self=community=community=self • Self and Collective Defense As Liberatory World Infrastructure

This online workshop is Dalaeja Foreman’s contribution to the exhibition At Peace II

Thursday 16th June 2022, 1-3pm EDT / 6-8pm BST 

Limited places are available for this event, pre-booking is essential. Please book your place via Eventbrite or by emailing the gallery info@2queens.com

Largely inspired by the book The Community of Self by Dr. Na’im Akbar, this workshop catalyzes the ways in which art forms based on self-defense can be a praxis for experiencing art through an embodied and anti/de/colonized lens. As well as a framework for self and community preservations through autonomous action and collective support. This communal conversation and practical self-defense skills workshop asks participants to experience and co-create definitions for self-defense that are rooted in self-expressions and community-responsive paradigms of value, care and communal co-creation.

How we create the ripples and ruptures in colonial logics that have been imposed on us are largely determined by the paradigms in which we enter experiences. This perspective on self-defense looks to explore paradigms and historical central points that embody the needs of the soon to be liberated masses of the world. With the goal of learning from one another, and living from space and self-esteem(s) that translate to community and cultural esteem(s) toward complete autonomy.

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Access: No prior knowledge is needed to access this workshop. This event will take place over Zoom, closed captions will be available for anyone looking to use them. A Zoom link will be sent to attendees who have booked via Eventbrite in advance of the workshop. The workshop will not be recorded.

Dalaeja Foreman (she/they) is a community organizer, curator, cultural worker and first-generation Caribbean-Brooklynite. As a hood-intellectual, their work focuses on political education, Black and Indigenous Autonomy, and community control through community preservation. Radical pedagogy, reclaiming public space, and liberatory action are central to Dalaeja’s curatorial and organizing practices. Specifically with the goal of prototyping counter-hegemonic ideologies and actions, combating internalized misconceptions oppressed people have of ourselves and emphasizing resistance through direct action and cultural production. She is one of three founders of the woodworking cooperative, breadfruit.