It should go without saying at this point, but let’s say it anyway – we are moving through a time shaped by overlapping and urgent crises. Racism and sexism and all the isms, homophobia and transphobia and all the phobias, ongoing genocides and surveillance, arrests and imprisonment of those speaking out about genocide, rising fascism, data centres taking our water, machines making shoddy art, politicians building pipelines as wildfires rage across the country, billionaires flinging rockets into the moon! You name it, we got it!
There are too many days when we are left feeling depleted, untethered, and unmoored. And that’s really the point, isn’t it?
This relentless destruction is meant to stun us into passivity. The unabating chaos is meant to shock us into inaction. The heaviness of this grief is meant to stop us from imagining futures beyond this hellscape.
But for Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities, imagining otherwise has always been necessary. In the face of colonization and displacement, systemic violence and erasure, our communities have long turned to storytelling, art, humour, play, and collective imagination as ways to survive, resist, and dream beyond the worlds we inherited.
Living Hyphen strives to build from and grow that lineage.
That’s why this summer, we embarked on a series of experimental playshops where we did exactly that – WE PLAYED!
We centred joy, creativity, and possibility, all while exploring significant and consequential themes around justice, grief, conflict, and contradiction.
Over the last few years, we have been deeply inspired by adrienne maree brown’s book, 'Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good,” which asserts that joy, pleasure, ease, and connection are central and vitally necessary to social justice. adrienne maree brown asks, “How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life?”
And so, we wanted to lean into that very curiosity and put these ideas into practice.
Is it possible for us to “play” with grief? Is it possible to hold conflict with a touch of levity? To find justice through some fun? To carry contradiction with a bit of whimsy?
Turns out, it absolutely is. And it is a beautiful, tender delight and a riotous good time!
We played games, we doodled, we made art just because. We took walks around the neighbourhood and paid attention to the signs of collective care that are all around us already. We made maps of justice through the path of joy. We wrote from the perspective of different objects (a bruised banana, a taste bud, a hotel bar soap) to cultivate and deepen our curiosity. We made blackout poetry to bear witness to the beauty of absence and loss. We braided (literally!) all the contradictions we are holding together.
“Joy and play are how we replenish our imaginations. They are a dimension of connection to our bodies, to each other, and to the world around us.
Play is a refusal to succumb to the violence of empire. Our liberated futures require our full selves, not only our grief and suffering, but also our unabashed joy and silliness.
I hope that, for all of us, we can experience the richness of play that expands what is possible.”
As those in power make reckless, self-serving decisions to the detriment of our present day and future generations, it is up to us to recognize and wield our own powers. And it all begins with our imagination, with our ability to play and seek out creative ways of being in a world stuck in the status quo. It all begins with our insistence on connection in a world that feeds us endless, mindless distractions.
While our programs at Living Hyphen focus on our creative storytelling practice, we know that this way of thinking and being ripples out to every other part of our lives.
As the artist Yumi Sakugawa writes, “creativity is not just what you create and what medium you use, but also how you live, how you love, how you fight for what is right and necessary when the dominant social script wants you to keep quiet and accept things exactly as they are.”
We hope to serve as an entry way to this kind of nourishing creative life, and we are committed to growing our muscles of play, whimsy, and imagination with you to build the kind of connected, just, and liberated futures we long for.