EVA YAA ASANTEWAA GRANT 2019 FINALIST
ChE WARE
ChE {they/them} is an interdisciplinary artist-organizer weaving ancestral healing, liberatory facilitation, and socially-engaged artmaking to transform systems of oppression and conjure expansive worlds of Freedom. They work in mediums of painting, immersive installation, harmonic vocal arranging, community organizing, and dance forms of the Queer Afro-Indigenous Diaspora. ChE is the Founder/Artivist Director of #DignityInProcess— an Intersectional Justice platform rooted in embodied artivism, Freedom Schools, and transgenerational Wisdom Councils to activate a movement of QTGNC+ Afro-Indigenous life beyond the binary. They are an honored Fellow with Southerners on New Ground: The Lorde’s Werq and Intercultural Leadership Institute for their holistic equity framework, Afro-Indigenous Liberatory Praxis. Learn more at http://che-art.life
the people can fly: a #dignityinprocess black dreaming exodus
The People Can Fly: A #DignityInProcess Black Dreaming Exodus sets the foundation to reimagine movement organizing as we know it through a 4-part series of land-responsive, interdisciplinary performance rituals igniting Queer Afro-Indigenous medicine-folq to take flight! The series is inspired by an African American folktale describing the liberation of enslaved peoples who fly away from a plantation in a vertically spiraling Ring Shout. Afro-futurist processions of body-percussive movement and vocal harmonies circle altar installations queering the traditional folktale, The People Could Fly, through a deconstructed investigation of Gulf South cultural technology, the Ring Shout’s core elements as a framework for liberating land, spirit, and collective body. Four land-responsive performance rituals (re)center the role of Queer/Trans/Nonbinary/Multi-gendered medicine folq as officiants of this liberatory ritual, and the ritual of movement-building at large. Collaborative organizing across movement intersections create opportunities for intergenerational storytelling, healing, resource mapping, and creative solution-building between QTGNC+ Black and Indigenous farmers, medicine folq, healers, activists, and culture bearers throughout the Gulf South. Taking place on sites of Afro-Indigenous resistance, trauma, and collective memory, this 4-part Ring Shout folktellin’ calls in a new kind of movement sustained by Queer marooning and ancestral healing.