Breathing In Babylon Weekender
“Come with all your loss, your regrets, sins, memories, black outs, secrets. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than you.”
― Warsan Shire
Breathing in Babylon is a proposition to address the vibrancy of sonic and visual cultures and the racial, political and ecological turmoil that shape our societies, streets and wellbeing of our communities. To breathe within these supremacist structures, from a racialized position is to intervene into its apparatus of violence and repression. It is to ring di alarm, be alive and remembered. With this program we bring together sounds, art, performances, music and conversations that attune to our laughter, losses, love, regrets, memories, chaos, black outs and desire to catch our breath in these times of duress.
This four-day long program zooms into how alternative situations and praxis breathe life into street culture pasts, presents and futures. By acknowledging the spatial and everyday colonial and capitalist wounds and secrets that make it difficult to catch our Breath in Babylon, we carve out space for being together. This program centralizes the way people use intimate stories and fabulation, humor, dance, silence and songs, which emerge from (art), cultural and sonic practices to address the politics of breathing and imagination in cities that don’t care for marginalized people's imagination, dreams and wellbeing. Whose oxygen is compromised? After all, we don’t all breathe the same air nor does breathing together rarely mean breathing the same.
Together with artists, poets, designers, thinkers and hustlers, Metro54 and Kanaal 40 look into these questions and ways the futures of street culture unfolds through wayward forms and practices. Breathing in Babylon is a critical celebration, a funeral, a cypher of beings and through experiments, performances, conversations, workshops and dancing, a space for coming together, emergent and everyday strategies of breathing.
With contributions by Joy Mariama Smith, Farida Sedoc, Perry Gits, Tarek Lakhrissi, Marly Pierre-Louis, Christian Nyampeta, Otion, Authentically Plastic, Dey.Rey, Soungou, Tina Reden, Pelumi Adejumo, Rhoda Thochokam, Yung Liberachi, Bxxmbastic, and Chinnamasta.
Breathing in Babylon is developed in multiple conversations with Hala Namer, Bram Owusu, Vincent van Velsen. Details about the program and how to rsvp will be announced soon on our socials so please keep an eye out. <3