Image: House-of-Weaving Song by Dhaqan Collective © Luke O’Donovan
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
“The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.”
Audre Lorde
As part of this year’s Platforma Festival programme in the Southwest of England, we have organised a Climate & Displacement mini-retreat, taking place between 3-4 November at Hawkwood College, Stroud.
With social and environmental issues intensifying, and general discourse steered towards greenwashing and short-term solutions, we need new approaches, ideas and collaborations. With this challenge in mind, we are organising a retreat that will convene a group of women artists, who make work about community, collectivism and solidarity.
Could co-habiting in this way allow us to share our diverse methods, processes, struggles, and accomplishments? Women have always convened. By giving a platform to women who are already developing work addressing answers to contemporary issues, the retreat will provide an opportunity to start reciprocal conversations and engage intersectionally with womanhood, migration and belonging in a self-directed, non-hierarchical context.
We will host around twenty women in a generous, intimate, networking space that is about exchanging knowledge, experiences, practices and ‘making’ something together.
The retreat is co-designed and co-produced in collaboration with socially engaged artist Dana Olărescu.
This gathering is inspired by the fact that for the current Platforma Festival we organically commissioned and co-commissioned projects on migration and displacement by women artists, who will be part of the retreat (artists Kaajal Modi and Dhaqan Collective – co-commissioned with Art Reach; and with Creative Kernow, artists Sovay Berriman and Abigail Reynolds). This inspired us to want to re-imagine ways of gathering and collaborating led by women artists and activists, including beyond this retreat.
