common /play\ grounds
common /play\ grounds is a reciprocal project hosted by yasamin ghalehnoie and sass popoli. This project sides with our new programme strand Mujaawarah (neighbouring)* dedicated to convivial learning, social action, and communal understanding.
The project offers opportunities to publish collectively, perform, and share work in the playgrounds of our imaginary worlds; through zines, letters, maps, and poems.
Read below for further details and to find out how to participate.
*Mujaawarah (neighbouring) is a concept practiced and developed as radical pedagogy by Palestinian learning theorist Munir Fasheh. At its heart lies the nurturing of rootedness and community, in opposition to hierarchies, and its core value is shared wisdom and wellbeing.
common /play\ grounds (a letter from the artists)
Conceived by yasamin and sass, common /play\ grounds host soft bonds and firm desires to rehearse be(longing), daydream in our nervous tongues, and tongueless languages, and rest in clockless commons: |homes| |lands| |times| |futures| |economies| |{}|
As echoed in their letter of the night, to disengage genocidal futurity, abused histories, and catastrophic times, we want will do should need desire care to love and befriend; make kinships, care networks, solidarity economies, and trust circles.
We hope to translate displacement and distress embodied in our cross-disabled and unruly bodies; and transnational memories to cosmic portals we wander through collective writing, improvisation, walking, performing, and publishing. 🪨🍄
If our societies and material conditions have made you displaced, disabled, distressed, sick, and alienated, and if you are a fugitive, immigrant, qtbipoc diaspora, differently abled, neurologically divergent, in need of play and rest, curious to make subversive friends and fabulations, we invite you to assemble and make time with us in sittings to come; for our collective memory and our will to remember, to imagine our futures past gone, and to think with what has been deemed wasted, failed, unproductive, dispensable and ornamental, for all the timelines we have lost.
Let us roam to places that do not yet appear to us, and in departing with trust, think about the questions around time, spaces and commitments, and the upkeep of cooperatives. For this is a practice of imagination and imagination is a practice of undoings and doings.
yasamin is a restless daydreamer. They are possessed by the unruly ghosts of wasted lands, times, and bodies. sass comes from the moons of uranus where Persian cats scratch and defecate. They facilitate, write, draw, print, and walk in common /play\ grounds, seeking to play, rest, and reset with friends: Maymana Arefin, Ashkan Sepahvand, Hannah Clarkson, Angela Yt Chan and Mandy Merzaban.
How to participate
If you are interested in joining our community and participating in five workshops in London locations and at The Mosaic Rooms, please email us at contact@mosaicrooms.org with your response to the questions below (in any format and language you feel rested in):
What is play to you? How do you want to play on these grounds? Or, share with us why you’d like to join us.
The project is generously supported by Arts Council England.
Image: Artwork by yasamin & sass. Courtesy of the artists.