brontë velez opens this week’s episode inviting us to think about how supremacy’s submission to Earth is an invitation into a more life-affirming world. What does a future look like in which white, human, and patriarchal supremacy surrender their power in an act of pleasure? How does this release manifest and what spaces must we create in order to allow it? How can our own personal play aid us in these times? This week on For The Wild, we explore how playing with submission and domination can be a means towards both liberation and pleasurable redemption with brontë velez.

brontë velez (they/them) is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis of state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist and designer, they are currently moved and paused by the questions, “how can we allow as much room for god to flow through and between us as possible? what affirms the god of and between us? what is in the way? how can we decompose what interrupts our proximity to divinity? what ways can black feminist placemaking rooted in commemorative justice promote the memory of god, which is to say, love and freedom between us?”

they relate to god as the moments of divine spacetime that remind us we are not separate, the moments that re-belong us to the earth. they encounter these questions in public theology, black prophetic tradition & environmental justice through their eco-social art praxis, serving as creative director for Lead to Life design collaborative, media director for Oakland-rooted farm and nursery Planting Justice, and quotidian black queer life ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life.

In Part One of this expansive conversation, Ayana and brontë delve into topics surrounding authentic expression, the distortion of feminine and masculine powers, beauty and aesthetics, queerness, dominatrix energy, and power as agency. We hope this episode provokes you to enter this world of pleasure, desire, devotion, surrender, relinquishment, and fluidity.

At the end of this episode, listeners hear an excerpt from The Well prophecy, written by brontë velez and recited by brontë velez, Ra Malika Imhotep co-founder of the Church of Black Feminist Thought and Jazmin Calderon Torres and Liz Kennedy from Lead to Life.

♫ Music by Esperanza Spalding