Rooted Heart Series: Healthy Branches

About the event

Rooted Heart is a 5 part series of workshops over 5 months exploring the practice of abolition in individual and community healing. We will be processing the conditions in our society which develop and legitimise harmful behaviour, and co-creating strategies for collective regeneration. Together we will be working through an abolitionist lens to practice, process and plot for ourselves and our communities; exploring accountability, parenting our young ones and re-parenting ourselves. This wide-ranging series considers survivorhood on an expanded scale.

We invite each participant to aim to attend 3 of the 5 workshops offered, to enable shifting dynamics in each session. The sessions will be centring FLINT (femme/lesbian/intersex/non binary/trans) participants, with sessions 1 and 5 open only to the FLINT community, and the other 3 sessions open to all.

Over the workshop period we invite participants to engage in a creative project in whatever medium you would like. We will be engaging in some creative reflection and practice each session and if you would like, you can exhibit or present a final piece at a festival in 2023.

The content of this series of discussions has been designed to encourage courageous and challenging conversations. We are committed to ensuring the space remains safe for all participants to engage with the complexities of this work.

This session is fully booked.

 

1. Fertile Ground (11 April) – FLINT community only

2. Germinating Seeds (9 May)

3. Centred Trunk (6 June)

4. Healthy Branches (11 July)

Relationships form the basis of society and community. Whether they are structural, familial, platonic or intimate, we often find ourselves replicating relationships that we experience in early childhood or that are legitimised through structural capitalist exploitation. Every person has the potential to exist within patterns of abuse as both victim and perpetrator to different degrees.

This workshop will explore how we can learn to recognise cycles of relational behaviours, and challenge them in safe, effective and even pleasurable ways. Practising accountability and courageous conversation will be at the core of our work here.

5. Cyclical Leaves (8 August) – FLINT community only

How to register

Sign up via eventbrite and you will receive a registration form via email. Please fill out this form to indicate which 3 of the 5 sessions you’d like to attend, and to give us some more information about yourself.

Please confirm you are over 18 in order to attend.

Accessibility

These sessions will be online with closed captioning available. If there are any access needs you’d like us to consider, please email info@healingjusticeldn.org.

About the Facilitators

Venus is a sex worker, performance artist and facilitator who has been practicing self-defence for over twenty years. She draws from her background in martial arts to devise workshops that explore agency and autonomy to address socialised beliefs around power, strength and survival. As founder of Sex and Rage, she is an advocate for sex workers’ rights, and works to organise spaces that explore the intersections of sex work, survivorship, racial and gender identity. A current student of politics and philosophy, her work is ultimately an exploration of the profound relationship between personal and social justice.

Indy River is a genderqueer bodyworker, facilitator, kink practitioner, organiser and multidisciplinary artist. Their practice centres marginalised folks, and they work through lenses of anti-oppression and transformative justice. Their work is informed by creative approaches to the body, kink, nature connection and Indigenous wisdom. They are constantly developing inclusivity and accessibility in their practice and awareness, through openness, accountability, non-judgement and growth. They understand bodywork as a vehicle for individual and community transformation, and a fundamental tool towards repair and collective liberation.