#Healing (Faju) || Feb 4-6

The series of events is rich and fulfilling. It includes performances, healing sessions, music and dj sets, conversations, all that is co-convened by Alessandra Pomarico and will be launched on Feb 4th.

Gaps, holes, erasures are spectral wounds in the flesh of history. In the context of the Black Atlantic and African history, how can repair – beyond material reparation – acknowledge that former and future memories, relations and possibilities can never be fully restituted? Is it possible to heal the colonial wound and what haunts the present time, in the social body and collective consciousness, retrieving missing voices, unveiled stories and reclaiming other ways of knowing, being and relating?

The New Alphabet School is a collaborative self-organized school for practice-based research. Over the course of three-and-a half years, it will function as a colloquium for practice-based, situated approaches in cultural studies, art and activism. Assuming that knowledge is not universal, but always located, or bound to a specific context, one's own position or place, the school aims to explore critical and affirmative forms of knowledge production in order to create solidarity between different approaches in theory and practice.

This edition of theNew Alphabet School will focus on afro-diasporic or folk healing practices, therapeutic or shamanistic modes of cure and restoration and Indigenous, decolonial and feminist practices that hold a transformative power. What is their role in the maintenance of personal and social well-being? The lens will be on sacredness, spirituality, connection with the land and the ancestors, with the human and more-than-human elements, through dance, sound, orality and ritual ceremonies. “Healing” and the Wolof term “Faju” here are understood as a process of repairing traumatic relationships through non-Western epistemologies and cosmovisions. It is about unlearning hegemonic and Western-centric patterns, including extractivist forms of knowledge appropriation. Thus the #Healing edition is an offering to investigate the potential for “healing” society from systemic forms of oppression like colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy and modernity.

#Healing (Faju) will bring together healers, artists, practitioners and scholars to share healing traditions and technologies grounded in Indigenous and ancestral knowledge systems. Workshops und divinatory sessions will be convened online by participants of the New Alphabet School.

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For the program details check the website of HKW (Berlin)