[box]-BUILDING INTERPERSONAL INFRASTRUCTURES-
-COLLABORATIVE PRECARITY BODYHACKING-
emBODY WORK / STUDENT emBODY
-HOW TO HUMAN-[/box]
A Series of Workshops, Presentations, and Roundtable Conversations
on Somatic Practice, Engaged Pegagogy, and Sustainable System Building in Traumatic Times
Facilitated by: Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Founder and Creative Director, The Operating System
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Sample Iterations:
How to Human
@ The Next Edge Summit
Montreal, June 13-15 2015
Building Interpersonal Infrastructures:
Proactive System Building for Women, Nonbinary, and Transgender Creative Practitioners,
@ SOHO20 Gallery, Brooklyn
January 21, 2018, 4-6 pm.
HOW to HUMAN: Creative Self-Hacking for Growth in Traumatic Times
wildcard lecture @ WEIRDD / Books are Magic
June 29, 2018
emBODY WORK / STUDENT emBODY
Feminist Poetics / Emergent Pedagogies symposium
May 11, 2018, Los Angeles
Collaborative Precarity Bodyhacking
co-facilitated with stormy budding and Cory Tamler
as part of the RESISTANCE FANTASTIES residency / Exponential Festival
@ Target Margin Theater, Brooklyn NY
January 24-26, 2019 [/box]
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[box]Collaborative Precarity Bodyhacking is now an open source work-book and guide!
Perfect for autodidacts, but with all the tools to lead or cofacilitate a workshop in your community. Includes extensive resources, somatic and writing exercises, and structural guides for workshop facilitation. Buy it here.[/box]
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[box] Interested in booking a workshop, lecture, or other programming at your venue or institution? These programs can be tailored for various ages, levels of participation, group sizes, as well as for specific populations or demographic groups. No expertise in any field or discipline is necessary. Please email us for more information. [/box]
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The “BUILDING INTERPERSONAL INFRASTRUCTURES” initiative was started in late 2017 in response to personal and collective trauma. It is part of a series of ongoing workshops that trouble the role and capacity of body, language, and systems in building a sustainable future both individually and collectively.
It asks:
What would it look like to support each other, to build intentional interpersonal infrastructures that work alongside (and possibly replace) the cultural norms and assumed systems of personal resources that we rarely examine closely together? How can mindful, intentional system building serve to stabilize and ground our personal and professional lives?
We participate in social rituals, hold onto friendships long past their expiration date, attend family functions, don’t speak up in the workplace when we perceive that doing so endangers us in some way. And now we find ourselves in a curious time, when our willingness to speak out seems to be on an uptick, made visibly safe and culturally viable – like the current #metoo movement. We post on Facebook, we share, we publish. But how many of us are able to take real risks in doing so? Who is able to take the sort of “risks” that fully inhabit their values, to work for the change we’d like to see on the personal, local, national, and global scale? This becomes a question of privilege.
For the initial session, SOHO20 and The Operating System invited guests to participate in a discussion about navigating queer communities and gender normativity, financial and personal risk taking, interpersonal support, and precarious professions, such as art and academia, through looking at how resources and values can and do exist without a safety net. In this discussion and workshop we will use open space facilitation methodologies, drawing on writing and mindfulness exercises, and small group work, with room for emergent conversation and topics introduced by participants.
We encourage people to come both as active participants as well as observers. These conversations can be vulnerable and uncomfortable, so those who are on the fence can simply listen or ask questions. Not everyone has the same access to the privilege of sharing information without recourse, and no one can decide what defines a “safe” space for someone else. We do believe that showing up and energetically gathering around intentions to build positive, supportive infrastructures for one another is an important place to start.
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We are in the process of building virtual resources and growing a community interested in exploring these questions together both on and offline.
Check out this article by OS Founder, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, talking more about the issues at play,
use our Q&A/prompt template to submit your personal story (anonymously if you prefer) on The OS — or use the questions for your own explorations!
and please contact us if you’d like to be involved or have ideas for growing this initiative!
