somebody else's interests. We are trained from a very early age to prepare to be workers who subdue the need to move, the need to sing, the need to breathe deeply, the need to eat when we're hungry, not on someone else's schedule. That our bodies are the process of teaching us to be alienated from our bodies and to see our bodies as inert vehicles to take us places and raw materials to produce wealth. Deeply alienates us from, you know, we silence and silence and silence and it is a process to keep saying to the body now I will listen to you, now I will listen, I will listen again. When I'm writing at this point after many years of practice if I write something and there's some off about it I haven't really gotten to the true thing I feel in my body. There's a discomfort somewhere and it has taken a tremendous amount of work to get myself to listen to that because all our training is to override it to just push through and parallel to that is our alienation from the natural world which human beings evolved in and with and in relationship to and are part of I really dislike the word environment as a description of nature because it seems like we're describing it's a stage for us it's our environment. There is an eco-social web that we're part of and all parts of it are aligned but over a period of centuries there has been, particularly in European societies a move toward seeing the natural world as really just raw materials to make stuff out of. There's, you know, it extends to the level of absurdity where you have corporations like Monsanto saying that bees steal pollen that belongs to Monsanto and leaves appropriate sunshine that belongs to cash crops the extent of modifying the natural world and our bodies and pretending they have no voices of their own so one of the workshops I teach is writing from the body and I have people go inch by inch and say, you know, the story of this knuckle like what is my art and my left foot have to say to the world we have huge archives of stories within our bodies that have been suppressed and so they don't just pop up easily they need to acquire courtship they require... it's like a wild animal that's been treated and needs to be slowly coasted to come forth and it's interesting that I asked you that question before I turn over the card number three and that is exactly what we were supposed to be talking about we're insane, we're insane I'll take it as well yeah, I mean, I think that... okay, so the question says how does climate change and environmental trauma affect our bodies? that was the question so Aurora answered that and you know... some of it yeah, you could definitely continue but I'll tap in you know, I think that this question is one that I feel like I'm always negotiating my daily thinking about something and as Aurora is so eloquent in talking about you know, the capitalist framework and how it is at odds with nature or at odds with the rest of the ecosystems that we are a part of I feel like... what I feel in my body in this moment is the result of an accumulated archive in thinking about the archive as a living breathing practice so there are things that I do that I pick up from, you know my family and my mother and my mother's mother and being a part of people who are resilient but also who have in some ways in a lot of ways had to bend around and kind of, you know, build up calluses to be able to breathe literally to be able to breathe and so again, I mean, I think you spot on our breathing in understanding environment as more as just like a transactional relationship that we can excavate and get what we need and there's no reciprocity I feel like I definitely identify with that and I feel like having a different relationship or building a different practice and relationship to my internal and external environments is kind of the trajectory that I'm hoping to be on that I feel like I'm nudging in that direction and what that means very concretely for me is recognizing that I am here as a part of a larger ecosystem that I am a part of each start in the sky that I am a part of everything that rolls out of the ground that I deserve to be here and that I can have an experience that is building a different relationship to trauma I feel in my body right now that my time as an activist when I identified it that way was good time spent learning and being on the front lines but right now and we talked about again we talked about this on Friday but right now it really is about taking the space reclaiming snatching back the space to be visionary and to dream beyond trauma to dream beyond resistance I am in a community of people who are on the front lines all over the country fighting and also being deeply impacted by that fight and there is no safety plan for people who put their bodies on the front line so resistance is important but vision is actually where I'm going to situate it right now and I think dealing with and experiencing and exploring trauma as it relates to all of the environments that I am a part of has kind of pushed me that is the way I'm going to stay alive it is not like a theoretical methodology or framework that I am considering no if I do not spend more time visioning and building and sourcing my own vitality I will die and that is individually that is also speaking collectively that is what has happened and that death is not like only just a literal passing away but it's also living in a very small way that really isn't living at all it might be surviving but it's not thriving it's actually the way the enemy wins so yes, yes, yes, yes thank you what else though? what more? I want to say a little bit more about this one this could be a week of talk yeah but absolutely review about the importance of vision I think that I use metaphor a lot about that those of us who are trying to create sustainable life on earth have to have a foot in the present and a foot in the future yes, we have to have the realism of what it is that's right in front of us that we've got to deal with but if we don't have a vision that's big enough then the metaphor is that we need to steer by the stars while our feet are in the mud that the mud of the present moment requires some slogging through you've got to have good boots you've got to deal with what's right here but if your vision isn't big enough and high enough you can't really steer by it and one of the things that I say when I've run in to speak to actors, groups of different kinds is that counterintuitive as we've come to believe it is it is far easier to organize people behind a really big vision than behind a small one that when we ask for too little we don't engage people's passion people's real desires people's real hope and that what oppressive societies do is shrink imagination yes and our job is to expand imagination and say something bigger, something bigger what would a society have to be like for the various physical conditions that are considered disabilities currently not to be disabling disability comes from society's beliefs not from the body the body has challenges society makes those disabling by for instance insisting on standardized cases of work which means a narrow range of bodies can work at that particular pace insisting that on these certain kinds of things are productive who is decreed to be disabled very tremendously from time to time in place to place it's a social idea what would society have to look like for it not to be disabling to have a spinal cord injury on the other side of that I look at all kinds of things that happen to our bodies that are not considered to be environmental in nature that are not considered to be social that are thought as accidental but are not somebody who gets a spinal cord injury as a result of a car accident is actually a victim of an economic structure that requires speed speed is not in any human need work that is structured in centralized ways with people living far away a work schedule and demands upon us that requires to rush people don't actually have a biological need to zoom around 55 months now or more so a person who is injured with a spinal cord injury is injured by the entire economic structure it's not an accident I have what's called environmental illness I am extremely reactive to toxic chemicals around me I also have epilepsy and my epilepsy is connected to the pesticides used on my parents' farm in Puerto Rico in the 1950s that were repurposed nerve gas from World War II so my epilepsy is an environmental illness although no doctor has ever asked me about chemical exposure it is an illness of militarism it's an illness of colonialism we need to really expand our notions of all of those concepts so when I see a question that says how does climate change and environmental trauma affect our bodies I say how doesn't it but the sense of the need to have a really big vision for what's possible and also I think to facilitate resilience I hear a lot about people wanting safe spaces guarantees and safety is a privileged concept there's not a lot of safety going around in the world but resilience allows us to confront a wide variety of situations and come up with creative responses to them and in the face of what greed and alienation from the natural world has perpetrated on our planet we need great imagination great affiliates we could stay right here we could stay when we say how does it affect our bodies that implies that our bodies are affected equally our bodies are not affected equally environmental trauma affects different groups of people very very differently and the people who have been rendered by unequal distributions of wealth and access are way more impacted way faster way harder way sooner malaria is a disease of environmental destruction the deforestation of vast trunks of West Africa thrives mosquitoes out of deep forest into proximity to human beings malaria is one of the biggest killers on earth it is a disease of climate change it is a disease of environmental destruction so when we say our bodies are going ok well let's differentiate different bodies are being hit different ways at different rates we should I'm going to put this car over here because I feel like it's going to come back I think we're going to re-deal yeah ok this is my turn what does re-imagining our bodies mean to you this is great this is great if question 3 came back to me then I would just want to meditate for a moment on my body right yeah my body beyond trauma my body my particular body and the body that is the community that I'm accountable to the communities I'm accountable to what would I say to my baby niece about her body as she is learning what it means what is the value of imagination as it relates to connecting ourselves remembering, reconnecting to this physical thing and also all of the spaces around us but you know I'm going to do something that we did not talk about so I'm just letting all of the organizers know that I'm about to go off script in the most respectful way but I want to just ask for some one word responses when you think of the word re-imagine when the word comes for you say it as loud as you can community all of those words are generative and fertile and rich and come from a space of expansiveness and opportunity and growth and reach and creativity and creativity and when I think about re-imagining our bodies I think about all of those things actually I wouldn't even do I think about connectivity quite often I think about connectivity I think that's the world and collaboration that's the world that I live in most often is being in spaces with people who are wanting to bring more beauty into the world figuring out how to do that and the idea that artists are conjurers in a lot of ways where we can take a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a lot of emotion and a lot of multi-sensory ability and extra sensory perception and make something that wasn't there before imagination and re-imagination and re-re-imagination and re-re-re-imagination is an opportunity within the body and beyond within the body and along with everything else that we can we can touch to be in a space of embodying being beyond trauma that I think is a medicine I really do I think it's a medicine I think re-imagining our collective body means that we see each other and seeing not just being about eyesight but we sense each other and we are connected in a way that we don't want we don't feel like the beings are sitting on the pop we are here together and it's up to us to nurture that that connected space and yeah I could go on and on and I haven't seen these questions yet so I am kind of like you know reaching and grabbing but it's interesting to be in the space of answering these questions now because I feel like I'm always in a space of reimagining every time I sit down with a group of people to have a conversation about building a cultural opportunity it is from a space of vision, it's from a space of connection, it's from a space of opportunity generativeness being a space of fertility and I think all of that that comes to mind for me when I think about imagining my body and imagining the collective bodies that we encounter very poetic to that we were talking backstage but I was saying that I think of the metaphor as my tool of analysis it's a method of noticing relationship I want to answer this in a more specific way although I could also go on to talk a little bit about the work I do in what's called the disability justice movement which is different than the disability rights movement which is much more narrowly focused and it's really a question about bodies in general and how we define all the stories that are heaped upon our bodies that define what's okay and what isn't okay what's considered disabled what's considered ill what's considered healthy are deeply distorted by all kinds of social forces and as I've been doing more and more work in that area I do a lot of writing workshops with disabled and chronically ill people I see how profoundly important the voices of those people are in this mission to reimagine our bodies because people with disabilities and chronic illnesses have bodies that do not allow us to comply with a lot of the rules of bodies in the society and because of that we're forced to face questions of what is worthwhile in a body what do we mean when we say well I'm somebody whose body reacts in very unpredictable and unstable ways to what's around me but my body shouts about perfume it shouts about the 500 chemicals in the fragrance in the fabric softener and I've had to reinvent for myself what I mean by being productive I spent 5 years lying in bed watching a whole lot of Netflix and really having very little social contact I was sick before I was isolated and recently I've been engaging in new kinds of work and realizing wow I was thinking about that I was lying in bed that was the fertile ground from which these ideas that I'm putting out of the world now came that was actually productive time that's not something we're taught we're taught very narrow standards of what's valuable to society I have also the not so common in this country experience of having been a patient in the Cuban medical system I went to Cuba to receive rehab treatment after a stroke and as I was preparing to go there I decided to research a little bit about the clinic I was going to and I read some of their papers and there was a paper about medical ethics and it was talking about what do you do when you have a patient who's a really good candidate for rehab their family's supportive but they don't want to do it and the person writing was saying well you need to respect their sovereignty and at the same time you have to explain to them that each human being is unique that people are not interchangeable and that their specific gifts that if they refuse the opportunity to heal from an injury and become more able to share their gifts that they're depriving themselves of their family and society as a whole so that was right while I was getting turned down for SSI in the States pack of papers this big they prove that you deserve any help at all and that we're not wasting our resources on you which we kind of know we are anyway there was a sense that people are interchangeable and really the measure is how soon are you going to be able to get back to work and in Cuba the notion was we can't afford to do without any of our individual gifted people no idea what they could bring to the table and so we need to make sure everybody is cultivated it's not just specific so that's part of the re-imagining is to kind of re-examine the uniqueness of each of us but also I think that there's a lot of leadership that sick and disabled people can bring to this conversation about what we discover as we explore our own truths and argue with the medical establishment and you know wrestle with diagnoses and with ambiguities that the medical system doesn't like people with chronic illness and particularly the newer chronic illnesses often get really mistreated in the medical system because we have a model of this thing caused this illness and this pill will cure it my body is sick from 21st century and 20th century capitalism I have a wide range of ways that my body was not able to adapt to the toxicity of that and that toxicity includes the colonial occupation of country it includes what it was like to be a Puerto Rican girl right in the United States at the age of 13 it includes a whole range of things that my body didn't have enough resilience to handle so as we tell specific stories of body trauma there's also clues in there about what re-imagining resilience and healing was like so I'm really excited to bring forward more of those voices and see what people who currently imagine themselves as able-bodied and well can learn from those of us that's one piece of a millionth of a say about this it's a really good question let's leave it at the same time have anything on it before I ask the question how do you feel it how are your bodies yes how are your bodies hungry do you have something to eat snack someone in the back said something cold can someone give that person scarboard sweater in the back raise your hand she's let's be responsible for our bodies here also you're sitting in chairs that I imagine are not that comfortable sitting for long periods of time are they comfortable well sitting still is not actually natural so feel free to look around get up and stretch up here I would love to see while taking care of your body as well did you get a shawl or something no anyone have an extra garment pass it back we're going back yes it's a theoretical opportunity how and I feel like you have been answering this question so opportunity to say more is really how does this ability ability relate to how we think about the environment I've been working very slowly on a really big book it's all about that and part of what I've been thinking about is that in some traditional societies there's way less distinction between body and environment than what we currently live with there's an understanding that the skin is not the barrier we think it is that we're constantly exchanging our body with the environment and that when we become ill when we become disabled that it's actually not limited to it's not just happening inside the bag of the skin it's a disruption in relationships and in fact I coined a word based on the language of the people which means our center as a word to mean mind, body and ecosystem all in one because when I reimagine my body when I expand my vision I understand myself to be a lot less bounded individually than I've been taught to think and environmental how is it how does the other question how does disability relate to how I think about the environment disability and illness are disruptions in the expected relationship between an individual body and an environment disability and illness are both disruptions of the relationship we expect to have with our environment we expect to be able to move through it will we expect to be able to proceed with the five senses we expect to be able to breathe easily we expect to be free of pain and then something disrupts that and so it does bring a heightened awareness of what's around us um I'm going to talk about me for me I really wish I had brought my laptop instead of leaving it at the hotel because there's a snippet I would read to you about how when I struggle with illness sometimes it feels unbearable I want to just vacate my body so I don't have to pay attention and what allows me to push past that is to extend my senses to really perceive my body as part of a web that is both traumatizing and resilient my body is I have disabilities that have to do with having landed on my head during seizures I extend my senses outward and think about the way the environment impinged on my body to make that happen I think a lot about my body and my land and how we were injured in similar ways I spend a lot of time imagining my body as soil I imagine a regeneration of my body and the reforestation of the mountains of western paprika I think about the toxins in the water table there and the things in my liver and as I expand that sense of relationship with the natural world I feel empowered I sense a huge web that is struggling for resilience in the face of trauma so for me disability and I think for a lot of people it depends on what people bring to it and what the disability is but certainly for people with chronic illness I think there is an open door into more perception of relationship with the environment this is something that that you're going to write your go-de-en-salula wrote about a lot she wrote a lot about the state of awareness from being broken in that way from being kind of forced open to perceive relationships that we can just sort of trumble through life on noticing so for me personally illness and disability open that sense kind of out of necessity I feel like if I limit my perception to this body it feels overwhelming and when I stand out I see both greater damage and greater resource greater possibility this quote has been coming to my head a lot this week the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton has a long poem that ends all together they have more death than we but all together we have more life than they when I reach with my sick body outward I tap all that life that's the age of that I even noticed that I struggled with it first because I was up here in my head and I went wait a minute and I went like this I was like okay what does my body actually want to say about this right now so that was that process that we were talking about earlier of the body as a compass the body as a place of checking the accuracy of what's happening here in the front row are some of the dynamics you bring to your artwork race and gender for example connected to our climate so I've had the privilege and the honor to be a part of building collective women artist collectors around the country mostly folks interested in performance theatrical performance and cultural performance and mostly women of color and black women and I have done this where I'm from in Houston, I've done this in DC here in New York in North Carolina and I've been a part of institutions and cultural organizations reaching to do this type of local intimate work in terms of performance with people of color it's challenging work and also very troubling quite often I'll be very honest with you to do this work in the midst of all of the environmental traumas that we are living in but it's also very gratifying work and I really believe that it's a part of why I'm here and this time to gather women and create sacred space for us to imagine beyond our trauma and to then take that imagination to public spaces and so so the dynamics the elements, the ways in which the processes that I use really come from the front porch and I'll talk a little bit about that the kitchen table they're not learned in a way like oh yes and then I took this course at NYU on experimental poetics and black women's blah blah blah I did that but that's not where I learned these dynamics that I would be asking to discuss it really, I think you know one that's coming up for me as we've been talking is my relationship to my mother which I think is one of the first relationships I ever experienced that was so full of life and so full of challenge all wrapped up in one individual, one human being and I think some of these these what we're talking about I think I'm leaning in to listening because I hear it resonate and really like you and my mom would just I'm sure y'all could just have conversations over days she's a brilliant woman and also some of these things around health and wellness and what that means and who gets to decide I think she would have a lot to say about not to me but I think she would enjoy talking to you about some of these things yes yes, yes so it feels good to hear I know the conversations that my mom and I haven't been able to have I'm able to hear today so it's very much you know I'm really thankful and it's a learning for me and an opening for me so I'm very thankful but those dynamics specifically that ask black women to be more in connection with each other are sometimes the hardest part of making artwork in the communities you know that I could make work with and we we've outlined why, you know we've outlined a word talked about well everybody's body isn't impacted in the same way if you think about black women within the cultural, political social landscape environment ecology of this country imagine just for a moment and I actually want to just take a pause and have you imagine how these dynamics play out in these communities of black women and then on top of that to be expected or to want to or to say yes and we will still be creative forces in our communities we will still make art we will still perform our stories on the street we won't be silenced we won't be invisibleized, we will tell our stories in public and you will contend with our movements what the f*** so much to say go away and for these communities of women to say hell no really you will see us it's absolutely the unmitigated god of black women it's key yes and I'm being very local and I know it being specific to talking about communities of black women there is connection in this world but through my experience those dynamics of stepping up stepping in being visible being scary in some ways to the dominant structure are dynamics that I have in my pocket they're my pocketbook so to speak and has a daughter of a woman who took no sh** from anybody who takes no sh** from anybody and her four sisters and my grandmother and my great grandmother who I've had in my life for most of my life I come from a lineage of women who while dealing with trauma while dealing with the reality of Jim Crow south in the 50s, 40s and beyond and also while getting graduate degrees in the world and making families and raising babies and loving and living all these things that we were talking about we are here and we are here it's not a binary we are an ecology in each body and in our collective those dynamics are not just about how we make it through the day those are the elements of my art practice and the art practices of the people who I get to make art with we come to the table and the first thing we say is we know is that we're supposed to be there we are not marginalizing ourselves and saying oh we have a story to tell but we're not going to say that those people are but the people that I make art with are bodacious you know and and it is because in the communities that I'm a part of art is is a tool, is a strategy, is a method is a recipe for revolution and liberation evolution, revolution and liberation yes so we come together and we're like okay we're supposed to be here we have a story to tell we have an agenda to move forward it's very important it's not you know these are people who are strategic artists these are people who are strategists and the way they activate their strategies through art I get to work at here in this moment I get to work at the National Library everybody know who that is everyone knows who Dr. Barbara here is in California if you don't Google Dr. Barbara Antier then take yourself to 125th and 5th and find out more about this cultural revolutionary that refused to put black people's stories on the back burner she worked on Broadway and could have totally done that and did that and started an institution that's still here and still thriving the stories and the lives and the experiences of people of color at the center of their seas very important work I could talk about this for a long time but those dynamics of resilience of vitality of taking what's in the cover and feeding a whole neighborhood that's the people I come from and that's the art that I make whether it's on the street whether it's in a school whether it's on the stage it doesn't matter because it's not just art is not like in quotations art is life art is practice, art is relationship art is building, art is cultivating art is love, art is spirituality art is a holistic ecology, a possibility and within that you know I never shy away from the body that I'm in, the experience that I'm having it's it nourishes it makes it even richer I'll say this and then I'll pause a couple of days ago I taught a day long workshop which actually I didn't do all the teaching I let folks teach themselves popular education style but after the workshop there was a gentleman outside he has this cultural campaign called Very Black Google it, it's called Very Black and I know him he was like, would you take a picture with my very black sticker and I was like, of course you know and I took a picture, posted it on Facebook like 150 people liked the picture that's important but not important but it is important because I live in a world where being in this body is not considered the standard or the norm of beauty by some, it isn't for me for me and the people that love me and the people I love but you know, so the idea that this platform be black be as black as very black as you can be exists oh gosh, what a wonderful opportunity to let the world know that I'm down with that and so those dynamics of again a resilience of being bold and radical and loving and nurturing I'm thinking back on that briefly, yeah I come from those people on the Latino community what does that say I can't be a transition okay, well transition to yeah but first I'm going to say something I just want to say I came two weeks ago from being in Indiana with 14 Latina feminist writers to 20 years ago got a grant to do some boring academic thing and got into the room with each other and went around and said let's tell our life stories and saw how much we had to fight for space for our thinking and our voices and said yeah, we're really writing the grant and what we did instead was each other's life histories and we created a book called telling to live Latina feminist testimonial it's 20th anniversary of that project so we were invited to speak at Notre Dame University and we walked into the auditorium said okay, well we have an altar draped fabric all over everything rearranged the chairs and instead of a panel on testimonial writing did this thing where we were going back and forth and speaking poetically and doing invocation and doing what you're talking about rounded inner bodies the pain and resilience the beauty making the persistence though and saying these things in every single space we can drive a wedge into another that's the ground our bodies, our lives our survival, our resilience so those women my mom was my co-opter for four years and she didn't take any shit either she wrote a master's thesis on the racism of the great God of Anthropology cloud body straps alright so we're gonna audience okay y'all here with us people are taking notes I see people taking notes so y'all tweeting did y'all do that no, you're present you're here with us and there's something that you've been carrying around in your new chest that you want to say a question maybe in your belly I wanna see because certain people raise their hands first so I'm gonna pause a minute and I'm gonna see who's holding back can you see them? I mean I can see them but sort of I only see one hand over here there's another hand over there two guys notice how many questions do you have two well they're not gonna both be light skinned boys so let's wait a minute see who else has a question okay I see a hand right here I see a hand back here she just can't see okay I know, I'm like coffee calling first and then see who else hi thank you so much I actually never asked questions good what would you proceed to make a difference between environmental trauma and violence especially if we think about structural frameworks that actually put violence upon our bodies and then cause trauma so can you all hear the question I think about as a Puerto Rican woman I'm also a survivor of the trafficking industry I look at the history of my country and sexual violence and environmental violence have been like this from day one and in fact the environmental violence in the Caribbean was framed as sexual violence the landscape is spoken of as a female body being captured in the earliest days by the Spanish but when the US invaded in 1898 they said the fertile curvy hills of Puerto Rico were surrendering to the Vero Marines a great narrative of environmental violence that goes back 500 years trauma is the are the tracks of the violence but yeah I think it's really important to talk about it's more fashionable trauma has become fashionable it's good that people are thinking about trauma but trauma is the footprints of the violence perpetrated and yes you're right it's really important to name violence as violence and to name the clear cutting of western Puerto Rico to plant a cheaper variety between the ability of large numbers of people to sell children and young women for sexual violence and the ability to decimate the planet there's a disconnect this is our young this is our the children of humanity being sold commodified exploited often dying in the process for a species to be able to do that to its young requires an extraordinary amount of violent disruption of relation and so to me that's completely intertwined with the same mentality does that to children as you know decides that we can clear cut the Amazon and that even though it will mean that we have no air it's still worth putting that into a Swiss bank account so but I also I mean I think of every aspect of that mentality as violent poverty is violence shortage of food is violence all of it is violence anything that is not nurtured is is in some way violence because alienation is violent it's a severing of the ties that sustain life and I frankly think that we're all in a kind of PTSD state around the loss of our bonds of the natural world with one another I think about the people who perpetrate these crimes must be in a state of horrific orphanage from the kinship of humanity and the planet that must be deeply intolerable to live that way and people must be incredibly not to be able to tolerate even those things one more question people is there a question here I have a question yes please it's actually kind of a follow-up I was thinking about trauma while you guys were talking too there were kind of three words that kept occurring for me as I was listening like bells and resilience, imagination and trauma and in one case it was it was in your metaphor it was resilience and imagination and then at another moment you were saying you faced the day through resilience and trauma and I wondered if you were if there is a relationship to trauma and imagination in that sense or if there's a way to think about that relationship can you take another one the relationship between resilience and trauma or trauma and imagination trauma and imagination give me a moment the relationship between trauma and imagination I mean the short answer and I will explicate but the short answer is well of course there's a relationship between trauma and imagination and for me of course there is a relationship for me and I think that relationship or that connectivity was sparked in me at a very young age and I think I know I remember being able to express things through art through painting through poetry that I couldn't express in conversation with the people who were experiencing the trauma most directly so that imagination in some ways becomes an opportunity to step outside of the present moment and consider the nuances that are happening to take in place for me I've seen that and I've also seen that in the communities that I lived in that the space to imagine is sometimes relegated to the last five minutes of the agenda of the program of the project and that is where we need to be most often is taking that that break to breathe in a different way to experience in a different way and to understand what's going on it is I'm not able to really metabolize trauma if I'm in a fight-or-flight space I'm not able to understand and figure out what's happening my body is shut down and I'm saying my body and I'm also saying the collective body but the opportunity to think about police violence and all of that people are coming together at their wits in wanting to figure out what to do with their trauma do we just come together and talk do we make another nonprofit do we run a plane what do we do we don't know and what I'm experiencing right now in Harlem is how long-term the long-term impact of trauma on imagination these are groups of artists coming together that can't breathe long enough before there is another trauma so the space of imagination becomes impaired in a way because of the constant threat of attack and I said this earlier we've been talking about this so imagination becomes not it is a revolutionary practice for some but it's also a visionary practice it's also taking back that space in our bodies from the capitalist state from state violence and using that time and energy to imagine to build something else but I will say that this is all very flowery talk and practice I know folks that have been on the front lines in Ferguson on the front lines here on the front lines all over the world and when you ask them to imagine they look at you like you are crazy like you're talking crazy talk like you're talking beyond the scope of possibility like they can look at me like I need help because the daily life says that that is not a possibility even for artists even for people who spend the bulk of their time in an imagination in an imaginative space and so you know I'm talking around I don't have an answer I'm just like sharing what I'm feeling right now that for some people this space of imagination the practice of imagining is a privilege when you do not know if you're going to be shot dead in the street in the next moment and so it becomes you know it's difficult it sounds good to talk about it sounds good to think about the opportunity and the options and I know some folks that some of my people will be watching this live stream and we'll take issue we'll say right now is the time to fight right now is the time to revolt right now is the time to make sure of our communities and make them safe right now is not the time for poetry right now is not the time for vision right now is the time for survival and so you know I'm speaking for myself but I also know that there are people that I love who they can't be there right now the reality is they can't be there there's always the danger that urgency will that the mud at our feet is up to our needs and who has time to go start but if we're going to walk out of the mud we need to have a direction I, I, yes, yes, yes, yes and after the earthquake in Haiti Cuba sent a bunch of medical teams to help they were on the ground already because they really worked there building the medical infrastructure but they sent a bunch of medical teams and they decided to send some teams of artists and the artists plan had been to do some work with Haitian artists and get some community art going to process the trauma while they were at it they did a workshop and were living in tents in the park and didn't know where their families were and they thought they were going to do that once as a side thing while the kids revolted and said no you have to do this every day in the middle of all the horror of what was happening they started having art programs in the refugee camps throughout Port-au-Prince and the Cuban doctor said it was the first time they had been able to attend to bodies and souls simultaneously and the way that those things interacted with each other greatly enhanced the power of the boat so I won't put that story in the table I also am in a really lovely project called We Are Not Numbers where writers in the United States are mentoring young writers in Gaza who want to write in English and talk about what their experiences are so I'm receiving poetry from young writers who are talking about writing in their journals writing stories in their journals as the shelves are falling so that question of whether we can embrace imagination in the moment I think it depends on a lot of different factors and community support for that and also there's certain kinds of emergencies where there's so little sense of control that sometimes maybe nothing is left to try to imagine the way out I mean look at the massive literature of prison poetry over centuries people in extreme circumstances turning to poetry I know one story in fascist Spain of a prisoner giving a book of poetry to a prison authority who after reading it could no longer do his job was not able to continue abusing prisoners and managing that but I wanted to say about trauma and imagination that I think of it that violence writes a story on us it says you are a person to whom this may be done and that our imagination takes that wound but that in the telling, retelling of the story and claiming it and putting ourselves in a different role we can rewrite we name ourselves as I am someone to whom this was done and who is healing and who is coming back and that so for me imagination and trauma deeply linked and critical part of addressing trauma is specifically the feeling of imagination specifically opening up that space that you're saying that some of the frontline people you work with can't imagine can't hold off the urgency of the danger and the violence of long enough to create that how do we as artists open up even tiny little spaces upon the wall that's two lines can impact somebody on their way to the trenches so they have lines what's the song we sing as we walk down the street how do we make sure those songs embody something beyond just fight fight fight fight is important when we've been taught not to fight but imagining winning is incredibly important for our immune systems in the larger sense that to sustain ourselves we have to have some cellular belief in the possibility that struggle leads to something that struggle is not just a state of permanent state of being that there are possibilities possibilities we have 50 more minutes there's a song that there's an institution in Newmark and Tennessee Highlander Center if you don't know about Highlander you should Google Highlander Center for Research and Education at Newmark and Tennessee it's been around about 80 years and one of the pieces of work that I do is I serve on a committee called We Shall Overcome Fund which is responsible for redistributing the royalties from that song back into black communities led organizations led by people who are doing work for the liberation of black folks so that's a big job that's a big job and every year we have something called Cultural Workers Weekend which is led by the lead cultural organizer at Highlander to Firewaller Muhammad and one of our convenings recently what about actually not recently I learned this song and I think it really kind of encapsulates for me an answer to that question it's basically the song says we yeah, yeah, yeah we will not we will not stop and we won't turn around we'll flood the streets with justice we are freedom bound and I think you know that song and we will sing it and sing it and sing it until we just get overcome with understanding that in the space of in the space of trauma in the space of state violence in the world that we live in we won't stop we will not stop we are going to flood the streets with justice we are freedom bound and so yeah what is the start? that's the start what do we use these last 15 minutes to do? there's a lot of things that exist but what do you guys I have like a I dropped one well this one is interesting how does the human body build a bond in relationships? I saw that question too what else do you have there? I'll share that sure not alone the human body by itself my first reaction was this is something done collectively this is something done in community because the things that separate us from having a cooperative relationship to the planet have been societally structured they're bigger than an individual I mean yes, go press your body against a tree until you can feel the sap but really how do we build a cooperative relationship with the planet by systematically dismantling the obstacles to that and I the economic structures of the planet that have defined it as plunderable that's the biggest obstacle I also believe that unhealed trauma is one of the biggest obstacles to being effective at doing that so if there's not a single pathway toward the answer to that, I think it's how do we how do we reclaim our place in the ecosystem how do we rebuild how do we refasten the threads that were separate systematically for different peoples different cultures that happened earlier or later there are still cultures in the world that are very integrated into their ecosystems and understand for people of European heritage there was in closing of the commons there was the burning of the witches there was systematic violent disruption of that and those are currently the people inflicting that harm most extensively on the rest of the world and so there's a healing of that and a conscious decision to be rebind to say okay I want to get to the place where when a tree is being cut I just feel it in my body when I see a clear cut slope that I feel like I feel asthma how do we reestablish kinship and I think that has to happen simultaneously with even the places where we can't yet feel the kinship acting on the knowledge of that kinship and protecting my brother who's a visual artist and organizer said something really interesting to me I don't know how many people heard that the Lakota Nation announced that they were offering political asylum to wolves funny but not funny it's important that was framed not as protective the animal but political asylum these are our relatives who are being hunted and killed and exterminated just like we were we offered political asylum on our land my brother then pointed out and actually met with some of the people who were doing that that the way we talk about the great peril of the bees is most often in terms of because we won't have food if they die and that it's very similar it's as if the bees are a migrant agricultural worker and we're concerned that they're not going to deliver the crops to us that we need to be talking about the bees as an amazing phenomenon worthy of life in them itself they don't just fertilize what we eat they fertilize everything they dance in the air they are splendor the honey that they produce was not meant for us they pollinate weeds they pollinate things that we don't consider valuable we express solidarity with bees rather than uh oh if the bees die then we're not going to get our tomatoes how do we shift constantly notice and shift the places in which we feel proprietary toward nature we feel like nature is here to supply our needs uh oh it's a danger our needs won't get met but how do we become once again responsible kin to this web of life that tolerated our expansion and destruction up to a point but where it's disintegrating because we have overstepped as a species what we're entitled to what's sustainable I think the answer is a collective answer and it's a collective answer about consciousness and it's an answer about culture building but it's also an answer about standing up to Monsanto about standing up to right now the USDA is considering rules that will allow Monsanto and other GM producing companies to contaminate the gene pool of seeds without any consequences whatsoever they're going to say organic farmers have to pay into a fund and compensate themselves when their crops are contaminated there is a danger that the spread of patented seed genes will spread into the plant population and render plants sterile they were designed to be sterile because they're trying to create a monopoly on all food so there's urgent actions to be taken and we need to take them from this place of respect and reverence for the rest of life not just oh my god the food supply but people and our imaginations are the greatest untapped natural resource on the planet with the capacity to stop what's happening the bees aren't going to be able to stop it by themselves so that's a piece of an impassioned speech that could go on for three days Oh Lord can you talk about that for a second I don't even know what that means I don't know what it means What is that? We're reading different books Is that like the human-created era or something? I don't know what it is Philippe you know what it is Can you share it? I think we have more time Does anyone else have a question? I see a hand right here Please So I would appreciate the conversation and we've been talking about a lot of the challenges that we're going through and I would like to think about a lot of the challenges we're facing both individually and as a community and also as a species and I would be curious both of you to know from you to know what gives you hope That's a great answer Thank you I'll say a few things about that I would love to hear your response I think the work that I get to do as a cultural strategist as an artist and as a community educator allows me to be with young people and I mean one of the projects that I'm working on right now is about building cultural bridges between toddlers and cultural institutions How can we get more three-year-olds to match Power Museum Seriously So when I am around three-year-olds making masks and crowns about their self-determination that represent their self-determination I know I know that there is more movement than what boxes us in in terms of violence or trauma or any other type of precarious position that we place in as folks When I am in the a couple of weeks ago I led this performance jam session and there was about 15 people there everyone at first was kind of like performing and then we got to a sweet spot where the performance stopped and we were all in breath with each other and we were all sweating and we were all connected and that if we could just let that ride out for you know forever if we could tap into what that means that generative space and infuse it into every aspect of our lives we can we can that's what gives me hope it's the experiences I get to have that are very intimate and personal and transcendent and I'm not the only one having those experiences I decided a long time ago that it was part of my responsibility as a radical and as an artist to take care of my hope to cultivate it to collect hopeful stories and also to limit the amount of horror that I allow of violence I don't open the emails that say see horrible video of gross violence urgent urgent watch it now the bad news is very repetitive violence is violence corruption is corruption war is war it doesn't add anything to my consciousness to read the latest thing okay it's happening over there I don't need the details in my field of awareness good news tends to be far more married and interesting and I collect stories of people getting each other's backs in unexpected ways I collect stories of people coming up with creative and generous solutions to problems I collect stories like the fact that the venezuela government has been gathering weapons that it captures from people in the drug trade and organized crime and also incentivizing people turning in weapons and once a year they melt down the guns turn them into steel bars and use them to build houses for people the people of Gaza sent aid to the people of Haiti how beautiful is that the Choctaw Nation fresh off of being driven out of the southeast and into Oklahoma sent aid to Irish famine victims in the 1840s 100 years later Irish Americans approached the Choctaw Nation and said we have collected 1000 times the original donation you sent us which was $710 and started a foundation against hunger will you help us run it those are the kinds of stories that I collect for my own well-being and also to share them I draw tremendous amounts of hope from what's happening in Latin America and one of my deep frustrations is how insulated the population of the United States is from news about that how many people here are aware of the fact that the Bolivian government has a vice ministry of decolonization or that the education department in Bolivia has decided to train teachers differently that the three things that are most important for students in Bolivia to be learning are Latin American history with an emphasis on indigenous history and culture and sociology and solidarity and that those if the subject matters most significant for Bolivian survival in the 21st century stories like that where people invent their ways out of narrow places I gathered them as medicine and I tinctured them and I handed them out and when hopelessness overcomes me which happens periodically to all of us when I feel discouraged when something slams me I call somebody up I don't sit with them alone it's that Clarissa Pincola Estes who says that this fair may come into the house but that she doesn't set a plate for you at the table I reach out to somebody and I go find the source I tune in to De Le Sur TV which occasionally has amazing stories about the restoration of land to indigenous people or housewives get pensions in Venezuela things that people have figured out some of them small some of them really big and I think we should all be doing that I think we should be gathering and trading our helpful stories people talk about singing to the choir like it's a bad thing choir needs a lot of singing to make it a choir because the choir is always singing to someone else yeah the choir needs to get together and put arms around each other make sure we're in key I would just like to say no I get to experience a lot of love in my life I get to experience a lot I get to be connected to my erotic self quite often and I get to be in that space of being nurtured and held and vulnerable and all of those things give me hope this morning I'd just like to thank these amazing women in a real world