Expanding the Black Sacred Imagination

This teaching asserts that Blackness is not a social caste but a cosmology and ontology unto itself. More than a category imposed by race, we radically position Blackness as the fundamental building block of the universe — beginning with dark matter, the unseen substance that makes up the vast majority of the cosmos, holding galaxies together while remaining invisible to the eye. The universe itself is held by a Black unseen. Before light, there was the fertile dark: the generative void from which all worlds emerge.

What expansiveness becomes available, in our definitions of ourselves, our relationships, and our role in society, when we move Blackness away from the mother wound of anti-Blackness created by Empire and racial cis-heteropatriarchal programming? What happens when we shift our definition instead toward one guided by our freedom-making ancestors; planting ourselves in the fertile void, where all manner of new ideas and worlds may come to be?

Led by two artists whose work intersects ritual and performance, we will guide participants into an embodied and sensual exploration of what it means to position ourselves not as reactors to a world, but as creators of worlds: co-creating together new worlds for us to inhabit.