!! This Workshop is for 16 - 25 year olds, Participants under 16 are welcome to attend if accompanied by a parent or legal guardian !!
This workshop invites young queer people to explore creativity through the wisdom of the body and play.
Many of us are taught that creativity lives in the mind: something we think our way into, plan, or perfect. Yet our bodies are constantly generating deep personal knowledges, imaginations and possibilities.
Through simple embodied exercises, reflection and collective creative play, you will be invited to explore how our bodies can support creative expression and power. Together we will experiment with practices that cultivate curiosity, presence and connection. They can be tools of wellness and self and collective care too.
The workshop is rooted in the belief that creativity is nurtured through deep relationships with ourselves, with one another, and with the worlds we imagine and create. By paying attention to our embodied experiences, we can access new forms of insight, expression and possibility.
This introductory session offers a gentle and playful space to connect with fellow young queer people, explore embodied approaches to creativity, and leave with practical tools you can continue using in your own lives.
Farzana Khan (she/they) is a social sculptor and writer, as well as the co-founder and executive co-director of Healing Justice London. Her practice works on building community health, repair and self-transformation rooted in disability justice, survivor work and trauma-informed practice working with communities of colour and other marginalised and underrepresented groups. Farzana has a background in Youth and Community organising particularly focused on cultural work both in the UK and internationally. Farzana is the former creative and strategic director at Voices that Shake, bringing together young people, artists and campaigners to develop creative responses to social injustice. She ran this while working at Platform London, a climate and social justice organisation working across arts, education, research and activism. Farzana is a trustee of International Curatorial Forum and Stuart Hall Foundation. Farzana is one of the founders of Resourcing Racial Justice, and is in a deep enquiry around how wealth/resources mobilisation and liberation can serve collective life.
Healing Justice Ldn works to build the capacities, skills, and infrastructures we need to support community-led health and healing. This vision for the future includes liberation from structural and systemic oppressions including carceral systems and securitisation with freedom from intimate, intergenerational, and interpersonal violence. To get there, we are prototyping life-affirming infrastructures that support community health and healing. HJL co-designs and builds needs-based community programming to equip individuals and communities with tools to heal from trauma. Our Movement Medicine programme connects and resources movement leaders through training, networking and practice spaces. We also conduct transdisciplinary research into the harms, impacts and outcomes of current health systems; producing analysis that creates viable alternatives.