S/kin

23 September -
20 December

Northern Hemisphere: Fall Equinox to Winter Solstice

Southern Hemisphere: Spring Equinox to Summer Solstice

Program Description

Our skin is a sacred threshold. The ritual breaching of the skin is a ceremonial technology utilised by many peoples in the transference of ancestral knowledge. Through a codex of scars and markings made on the body’s supple container, we make visible our kinship ties and initiatory pathways. In the pelts of our animal relatives, we swaddle our infants and shroud our dead. The skin is the beginning of one body’s knowing of another: our skin hungers, our skin burns, our skin yields to the touch of a beloved. We honour the depth of wisdom worn in the softened faces and hands of our Elders. Through our skin, we receive the sun’s nourishment, the fire’s warmth, the embrace of water and wind. The bare soles of our feet find their home in the soil of our sovereign lands. 

For the second celestial season of K.o.W 2021, we consider S/Kin as the means through which we connect and ground into our kinstillatory relationships.

Keynote

Kim TallBear & Daniel Browning

21 October 10 AM ADST

20 October 7 PM EST / 6 PM CST / 5 PM MT/4 PM PST

Join us for a conversation between Kim TallBear & Daniel Browning.

In this keynote conversation, Dr. TallBear will speak with Bundjalung journalist Daniel Browning on her work on critical non-monogamy. TallBear situates her critique of the assumed, settler-imposed norms of dyadic coupledom and marriage within the Indigenous ethics of Right Relationship. In her work, TallBear traces a compelling line between the strategic imposition of colonial familial structures and sexual mores and the seizure and partitioning of land. In critical dialogue with the work of white ecofeminists such as Annie Sprinkle, TallBear proposes an expanded understanding of erotic relationship and intimate committment that includes both human and more-than-human relations. TallBear both references and refutes the existing formulations of Polyamory, troubling the overwhelming whiteness and neoliberal underpinnings of these movements, and instead makes an argument for the practice of non-monogamy and non-hierarchical intimacy as restorations of our relational sovereignty.