It is with joy and gratitude that we announce the launch of a new season of programming for Knowledge of Wounds 2021-22, and with it, the kindling of our evolving digital container, www.knowledge of wounds.com. In observance of the 2021 Solstice, we extend an invitation to join us by this virtual fireside for the unveiling of the full K.o.W 2021-22 program, a series of Indigenous-led events which will continue to unfold in this space over the course of an entire celestial year.
K.o.W focuses on the intersections of Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and the body. By centring praxes of mutual care, sovereignty, and accessibility, this program asks how we can engage diverse forms of embodiment, techniques, and forms that honor our wounds as points of entry to other selves and other worlds.
The 2021-22 Knowledge of Wounds program revolves around four themes:
BREATH
S/KIN
BLOOD
BONE
These elemental components resonate with solar and lunar cycles, honouring Indigenous rhythms and temporalities. Each quarter interweaves four modes of dialogic engagement:
a bodymind-centred practice, a four-week course, a keynote address and a roundtable discussion.
SEASON TWO: S/Kin
23 September - 20 December
Our skin is a sacred threshold. The ritual breaching of the skin is a ceremonial technology utilised by many peoples in the transference of ancestral knowledge. Through a codex of scars and markings made on the body’s supple container, we make visible our kinship ties and initiatory pathways. In the pelts of our animal relatives, we swaddle our infants and shroud our dead. The skin is the beginning of one body’s knowing of another: our skin hungers, our skin burns, our skin yields to the touch of a beloved. We honour the depth of wisdom worn in the softened faces and hands of our Elders. Through our skin, we receive the sun’s nourishment, the fire’s warmth, the embrace of water and wind. The bare soles of our feet find their home in the soil of our sovereign lands.
Kim TallBear
Daniel Browning
More to come...
SEASON ONE: Breath
20 June - 22 September
Centring Indigiqueer poetics, song, orality, sonic cultures, and the collective care of our vibrational bodies. Through breath, we consider what it means to be in resonance with ourselves, with each other and with all life. For this first season, we are thrilled to announce the following participating artists, thinkers and healers:
Ellen Van Neerven
Nicholas Galanin
Jack Gray
Seini Taumeopeau
Emma Bastable
Marika Clymer
Joshua Whitehead
Romaine Moreton.
In lighting this fire, we honour our entwined ancestral lineages of blood, practice, struggle and affinity. We humbly honour those who have preceded us, those who are yet to come, and the continuity of Indigenous cultural brilliance in which our work finds its anchor. This is a space held by and for Indigenous peoples, though we welcome all who arrive in the spirit of good relations.
For full program details, join us round the virtual fire.