This 2-part workshop will walk artists through the process of discovering and creating mutual aid pods and community power-mapping towards collective goals. A pod is a community of individuals that you can turn to for mutual aid, care or support. A power map is a tool used for discovery to identify individuals and organizations that can be targeted to advance progressive changes for the Detroit creative community.
What are the conditions that enable you to make your best creative work? Who can help you create those conditions? During these two sessions, we'll ask these questions and others to move toward building the systems that can sustain us as creatives.
During Pod Mapping, participants will practice identifying needs, supporters, and offerings that compose a mutual aid network that could support them, especially in advancing their creative practice. During Power Mapping, participants will examine the meaning of power and practice identifying where and with whom the power to create conditions that best support their creative work might lie. Extending beyond the scope of one's pod, we'll create maps aimed at addressing uniquely defined challenges facing participants by understanding the individuals, institutions, and networks that might support or oppose their objectives. This session will also pay particular attention to the ways mutual aid generates power and how one's pod might play a role in achieving their creative goals.
***Important note*** This workshop will be hosted on zoom and participants must register in advance.
Lauren Williams (she/her) is a Detroit-based designer, organizer, researcher, and educator. She works with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power....
(they/them) is a Black, Queer, Trans non-binary Reparations Alchemist (Artist/Activist Hybrid) working in their hometown of waawiyatanong (Detroit, Michigan). They create images and objects that communicate the living relationship between the...