BRONTË VELEZ on the Pleasurable Surrender of White Supremacy, Part 1 [ENCORE]/273
Photo of brontë velez holding a bouquet of botanicals standing in the foreground with plants against a dark background; Courtesy of Joan Osato.
This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with brontë velez, originally aired in October of 2019. brontë velez opens this week’s episode inviting us to think about how 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 surrenders its 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.
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.
“For me, it would look like, people hearing the call to submit and surrender to the Earth collapsing, shaking, going fugitive…as a call into a fantasy that was unimaginable, into something that might be more life-affirming…”
Photo of brontë velez by Joan Osato
brontë’s (they/them) work and rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). as a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, designer, trickster, educator and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration and death doulaship.
they embody this commitment of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice (Free Egunfemi) and hospicing the shit that hurts black folks and the land through serving as creative director for Lead to Life design collective and ecological educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth. they are currently co-conjuring a mockumentary with esperanza spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and stewarding land with their partner in unceded Kashia Pomo territory in northern California.
mostly, brontë is up to the sweet tender rhythm of quotidian black queer-lifemaking, ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life —"
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.
♫ The music in this episode is "Touch in Mine" and "Dancing The Animal (mind)" by Esperanza Spalding.
For The Wild is a slow media organization dedicated to land-based protection, co-liberation, and intersectional storytelling. We are rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth, and consumerism. As we dream towards a world of grounded justice and reciprocity, our work highlights impactful stories and deeply-felt meaning making as balms for these times.