Homebound: Embodying the Revolution with brontë velez /184
Photo by Ayşe Gürsöz of brontë velez at Lead to Life ceremony.
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brontë velez
For The Wild presents Homebound as an offering of curated episodes from the archives intended to share perspective and guidance in the midst of a time of tremendous uncertainty and possibility. We invite you to join us for seeds of wisdom from the weavers of transformation and mobilizers of personal and cultural shift featured in Homebound. We hope that this may serve as a North Star as we all traverse through our grief and fear that accompany this perplexing time fraught with shattering of systemic injustices alongside opportunities to co-create the world anew.
We are delighted to re-share our first episode with brontë velez on Embodying the Revolution, originally aired in 2018. brontë, a dear friend of For The Wild, poetically guides us through an expansive exploration of critical ecology, radical imagination, and decomposition as rebellion. brontë encourages us to examine our relationship to place and space, the unmaking of literacy, the decomposition of violence and the prioritization of Black wellness.
Many of us are feeling pulled in this time, towards grief, towards urgency...towards feelings of helplessness. This week we invite you to shatter these repetitions and take a moment of intentional slowness to ask, “How can I decompose violence in this life? Are urgency and intentionality compatible? What are the vessels that will carry us through these troubled times?”
brontë velez by Andre D. Wagner
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.
♫ Music by MaJo (Maria Jose Montijo) & Reverend Pearly Brown
Episode References
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Shulman
“Cosmic Literacies and Black Fugitivity” by James Padilioni, Jr.
Alice Walker
Mark Anthony Johnson
Leah Penniman at Soulfire Farm
Theaster Gates, Tamir and Samaria Rice
Bureau of Linguistical Reality
The Sovereignty of Quiet by Kevin Quashie