Lift your spirits and nourish your mind. Words of power, joy, freedom and dreaming.
INCANTATION is a live outdoor event featuring a curated program of live readings performances and visual installations by writers, musicians and artists of colour who will enflesh and incant texts of five prophetic, visionary Black feminist writers.
Hosted by artists from Writing Sacred Space in collaboration with resident artists at Twosixty’s 'seat at the table'.
'seat at the table' is a shared workspace prioritising and supporting creatives, academics, and political works focused on racial and gender equity.
This alchemical signature event will INCANT the public space with cosmic corporeality. Words, images, voices, sounds, spirits are full of energy. Spoken aloud, together, in unison, in praise, we can bring back to life connections that have been lost, broken, fractured and INCANT us back into spaces of belonging- to ourselves, to each other, to the universe.
We welcome all communities to gather, share, create, heal, inspire one another in the face of isolation, fear and uncertainty.
Let's build an intergenerational collective vision of a viable decolonial future and re-write/ re-right public space.
Creative Design and Event Curation:
Dr Nilmini Fernando is a Sri Lankan Australian and migrant settler of colour currently living and working in Narrm on the stolen lands of the Kulin Nation. She applies critical race theory, critical intersectional praxis and decolonial feminist perspectives across her academic and activist work and writing. With a background in radio, spoken word and theatre of the oppressed, Nilmini is an originator of Loving Feminist Literature- a collective of artists/academics/activists who bring feminist of colour intellectual, philosophical, political and literary texts to public audiences. Recent public events include: International Women’s Day Panel, ‘What does intersectional feminist leadership look like?; Black Feminisms and Buddhism: Love as a Revolutionary Praxis. Writing and Concepts, Melbourne, and Flesh, the Law and Black Humanity Melbourne Fringe Festival ‘Critical Talks’ at Siteworks, Brunswick Melbourne.
Produced by: Janelle Da Silva
Janelle is a multi-hyphenated artist, TEDx Speaker, art therapist, racial literacy educator, CBE/doula, ultra-marathon runner and philanthropist. Her work has featured on major international & national television networks, stages, festivals, radio stations and podcasts. RunBitxhRun, her ongoing philanthropic project supports educational opportunities for Indigenous children living in remote communities supported through the Cathy Freeman Foundation.
Janelle is currently in her final year of a Masters in Experiential and Creative Arts Therapy (Education) and approaches all her research from a queer, intersectional, transculturality, and decolonial phenomenological perspective. She is also occupying a long-term residency seat with Twosixty's seat at the table.
Janelle is a fiercely independent, decolonising, intersectional, and passionate advocate for social change through the arts.
Maxime Banks is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, poet and filmmaker, a time traveller of the Black American diaspora, with Chicago, Mississippi roots translating quantum entanglement and subatomic particle ghosts as a metaphor of Black alienation, Blackness ontology and Black Joy. She is creating an Afro-Galactic autoethnography archive of Black portraiture, the Universe and quantum poetics navigating thematic metaphors of hybridity, artefact and fragment exploring non-linear counter-narratives. Maxime is currently living and creating on the stolen lands of the Kulin Nation in Naarm / Melbourne, Australia.
Maxime’s creative cartographies draw from the richness of her experiential explorations. Her art is cultivated within a diasporic geographical spacetime. Fragmentation focuses the lens of the existential reality and relationship of family, place, belongingness and the evolution and flux of ‘home.’ Her praxis intersects science, visual art, performance and design with otherness sensations across afrofutures anamnesis. Quantum physics, space travel and cosmology inspire her aesthetics, research and imagination.
Maxime recently performed live as The Silver Lioness at La Mama Theatre, La Mama Poetica at War-Rak-Banksia Festival. Maxime is a featured artist in the 2022 Wisconsin Triennial Ain't I a Woman? Exhibition at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCC) Madison, Wisconsin USA. Recent commissions include Brittle Sun album art covers and Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation public art sculpture.
Currently a resident writer/artist at Twosixty's seat at the table in Melbourne, Australia, Maxime will present a public lecture, performance with an immersive art / digital visualisation installation with Writing & Concepts, hosted by and at Siteworks, Brunswick.
“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible.”
― bell hooks