This session is open to all, including BPOC folk and white supporters.
A day of learning and redefining reparations through play, embodied reflections and ancestral tools. This session explores experiences of grief, rage, sensation, remembrance and integration within our reparations and community focussed work.
The workshop will use an experimental game developed by facilitators informed by research on legacies of colonial commodification, alienation and African heritage theory. Throughout the day we will chart routes through and beyond conventional materialist framings of reparations towards a holistic practice of reparatory justice that is centred on mind, body and spirit.
We hope this session will equip participants with tangible ways to resource their reparations work and facilitate new practices of imagining repair.
We will be playing an experimental learning game that draws on somatic practice, African heritage knowledge systems and black diasporic liberation theories. Throughout the day participants will be supported through discussions, activities and meditative reflections on the legacy of enslavement, practices of generative disruption and repair.
12.00 - Arrival, lunch and introductions
12:30 - Somatic Opening
1:00 - Game Play
2.30 -Break
3.00 - Game Play
4.00 - 5.00- Reflections and Close
Bios:
Land In Our Names is a grassroots collective of Black and People of Colour getting land through reparations. Our collective is based in London, Britain, and works to reconnect Black and People of Colour to land, both in the city and in the countryside. Our work addresses the inequalities in access to land and food, and reimagines land stewardship towards climate and racial justice. We are organising toward collective ownership and land stewardship by Black and People of Colour, to heal the colonial-rooted trauma that has separated us and continues to extract from the land.
Jacob V Joyce
Jacob V Joyce is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice amplifies historical and nourishes new queer and anti-colonial narratives. Their work is continually grounded by collaborations and conversations with activists, community groups and archives. Supported by C.R.E.A.M (The Center for Research in Education and Arts Media) Joyce is currently a doctoral research candidate exploring the practical applications of historical African heritage education movements.
Nonhlanhla Makuyana
Nonhlanhla Makuyana(they/them) is a Zimbabwean-born, UK-based community economist, educator, and community organiser. They are a co-director at Decolonising Economics, where they work to cultivate a Black and People of Colour-led solidarity economy movement. Nonhlanhla’s research focuses on past, present, and future Afrikan and Afro-diasporic economies rooted in liberation. They are the curator of Medicine: Lessons in Black Economic Interdependence, an oral history archival project exploring how the African oral tradition can help communicate the relationships, tools, and skills essential to historic and contemporary movements for Black British economic self-determination.
Their work aims to make community economics accessible to marginalised communities and, through political education, to shift resources, wealth, and power to transform local economies.
Jose Funnell
Jose Funnell is an interdisciplinary artist, dancer, yoga and meditation teacher, and somatic practitioner based in London.Through live performance, sound, film and the workshop space, they explore the radical potential of embodiment as a site of liberation, healing and exchange in service of collective transformation. Using somatics, social dance, and various technologies of the gaze, their work examines practices of looking and representing as historic mechanisms of power, as well as the role fantasy and collective imagery play in world building. Working towards creating anti-oppressive structures, justice and equity, their practice brings awareness to the experiential dynamics of sharing space and the emancipatory potential of generating agency within contexts of marginalisation.
Andrea Ferdinand
Andrea Ferdinand who is better known as Dre is a social worker, healing arts practitioner, researcher, and facilitator whose work integrates movement, energy, sound, soil, and EMDR into her signature MESSE approach, a holistic framework for embodied healing and transformation.
She is the Vision Tender and Director of Breathe Through Collective, offering trauma-informed alternative therapies rooted in ecology, spirituality, and ancestral remembering. She is the co-developer of the Embodied Ecology and Unburdened Retreats, creating spaces for rest, reconnection, and collective care. Dre leads on LION’s land workers community care and reparative project Fallow.
She is currently a PhD candidate exploring sound, migration, and belonging through the tchatcha, a percussion instrument