Ecologies of Transformation

Embodied TRANSformation <-> TRANSformation Embodied, an Exhibition/Installation platform for Transgendered people, Transmasculine people specifically, to testify, be witnessed and claim the knowing mined from their lived trans experience and/or their transition, through the reclaiming and reconnection with their bodies. The first edition of this platform series was dubbed Embodied TRANSformation <-> TRANSformation Embodied "If me neva talk mi wudda dumb". This second series will be featured as my graduation show dubbed Embodied TRANSformation <-> TRANSformation Embodied "Present MiiiSS". “Present Miiiss” I explore the Trans-masculine experience as a form of somatic transformation, connecting the knowledge gained to support and aid the reconnection to the body, and beyond the body. How does the Trans experience, this very radical act of love, these very visible and intimate changes Trans people experience through their bodies shift how they navigate spaces? Panel talk 1 June 9th 17:00 - 18:00 Theme: "Present miss" Navigation Trans-Mansculine Identites This panel will be moderated by Ro, Rox, Roxy, Roxana Verwey @ be Panellist for the Kiki House of Majors and their contact info: James "Rea" Panell Yun Charlie Laban Raoni Muzho Open to all and Free! This will be in English. Panel talk 2 June 9th 18:00 - 17:00 Theme: “What is Gender” The testimonies of non-binary Identities Panelist Kat Ella Leroy Fractal Embodiment June 11th 18:00 - 19:00 This second edition of of Fractal Embodiment will feature Camille Barton AKA DJ Afrooankali Fractal embodiment is a somatic movement lab rooted in African ancestry and bass music and influenced by Jamaican dance culture. nightlife and Jamaican Sound System Culture.

Rouwende (id)entiteiten (Of: The Erfenis van de Rebellie van Bacon) (2023). Translated: Grieving (id)entities. (Or: The Heritage of the Bacon Rebellion) (2023), is a Dutch short experimental documentary, by @anne_jesuina . The work explores transracial solidarity by telling a story about a white man that realizes the construction that is his whiteness and his entanglement with racism, within the historical context of the Bacon Rebellion (1676-1677). As a response to the revolting European and African workers, plantation owners, in the British American Colony, Virginia, intensified the already existing racism by institutionalizing white and black identities. The aim of the intensification and institutionalization of racism was to divide the revolting lower class that the elite needed for the development of the (plantation) economy. The film aims to show how this divide-and-conquer strategy still 'works' today by drawing a parallel between the Bacon Rebellion and today's anti-racism protests and farmers' protests in the Netherlands. Thereby the film reframes today's dissatisfaction of the farmer protests as a colonial issue. It reminds us that polarization is one of the current system's political strategies to not change. Would it be possible to redirect our energies, not towards each other, but towards our common oppressor through transracial class solidarity? This work is deeply inspired by Nigerian philosopher, poet Bayo Akomolafe, who's concept of 'transraciality' has guided my thinking in this issue. The graduation show's opening is today! Come check out this work and that of other Ecologies of Transformation graduates at the Orangerie @amstelpark 1, in Amsterdam. The film will continually be shown with headphones. There will be an open screening on Friday at 18:30 and on Sunday the 11th 18:30-19:30 Exhibition opening dates and times june 8 17:00-20:30 june 9 12:30-20:30 june 10 12:30-20:30 june 11 12:30-20:30 @sandberginstituut Hope to see you there!

In search of anti-capitalist remedies: witchcrafting, dreamscaping, and interknitting bodies of rest, by @emmavanbokhoven Work description Knitting as a repetitive movement of transformation, guiding the body into a liminal space. Engaging in the process of crafting a rest garment by intuition and memory, inspired by one of the bed jackets my great-grandmother handcrafted and gifted to my mother. Passed down from generation to generation, yet hardly ever worn. Restoring its original intention by revisiting childhood memories, resting in the landscapes of the Dutch lowlands I visited during camping trips with my mother. Contemplating the perceived value of productive labour versus reproductive labour, and art versus craft. Reflecting on the extraction and devaluation of care present in capitalism. Knitting with the tension of intergenerational trauma, emotional repression, the body’s freeze response, and myths of fragility present in the white body. Remembering that my liberation is interknitted in yours, and your liberation is interknitted in mine. Come check out Emma's work and that of other Ecologies of Transformation graduates at our graduation show! The opening is tomorrow! @amstelpark 1, Amsterdam june 8 17:00-20:30 june 9 12:30-20:30 june 10 12:30-20:30 june 11 12:30-20:30 @sandberginstituut

In my bag, my ancestral bag Installation by @dlorrej Haul Noun: (General) Refers to what has been gathered over time. Example: "In my ancestral bag, a haul of treasured artifacts and mementos representing a significant moment of stability and grounding." (Usage: Informal) Used to describe a collection of items that are proudly shown off or displayed. Example: "Welcome to my bag haul, where I proudly showcase my latest fashion finds." Verb: (Physical) Means to pull or drag something with great effort and difficulty. Examples: 1. "My ancestors hauled a heavy sago palm to create this sturdy bag." 2. "Here, we witness the hauling of three pivotal moments in time." (Travel) Represents a long and challenging journey or voyage. Example: "My grandparents undertook a difficult haul to reach the Netherlands." (Illegal) Implies the act of stealing or obtaining something unlawfully. Example: “Hauling a precious cargo of spices obtained through illicit methods, the Europeans thrived upon their arrival back from the Moluccas.” @sandberginstituut

Desentierros: Stories of Clays, Deep Waters, and Unwanted Findings Installation by @bravolinabravo Over time, Amsterdam’s waterlogged territory has served as a site of convergence for multiple migrations: human and more-than-human. Clay, sand, and lime sediments that traveled from the inland through river flows have accumulated in its canals, preserving memories of water systems and landscapes. Significant amounts of heavy metals, including mercury and lead, can be detected in these sediments, revealing one footprint of careless industrial waste management in these territories. To expand dryland areas, part of these sediments has been used as landfilling material. Three months ago, while searching for local clays, I gathered some of them in Amsterdam Noord. This polluted sediment unearthing has grown into a somatic, bowel-uncovering research on toxicity and filth. This installation and guided somatic activation are invitations to take the carefully hidden reality of heavy metal polluted soil and water and put it over the table. To sit with our complex entanglements with them and sense the effects of toxicity unleashed by global capitalist necropolitics in our intricate living systems. Following generative somatic and embodied social justice lineages, I propose tracking the sensations they provoke in our bodies as a possible start toward different forms of resistance, activation, and remediation. Ancient deities of filth and local medicinal plants are invited to care for us during this uneasy quest. Activations: June 9 16:30 - 17:00 June 10 clay and river walk with Jules Davis Dufayard: 13:00 - 15:00 June 11 17:00 - 18:00 Special thanks to: Martijn Rodenburg, Masharu, Mikki Stelder, Ufuk Akbey, Stephanie ter Heide, Maarje van Deursen, Kees van Erp, Mariana Jurado Rico, Knut, Ali Asad, Ro Buur, Erika Doucette, Leila Darwish, Joy Mariama Smith, Camille Barton, Victoria Mckenzie, Char CA, Mar Maiquez, the garden department, Nieuwland-Woehoe loving community, and all my classmates and fellow renegade researchers from EoT. @sandberginstituut

Rebel Dances: Borders in Tranc-it Danzas Rebeldes: Fronteras en Tranc-ito performance by @la_chicascratch Rebel Dances: Borders in Tranc-it is a performance that delves into states of 'in-betweenness' and 'travelling worlds'. The emotional space between one geographic location and another one, the border controls that shape our existences, the multiplicity of embodiments we carry as queer migrants, the subtle gap between 'real' and enchantment, magic and reality. With a group of 9 performers we invite notions of trance, shapeshifting, and possession through somatic, performative exercises and durational movement practices like cumbia rebajada, neo-perreo, and post-punk. With the intention to reconnect to our mother lands in Abya Ayala, Latin America, we design syncretic devices through performance and dance to summon the resilience and resistance powers of our territories. We use decolonial cosmovisions and speculative fiction practices to map how our oppressions are link to wider social problems of our contemporary culture and imagine possible remedies for them. This project is initiated by Papaya Kuir and directed by La ChicaScratch. Starring: Moné, Patri, Aleja, Yoacín, Daniela, John, Estefania, Annette and Pau. Performances June 8, 9 & 10 19:30 - 20:30 June 11 15:00 - 16:00 At the Orangerie - Amstelpark *free admission @sandberginstituut 📸 Flavia Pinheiros

“A Garden (Un)earthed: Reimagining the Roots of Resistance and Plant Agency” by Effy Fu Yuanyuan. (Contact: [email protected]) is an eco-poetic exploration of the entanglements between human and more-than-human relationships, told through the perspectives and the gaze of (potted) plants. By vocalizing and revealing the many stories of plants, this work questions the political and scientific knowing of plants and gives voice to the plants who have been silenced, displaced, and commodified globally through the construction of botanical gardens created in colonial times. The work centers the stories of Sago Palm, Agave, Bird-of-paradise, and Tea plant, uncovering how the displacement of plants is entangled with the displacement of soil and humans. The work explores how (diasporic) plants are connected to not only diaspora people but humans who encounter them in diaspora land. And more critically,
 it asks: what does it mean for us to relate to plants (in pots) as sentient beings and how to navigate our positionalities and move towards what’s more desired within the ecological awareness. This site-specific sound installation encourages bodies to inhabit a different way of seeing, engage and connect with the plants through sensing, feeling, smelling, listening, and imagining, in ways that do not reproduce the role of spectators but co-creators of a shared ecosystem. I invite bodies to move around, listen deeply, and reflect on their own relationship and our collective relationships with more-than-humans and consider what it means to be in a (more) reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world See this work and that of the other Ecologies of Transformation graduates at the Orangerie: Amstelpark 1, in Amsterdam. Exhibition dates and times June 8 17:00-20:30 June 9 12:30 - 20:30 June 10 12:30 - 20:30 June 11 12:30 - 20:30 @sandberginstituut photos 1-4 made by Effy photos 5-10 made by @doralionstoned

fractal.spiral.wave Indoors installation and Outdoors workshops by @julietdavisdufayard__ Fractals, spirals and waves. The flow of time is cyclical and collective. “It is believed that the ancient celtic peoples practiced an embodied form of spirituality, encompassing the uniting of opposites (...), viewing time as circular rather than linear, and belief in an Otherworld which is embedded in the landscape and accessible through relationship with the more-than-human world. This embodied spiritual approach is immanent rather than ascendent; the body is not something to be overcome or transcended. The body is understood as very much part of the physical realm which holds its own gifts, and is an important part of cultivating creativity and power.” (Marika Heinrichs) Exploring how embodied practices and rituals with nature can foster the active participation and contribution of white people towards climate justice, I explore cold-water swimming as an embodied practice of connecting with place and being impacted by it in a profound way, breaking down our false separation from the more-than-human world. Physically experiencing non-duality, increasing our capacity to feel sensation - including discomfort. Seasonal walks and rituals as spaces to move away from characteristics of white supremacy culture such as urgency, control, binary thinking, individualism, perfectionism; practicing slow growth, complexity and collective care as foundational for political organising. Exhibition date and times: June 8 17:00-20:30 June 9 12:30 - 20:30 June 10 12:30 - 20:30 June 11 12:30 - 20:30 This work has different strands: installation with collective poem that can be activated by the audience; video; and 2 guided walks/outdoors workshops in Amstelpark: Saturday 10th, 1-3pm (“river ~ clay” with Lina Bravo Mora), and Sunday 11th, 1-3pm. Please rsvp for the workshops by emailing [email protected] @sandberginstituut

A practice of daily livity through sankofa songs: a blues passed down from our ancestors inna deh sound and inna deh soil: towards becoming well in a world that isn’t well at all. Installation and soundscape by Sabrina Miller @half__sister Work description Reflecting on the theme of wellness as a durational, complex and holistic human practice, this work invites the audience to journey through a personal and familial understanding of what it means to live without wellness and what it means to move towards becoming well in Western society. Soundscape/ sound-architecture is a cultural tool. A common black-body tool, often used whilst moving through spaces that are unwelcoming/ othering. It is a practice of creating a sense of home/ belonging within the body that allows for more agency in how we experience the environments we are in. The practice of music, specifically this kind of relationship to the sonic experience, is not commodifiable because it is a process. Sonic intimacy is durational. It’s on-going, and because of that, it has an accumulative practice effect across time and through many many bodies. This installation is a representation of a living room, designed to evoke a sense of becoming and belonging through relational time. The soundscape blends together fragments of lived experience, theory and research to (re)consider what is real for us and to (re)consider what actually brings energy back home to us on a daily basis. It attempts to make visible what it means to emerge the invisible through the individual. By doing so, it encourages us to integrate the entanglements of our personal and ancestral stories with the collective and the political and emphasises the importance of going back to fetch what is at risk of being left behind (sankofa) - by honouring the lineages and rituals that continue shape who we are becoming. See this work and that of the other Ecologies of Transformation graduates at the Orangerie: Amstelpark, 1 in Amsterdam. Exhibition date and times: June 8 17:00-20:30 June 9 12:30 - 20:30 June 10 12:30 - 20:30 June 11 12:30 - 20:30 Installation activation June 8 18:30 - 18:45 June 10 16:00-16:30 @sandberginstituut

Movement Song Feature film by @mayisrukel (2 hrs 10 min) Noa is a researcher, an artist, a collector of stories as well as an intuitive practitioner of re-storying; honing methods of crafting homespace on earth against systemic odds. She moves with her Caribbean lineage, having already moved to many different places, and is also moving with a recently heightened presence of grief. Through her friend Jules, a mysterious glass hammer connects her to Saffron; a poet, writer, editor and a trusted protector of rare objects. They develop deep intimacy and move through conflict among and with their friends. Their passion, grief and joy instigates movement as they take care of each other, give relief to each other's nervous systems from the systemic allostatic load their bodies are made to accumulate; their love builds resilience, care allows them movement towards life. Noa's heartbreak takes her to Saint Paul-de-Vence in southern France, similar to how James Baldwin's unprocessed grief took him there in 1971 to spend the last 16 years of his life in that small village. Traces of an exile or a final home can be difficult to see on the surface level due to the erasure of Black domesticity. Who is allowed to put down roots, and where? Whose home is only temporarily tolerated? Whose tangible legacies are seen worthy of protection? What actually is a presence? What actually makes an enduring homespace? How do we cultivate it in our bodies? SCREENING TIMES: Thursday, 8th June (Headphones - six available): 18:00-20:10 Friday, 9th June (Headphones - six available): 13:00-15:10 15:30-17:40 18:00-20:10 Saturday, 10th June (Headphones - six available): 13:00-15:10 15:30-17:40 18:00-20:10 Sunday, 11th June (🌞OPEN PUBLIC SCREENING🌞 in the garden): 12:00-14:10 Sunday, 11th June (Headphones - six available): 15:30-17:40 18:00-20:10 Location: "Orangerie", the glasshouse next to Amstelpark 4, near the Zone2Source office. @sandberginstituut

We are happy to invite you 🍄🌱✨🌞☁️🎉🎈🍀🫀 Ecologies of Transformation: the alchemy of embodied social justice, focuses on re-claiming, re-shaping, and re-patterning interpersonal relationships with the human and more-than-human world, guiding us towards home during times of political uncertainty and climate collapse. The graduation show showcases the work of 10 artists and community organizers who integrate art and embodiment to pursue social change. Their work sprouts from intergenerational depths, akin to a mycelium network in a thriving forest. By honoring the ancestral knowledge and resilience of their communities and visualizing hidden realities, their work becomes a response to the challenging questions of these times. With Works by: Anne Jesuina, Effy Fu Yuanyuan, Emma van Bokhoven, Jerrold Saija, J. Davis-Dufayard, Lina Bravo Mora, Mayis Rukel, Pau(la) Chaves Bonilla, Sabrina Miller, Sean-Claude Barnaby Neufville Further practicalities: • Wheelchair ramp available • Accessible toilets available by a few minutes walk from the site • Seating, earplugs, a quiet/rest space, and snacks/drink based on donation • Artworks with words will have subtitles or printed transcripts •Please take a COVID test, avoid visiting if symptomatic. Masks will be available at the venue. The venue will be well ventilated. •Regretfully, we cannot provide transport costs, braille texts, professional visual description, or sign language interpretation. graphic design: @emmavanbokhoven

EoT classmate Jules @julietdavisdufayard__ organized an overnight walk in honor of the summer solstice on June 21st. As we say goodbye to the summer light for another cycle, here are some images from their walk with Jules' sharings. Repost • @julietdavisdufayard__ On June 21st I had the great pleasure of organising an overnight walk through the national park Zuid-Kennemerland, for classmates & friends, to honour the summer solstice, end of year, and start of Cancer season (& Sabrina’s birthday!) For the past couple years I have been marking the 8 seasonal festivals of the celtic wheel of the year (which include the solstice festivals), always wonderful to share with others ❤️ Here’s what Effy wrote about the experience: “The trip was soooooo magical and I say it again: it completely shifted my relationship with Dutch landscape/nature… Jules’ facilitation (the pre-communication with elaborate info on time/space/arrangement and choice; during the trip with mindful intention setting, breaks, choices and communications as well as the after care with checking in) made the trip felt comfy and safe. Now after two days, part of my body and mind are still coming through that misty dunes and forests under the moon and stars with my fellow human beings. The experience feels very healing for me, someone who often feels stuck in the city/urban environment. Also it brings a lot of imagination, tenderness and sense of belonging in me - how I relate to nature and other creatures, to difficult memories, to places that I wish to be. I’d love to do it again, again and maybe again! Haha only next time I will bring a lightweight sleeping bag 😎 Thank you everyone again for this magical experiences! 💚“ Huge thanks to Angela, Effy, Emma & Sabrina for taking part and contributing beautiful snacks, stories, texts, music & photos! & to dear Vineta Gailite for organising an overnight solstice walk in the Peak district (near Manchester) back in 2019, inspiring me to carry on this tradition! Photos by Angela, Emma and Sabrina Image descriptions in the comments.