Image Credit: Markus Posse
Convening is a sound intervention in three acts.
It is an invitation to listen, rest, and imagine. It is an effort to balance the scales of continuous injustice. It is an active denial to lend our bodies to procedures of performance that rob us of our right to imagine, this meditative effort aspires to ask us to slow down, to look within and around ourselves, and to attend to our bodies and their needs. To lay them down and yield to the guidance of a curated sequence of sounds, words, and movements.
The framework for this concept is the work of multiple Black women in the elsewhere and here, who continue to urge and challenge us to listen not simply with our ears, but with our whole beings. Tricia Hersey in Rest is Resistance: A MANIFESTO, notes that the revolutionary praxis of Resting is “especially important for Black people who have historically and contemporarily been primarily valued for our labor”. She explains, that commitment to rest as a form of resistance came from her everyday experiences of being a part of the machine-level pace of our culture and surviving the trauma of the terror of poverty, exhaustion, white supremacy, and capitalism. She illustrates that sleeping is difficult for people who are marginalised, disabled, lower income levels, and undocumented.
Some of the questions we addressed here are as follows; Can what is understood here be transformed into other practices than only sleeping? Can the idea of a nap be regarded as a container that includes other ways of temporarily excluding oneself from public life and its expectations/processes of production?