We Ground, We Breathe, We Remember, We Imagine, We RE-SOURCE

Every single breathing body has a distinct musical culture to it, a soft composition with a ceaseless encore. No performance is ever the same. To breathe is to sing a note of indebtedness in an impossibly complex orchestration that congregates everything from the baroque glass bodies of nameless diatoms, the secretions of cyanobacteria, tropical reefs and rivers and lakes, to sea ice and travelling desert sand in transatlantic winds. To breathe is to be dispersed, to be undone, to be beside oneself. To breathe is to die.  

Bayo Akomalafe

How can we be together?

Reclaiming

Reasserting 

Affirming 

our presence here in a time when our presences are under extreme threat.

Whether we are directly under fire, being displaced, being targeted, doxed, undone, discredited. Or whether we are holding beloveds, colleagues, neighbours, students who are experiencing this type of violence.  How do we hold our grief?  Our despair?

With our grief can we let it come and tend to it?  Allowing it to take us, wash through us, break us open if needed. Allowing our sorrow to be a pathway to understanding. The key to our transformation. The ignition for our imaginations. The deepest expressions of our hearts.

Because for empire, keeping us in a perpetual state of despair is the way to stifle our potential. Control our visioning. Limit our powers of invention. 

We don’t need to calm down.

We need a place to act from

We need to RE-SOURCE

My offering here is small, 

Something to begin your practice, your reading or your action.  

A pause 

A moment

A grounding 

A breath

A libation 

You can do this alone, with another or many others in a circle in a triangle.  Whatever shape fits the time and the situation. 

My co-conspirators and I have often taken space to practice on city streets, in parks, in protests, in gatherings. 

You can bring candles and flowers. Rattles and bells. Incense and oils. Water and white rum.  You can create a sacred space. Be in the woods or by water. 

Or you can be just where you are.  Right now. 

Let’s start with our feet on the ground.  You can sit, you can stand, you can lie down.  I invite you wherever you are to imagine the earth beneath you. Grass, soil, sand, mulch, mud.  Porous earth is easier to imagine, though even rocks are energy, solid but permeable.  

Bring to mind the kind of earth you need to support your needs right now, soft or stable.

To help us to feel our connection to the earth I’m going to invite you to hum and as you hum imagine roots sprouting from your body through into the earth beneath you. 

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Allow your vocalising to root you deeply in the earth.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

The writer and teacher Sebene Selassie reminds us that our breath is our belonging.

Our BREATH IS OUR BE-LONGING  

Breath is RE-MEMBER-ing 

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

As we root let’s call in our ancestors to show us the way to liberation.

Understanding that what we have been taught about freedom, is in fact so very far away from true freedom.  Understanding that our ancestors have also fought for and tried to imagine a freedom beyond the limiting and oppressive ways that empire attempts to inculcate a racist and exclusionary interpretation of what being free is, into us. 

We ask our ancestors and benevolent deities from the cultures, religions, and belief systems gathered here to guide us through experience and understanding. Help us today to harness the wisdom of our breath as the ultimate resource for our liberation. Help us to trust the wisdom of our bodies knowing.  That the ways our bodies have showed up in this world. In the places they arrived in. Speaking the languages they speak.  Expressing the abilities and agilities gifted to us. These are deep ancient and barely grasped epistemologies. These gifts of embodiment are always giving and revealing truths to us.  

Because of the deep suppression of these knowing’s it is often extremely painful when we realise these truths. May we understand the purpose of our grief. Can we invite breath to hold us while we experience grief. In the times when we need to be with grief on our own and when we need to be with grief in community. Help us to understand that our breath and our body is our ultimate way finder, truth teller, and manifestation of all the embodied wisdom of everyone who has come before us. They contributed what we have come to understand, to who we are, why we’re here and whatever we desire to become. As we will do for others who will come after.  Sometimes the holding doesn’t feel as if it’s there. But our very presence, right here right now; Our abilities and capacities right here, right now in this moment to choose another way to be, to live, is the longing, the be-coming, the re-member-ing.

We also understand that it’s not just this western notion of biology that connects us.  Our most supreme ancestor is the earth itself and as we gently and tenderly work with our breath and our bodies, humming our roots deep into the earth, we remember all the gifts it gives to support our living. 

Air and atmosphere 

Plant life 

Animal life 

Water 

Fire 

The seasons 

The soil 

The sand 

The trees 

All the abundant blessings that we so often take for granted.

If you have water or any other spirit at this point in the practice you can now offer the liquid to the earth as an offering, a libation. 

“We offer this ensa (spirit) to the earth here now in honour of our immense gratitude for gathering us here to explore and practice liberation through breathing.”

As the Red Girl Rising Movement Society promote through their indigenous youth boxing programme our rising is a ceremony, it’s our ritual, our musical culture. 

Together we inhale and circulate ancestral wisdom, alchemise it, bring it forth for transformation.

And exhale all the bullshit we have been taught, all the lies of empire, all the things that have kept us small, all the ways that they have told us that liberation is impossible. 

We exhale loudly! 

We prepared the ground………….And now we can begin! 

Asé

In honour of all my teachers, my co-conspirators, my ancestors and all of you….

Barby Asante is an artist, educator, and researcher working across social practice, film, performance, collective writing, and the creation of transformative spaces for ritual and healing. Rooted in Black feminist and decolonial methodologies, her practice explores the intersections of art, activism, and healing, interrogating the enduring impacts of slavery and colonialism on contemporary life. She focuses on the complex dynamics of place, memory, and identity, using collective study and dialogical practices to unearth histories embedded in our geographies and bodies. Through her work, Barby invites collaborators and audiences into spaces of solidarity and shared breath, creating pathways to explore postcolonial migrations, challenge dominant histories, and reimagine possibilities for liberation and transformation.