Happening alongside b-side Festival, the gathering’s primary aim is to continue to cultivate values of community-building, solidarity, resilience, and to propose different forms and best practices of supporting and commissioning artists.

Dhaqan Collective’s ‘House of Weaving Songs’ is presented as part of the Festival. Starting with Dhaqan’s intersectional practice of honouring Somali heritage and the role of Somali women, other practitioners in the Counterpoints Arts’ womxn gathering will contribute to the public conversation by sharing their own practices and experiences. The conversation will convey the urgency of climate justice challenges on the communities we work with; the need to amplify the voices and agency of womxn artists and activists, working at the intersection of arts, climate and displacement; explore forms of decolonising, gathering and cooperating.

dhaqan collective is a Somali feminist art collective led by Ayan Cilmi and Fozia Ismail. Their practice seeks to find ways of building imaginative futures that support Somali people in the UK and in East Africa to resist threats over our cultural heritage. Cilmi and Ismail are Spike Island Studio holders and Pervasive Media Studio residents in Bristol.

b-side is an internationally recognised and locally loved arts organisation that both embodies and enriches its place of origin – the Isle of Portland in Dorset. The island is the beating heart that inspires b-side’s work, but their projects and opportunities extend all over Dorset and beyond. b-side works with and commission artists who are as excited by the bigger picture as the smallest detail. Their current ‘Common Lands’ programme regards Portland as a microcosm to explore relationships to and with land.