What does joy look like to you? What brings you joy? Can you make time for joy in your life?

Anna Chiedza Spörri and Mona-Lisa Kole invite you to a journey of self- and communal connection. Together, we will explore our relationship to different rituals of joy, rest and collective care. The aim is to explore how being in community can help us foster spaces that allow us to disrupt the oppressive structures we are faced with, as black people of marginalised genders. Guided by prompts and accompanied by breath and movement exercises, we will reflect, feel, connect and release.

As Audre Lorde writes in the uses of the erotic: «In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible […]».

So let us connect and tap into our very own capacity for joy.