Join Maymana Arefin and June Yuen Ting for a reflective wander and moving session through the green spaces surrounding Siobhan Davies Studio.
This ecology walk and improvisation-based movement session attend to the space and time our bodies and plant bodies could together hold. The session is exclusively for LGBTQIA+ people (see below for more information) and we welcome you to move as little or as much as you can on the day.
Moving at a pace that makes room for looking closely, we’ll pause with plants and local wildlife, uncovering the queer histories embedded in ecologies around us. Whilst we practise sensing, feeling and moving as and with these queerly fugitive plant bodies, we will also consider what we might offer in return.
Through storytelling, moving, and talking, this session invites us to learn from a natural world that has always resisted neat categories, and hone in on the practice of noticing and recognising that which goes unnoticed or unrecognised. Asking:
- What lies in the crevices, shades, edges and undersides of the more-than-human world?
- How might we learn to look for or listen to the minute, the quiet, the hidden and the ephemeral that exist amongst us?
- How might our queerly embodied relationships to plants and lands be of service to the larger social movements for justice?
- What it might mean to carry those lessons into our own lives?
You can also check out our Town Square Studio: Queer Takeover and Queer Town Square Chat.
This event is supported by the Southwark Pride Fund.
Who is this session for?
This session welcomes and centres all LGBTQIA+ identities and experiences. We also welcome those with intersectional and emerging queer life experiences which may situate them against normative expectations (whether this is through racialisation, disability, class and more). This is a Trans+ inclusive space, we ask that you don’t assume anyone’s gender identity or sexuality.
If you are a straight ally, we ask that you don’t take up space here. There are other Town Square activities, space hire and the opportunity to hang out at SDS – please see our website for more!
Please reach us by emailing contact@siobhandavies.com if you are unsure if this space is for you.
Meeting in the courtyard
No Experience Needed
Pay what you choose
Free / £2 / £5
The route to two local green spaces includes level access and there will be a folding chair accessible for those who need. Please be in touch with any access questions.
This is an outdoor event, come prepared!
The walk is from 5pm-6.30pm, we will meet just before 5 pm at the studios and come back to the studios at 6.30pm for hanging out and snacks.
Facilitators
Maymana Arefin
Maymana Arefin is a London-based community organiser, artist-activist and writer exploring radical futures through fungi. In 2020, she founded Fungi Futures, offering nature immersions, plant-fungi walks and spaces for deep rest, healing and reconnection with non-human kin.
Follow Maymana Arefin on Instagram @fungi.futures
June Yuen Ting
June Yuen Ting dances, organises, agitates and grieves. They are learning how to move against settler colonialism as a putatively perennial condition of dance making, and how to refuse the mandate of military industrial complex and its genocidal economy as the normative financial infrastructure for creative practice. With the conviction that our dances will and must outlive empires, June is committed to making dances in the interstices of and in tension with the hegemonic cultural politics of state and capital as well as their derivative institutions. A lifelong student of Black feminist praxis, June finds in the politics and practice of abolition the compass to navigate this world. June is living in the grace and legacy of crip ancestors and oracles from whom they are learning the work and the fight of loving disabled and mad people in a disabling and maddening world.
ACCESS AND AMENITIES AT SDS
Siobhan Davies Studios is mostly accessible, with lifts to all floors. There are two accessible parking spaces available on site which can be booked in advance. Blue Badge parking is also available nearby on West Square and Garden Row (for a full map visit the Southwark Council website). Our main door is power assisted.
Amenities include:
- Changing facilities*
- Communal showers*
- Toilets / wheelchair accessible toilets
- Kitchen: tea and coffee making, fridge, and microwave
- Snack Bar: We have a small selection of bars, drinks and food available to buy from the front desk.
- Shops: The closest shop is Superway Supermarket on Garden Row (4 min walk), the closest supermarket is Sainsbury’s on New Kent Road (7 min walk). We also recommend the Art Cafe which serves sandwiches, jacket potatoes and meals (3 min walk).
* Our changing facilities and showers are not fully accessible. Our closest publicly available and fully accessible changing facility is at The Castle Centre, a leisure centre 0.3 miles away from the studios. You can find full details of their features here.