The Gathering 2024

This programme is cooperatively built between our curatorial board, led by:

Zoé Whitley 

Yesomi Umolu 

Sepake Angiama

Beatriz Lobo 

Nate Agbetu 

This two-day gathering focuses on how we bring rest into our communities. Expanding holistically through our five programme pillars – Practice, Mind, Embodiment, Environment, and Nourishment – we centre our attention on different forms of rest.

As part of the curatorial process, we worked with a Sub-Committee for each pillar, proposing frameworks and identifying contributors for the programme.

PRACTICE

Informing access and working conditions. 

Members – Zoé Whitley, Bonlanle Tajudeen and Harold Offeh

The practice pillar seeks to find balance and knowledge within the works of transdisciplinary cultural workers. This pillar is focused on creating programming and moments that can engage a multi-hyphenate audience in search of the common thread surrounding rest. 

Reflecting on working conditions, exhaustion and precarity across the sector, The Gathering can be a space to review and reimagine support systems, particularly focused on peer-to-peer support. By offering practical sessions on common issues such as ‘negotiating contracts’ and ‘building care riders’, we hope that delegates will leave the retreat better informed about cultural infrastructural support and have developed language and tools to negotiate better working conditions. 

The sub-committee was inspired by contributors with a fairly social practice – proposing work approaches that can be fruitful for knowledge exchange, and for the creation of responses to the ecologies we currently occupy. 

MIND

Grounding in the spiritual and cognitive. 

Members – Beatriz Lobo, Deep K Kailey and Suzanne Dhaliwal 

This pillar acknowledges the importance of addressing both internal and external realities. We recognise that we are living in times of multiple crises and aim to reflect on these challenges whilst also seeking tools and strategies within ourselves to navigate them. 

In consideration of external realities, we are prioritising collective thinking and inviting practitioners who are addressing issues related to environmental, socio-political, and epistemological crises. These practitioners will collaborate with Deep K Kailey to develop exercises that analyse the impact of these issues on ourselves and create multisensorial experiences to help us deepen our understanding and connection to the world around us. By prioritising and engaging in pleasure activism and mindful thinking practices, we aim to cultivate a more holistic approach to addressing the complexities of our internal and external realities.

ENVIRONMENT

Connecting with local ecologies. 

Members – Yesomi Umolu, Joseph Henry and Beverley Bennett

This pillar is focused on how environments are shaped – taking back vernacular spaces like the Yard and using it as a stimulus to imagine what spaces of mental safety, refuge and joy can look like. 

In this pillar we seek to go a step further than just ecological environments and imagine what it could look like to create genuinely restful spaces within the context of the city, and to work with what is among us. 

The Environment sub-committee aims to consider activities that get the group out into the city, to provide a tangible experience of our urban space alongside more discursive moments. 

EMBODIMENT

Finding balance between the body and the mind. 

Members – Sepake Angiama, Camille Barton and Ashanti Harris

The Embodiment subcommittee will focus on the living body by acknowledging the connection to emotions and sensations while considering the earth, ancestor and spirit. 

From ‘movement therapy’ to ‘sound baths’, we recognise our bodies to keep score of all of our lived experiences. So, we’re seeking to develop accessible and considered ways of engaging ourselves. This pillar aims to frame embodied work in a way that allows us to move beyond trauma healing alone and present it through other possibilities. The subcommittee proposes connections to ancestral wisdom through practices that spark joy and relaxation. 

NOURISHMENT

Reckoning with how we fuel our bodies. 

Members  – Nate Agbetu, Yvonne Maxwell and Safiya Robinson

The Nourishment subcommittee aims to use this programming pillar to explore the ‘labour of nourishment’ which is often presented to us through a lens of servitude. 

We want to reframe our connection to food and nourishment beyond the role of restaurateurs and chefs, who are shown to be the heroes of the culinary space. 

We’re inspired by practitioners behind the process: the cultivators, the food justice activists and social practitioners, who fuel us through spiritual and manual practices by bringing our attention to the sovereignty of cultivation. 

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The Gathering 2024 is produced with Free Form.

The Gathering 2024 is supported by Freelands Foundation