Presenters: Nyasha Felder, Samara Gaev, Richard Patterson, Li Sumpter
Organized by Li Sumpter, MythMedia Studios
Selected via Open Call
The Art of Survival: Strategies of Creative Resistance + Resilience is part moderated panel and part skill-share workshop featuring Samara Gaev (Director of TruthWorker Theatre Company), Richard Patterson (MING Media), and Nyasha Felder (North Philly Peace Park Pavilion Project). Li Sumpter of The Escape Artist Initiative will moderate the conversation and support workshop engagement. This session gives platform to local and national change agents with powerful stories and socially engaged practices that support resilience of mind, body and spirit in violent and uncertain times. Through brief presentations and performative demos, attendees are introduced to different means and methodologies for resisting and rising above what educator/activist Paulo Freire called “limit situations”. Food insecurity, police brutality, apocalyptic fears and daily stress all qualify as limit situations. Afrofuturism, hip hop theater, community-centered media and design justice are among the creative solutions and emergent strategies this program highlights as tools for surviving everyday threats of today’s world.
Read the Session Notes here.