What if our Green City was a Black Utopia?
| By Evie Muir |
Last month, we had the deep honour of taking part in the RESOLVE Collective’s 💞🌿‘Nurturing Ecologies’🌿💞 Residential - a jam packed week of peer-to-peer learning in a knowledge exchange programme for Black, POC and marginalised organisers and artists.
Hosted by RESOLVE and delivered in our very own Sheffield, the project prioritised the existing knowledge and expertise of practitioners, to enable collective development and lay the foundations for future collaborations through both tangible and intangible infrastructures.
Over the course of the week we became emersed in film screenings, workshops, panel discussions, exhibitions and so much more, including a walkshop co-facilitated by ourselves, draft days with Healing Justice London, image sequencing workshops with Nathaniel Tèlèmaque, screenings of SADACCA’s archival footage with Ella Barrett and and an open deck session with Ashley Holmes!
It was a soulful week filled with mind, body and heart expansive connection, that inspired creativity, imagination and hope. And, here at Peaks of Colour, we’ve been entirely distracted by thoughts of it ever since.
One question that continues to dominate our musings is:
‘What if the Peak District/Sheffield was a *Black Utopia?’
Hear me out. From The Fly Tower, to Gut Level, Mondo Radio to SADACCA, and the vast array of eateries we nourished ourselves in, the residential utilised some of the best of Sheffield’s cultural spaces (many of those quite literally on the doorstep for us locals). I didn’t realise how transformative this would be. To be able to leave the house, walk down the road and experience that sense of family and freedom without having to travel to London for an event, or to, the farthest corners of Scotland for a retreat.
Throughout the week ‘space’ and ‘place’ became regular topics of discussion and exploration, and I found that I came away feeling unapologetically proud of the people and places that are the sites of revolutionary practice in Sheffield. It was a welcomed reminder.
No matter how proudly northern we know ourselves to be, so often we can be distracted by what we lack [cough ~ funding, resources, land, time ~ cough], particularly within a narrative that tells us that change can only happen in London’s metropolis. To be underestimated and undervalued can be a contagious feeling, and that bitterness is one I’m conscious to unlearn. This week offered a renewed confidence that just maybe, we already have everything we need right here, in and amongst our seven hills.
It made a Black utopia seem not like some distant pipe dream, but a reality we were all living and breathing in the now. Tangible. Possible. Not least because of Sheffield’s proximity to the nature of the Peaks. In our Utopia we were engulfed in the intimacies of one another. Sucked into an orbit of care, we emerged calm, loved, resourced, inspired, hopeful, motivated, moved, together. It felt good. Or, as Farzana Khan of Healing Justice London rightly summarised on our final night together, “breathed into”.
For Peaks of Colour, the week has left us with that feeling of anxious, excitable anticipation. Like we’ve just opened a door to something that feels too irresistible to close. For now, our contemplations will continue, but we know that this is the start of a thrilling journey to answer the question of:
🌿🪐 What if our Green City was a Black Utopia? 🪐🌿
We’re endlessly grateful to the RESOLVE boys and babes for the opportunity to sink deeper into community with the organisers, creatives and movement makers that we consider family.
Watch this space…
📸: Halima, Jashan, Jana and Akil.
*We use Black here in the context of political Blackness, which encompasses all those racialised under white supremacy.
