Consciousness & Spirituality, Story-Telling & Narrative

Ritual Reparations & “Commemorative Justice”

KINSHIP: An Online Course Talk with Brontë Velez, Justine Epstein

brontë & Justine will discuss their respective work and collaborations at the intersections of rite of passage, ceremony/ritual, ancestral recovery and “commemorative justice” (Free Egunfemi) in the midst of climate collapse. Engaging a re-historicisation of how we arrived to climate collapse, they will explore the “plantationocene” (Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing) versus the anthropocene and how reframing the epoch we are in changes how we are asked to respond. Wading through the spiritual and ancestral implications of climate collapse, they will ask: What are our respective inheritances across difference? What does our liberation have to do with one another’s and the more-than-human world? What has not been recovered? What has yet to be commemorated? What are the hauntings that live between us and in place? What does relational and ritual reparations look like between communities that are descendants of enslavement/indigenous genocide/displacement and descendants of enslavers and colonisers that accrued wealth through that harm? How does approaching climate collapse through ceremony help us get free together through radical kinship?