Rooted Heart Series: Cyclical Leaves

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)

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

This session is open only to the FLINT community, and centring survivors of violence. We are like the seasons, coming and going in familiar patterns. When it comes to personal and community healing, we remind ourselves that it is a process, not a destination.

In our final workshop, we will be looking at ways in which we can re-parent ourselves, including finding pillars of strength and belief that resonate in the now. Using techniques inspired by trauma informed healing, pleasure activism, restorative and transformative justice, we will end the series with a holistic exploration of the self and an honest, open-hearted view of how we can learn to ground and guide ourselves in individual and collective regeneration.

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.