Free YARD Art School Prompts
Prompts to invite a creative embracing of knowledge as more than the 'cerebral' kind.
MAIA’s Art School is one of the spaces within their Free YARD rhythm, where they pose a journey of creative practice that supports the imagination, resourcing and building needed for sustained movement infrastructure.
Tool: Creative prompts for imagining and rehearsing irresistible futures.
Duration: ~15 mins - 2 hours
Contributor: Amahra Spence is a community strategist, artist/curator, writer and organiser. Since 2013, she is the founding director of MAIA, an organisation engaging culture as strategy to envision and rehearse a world towards liberation. In 2020, Amahra also started Land Black, a spatial practice and speculative design studio prototyping and materialising works at the intersection of land and racial justice.
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Free YARD Art School Prompts
Contextualising Art School
Contextualising Art School
I wanted to contextualise MAIA's offering, which are practices shaped for Art School.
Starting from various points of need amidst multi-systemic violence, without centring a deficit logic, Free YARD is MAIA's way of sharing and exchanging in the abundance of resources the YARD community houses; a way of offering porous invitations into mobilising for liberation practice; a way of being in continuous rehearsal of the worlds we're growing. We honour in practice the Black Panther Party and other ancestors who acknowledged the everyday as a site of radical invitation, strategic reimagination and systems transformation led by those most impacted.
For Art School, one of the spaces within our Free YARD rhythm, we invite fellow travellers, dreamers, thinkers, designers, artists and builders into an embracing of knowledge as more than the 'cerebral' kind, uplifting. Art School poses a journey of creative practice that supports the imagination, resourcing and building needed for sustained movement infrastructure. We surface the systems that are working to debase our movements and explore tools and practices that enable life-affirming infrastructure, through culture-making, embodied knowledge, lived experience and other ontologies.
The practices we share here were from an Art School term titled 'Liberated to the Bone', in reference to the brilliant text of Susan Raffo. Raffo's Liberated to the Bone
"addresses the intersections between healing our physical bodies and healing our social relations which are shaped by violence... [and] interrupts the traumatic binaries of the political and spiritual, the physical and intellectual, and healing and organizing."
We hold in this the many more-than-human entanglements and relate these threads to the interconnectedness of 'place'.
