Workshop with

Lesley-Ann Brown | Dorine van Meel

In this second session of the Plural Wombs Research Group, Lesley-Ann Brown will address historical and present-day forms of colonialism, racism and state violence through the work of bell hooks, in particular from the book “Killing Rage, Ending Racism”.  Looking at hooks’ notions of white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture, Brown will use the session to think through strategies that will dismantle white supremacy and combat racism. She will also introduce her book “Decolonial Daughter: Letters from a Black Woman to her European Son” and address the need to understand history outside of the dominant narrative.

The research group takes place online and is now fully booked. If you like to add your name to the waiting list, please send an email to pluralwombs@gmail.com. After the event has taken place, we will make the lecture publicly accessible.

The first part of the session will consist of a presentation by Lesley-Ann Brown, followed by a discussion with the participants. After the event has taken place, we will make the presentation by Lesley-Ann Brown publicly accessible on the website of diffrakt and Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen.

Lesley-Ann Brown

Lesley-Ann Brown is a mother, TEDX speaker and author originally from Brooklyn, New York who feels passionately that in order to create a better world, we have to understand the various histories that got us here. Her work is intersectional, as her being stands on the very crossroads of race, gender and class. In 2007, she created the blog blackgirlonmars, forging a space for herself in otherwise alien-terrain, and inspiring others to do the same. Her book Decolonial Daughter: Letters from a Black Woman to her European Son (Repeater Books, UK, 2017), explores, through the lens of motherhood, issues such as migration, identity, gender, nationhood and how it relates to land, forced migrations, imprisonment and genocide. Her upcoming project From 1492 to Black Lives Matter is a combination of a talk and/or workshop that will not only facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of race and how it impacts us today, in our world; but also how we can co-create a better future for ourselves and loved ones.

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Plural Wombs Research Group

Plural Wombs is a collaborative project that brings together a number of cultural practitioners, theorists and activists working on the subjects of social reproduction, reproductive justice, and the political dimension of parenthood. In confronting these subjects, we are committed to a multi- gendered feminist approach and the exploration of different possibilities of familial relations beyond their bourgeois, patriarchal and heteronormative forms.

In light of the current crisis, we believe that it has become only more urgent to explore what a commitment to polymaternal kinship might look like today and how the experimentation with such forms of kinship could make different structures of support and care possible. We have therefore rethought the project under the present conditions and changed its form to an open research group organised around online meetings where participants each time discuss and work through one text of a relevant thinker. These sessions will be led by invited artists and theorists engaging with these themes and texts in their practices.

Dorine van Meel (1984, NL) is an artist based between Berlin and Amsterdam. Her practice unfolds in collaborative and discursive projects that result in moving image installations, performances and publications.

Plural Wombs Research Group | #2 Lesley-Ann Brown reads bell hooks from Dorine van Meel on Vimeo.

The Plural Wombs Research Group is initiated by the artist Dorine van Meel and hosted by diffrakt’s reading group programme (Berlin) and Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen’s public program (Amsterdam). The project has been made possible through financial support from Mondriaan Fund and Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen.