Soft Fire

Facilitated by Guest Artists

Shey Rivera Ríos (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist with 12 years of experience in the arts sector with a strong focus on community development and racial and gender justice. They believe art and culture can be catalysts for social change and collective healing by using many forms of storytelling to imagine and realize more just and equitable futures.

 

Sussy Santana is a poet, performer, and cultural producer born in the Dominican Republic and based in Providence, RI. Author of Poemas Domésticos (2018), Pelo Bueno (2010), and the audio book RADIO ESL (2012). Her work explores the bi-cultural identity through text and performance and her poems have been featured in a multitude of publications. In 2015, she became a recipient of the MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation. Santana is part of the first cohort of Creative Community Health Workers fellows with the Department of Arts, Culture & Tourism and the Healthy Communities Office. 

www.sussysantana.com + Instagram: @lapoetera

 

What are we carrying? Find an object that represents, What have you been carrying? What are you taking with you? What have you been given? 

 

List 3 things that distract you from you and your creative practice. In your journal, create a character that embodies at least two of the things on your list. 

 

Share your character through movement. Use your body to develop movements informed by your character’s perspective. 

 

A Soft Fire participants visited the Tomaquag Museum, Rhode Island’s only Indigenous Museum. They reflected on the following prompt: Use some of what you learned in the session to reflect upon an Ancestor or a Descendant. Who is that person? What message do they have for you?

Meditating on the Justice Tarot card, what does it mean to you? Reflecting on SISTA Fire’s Reproductive Justice work, how can we represent this visually? Practice representing your chosen social cause as a Visual Collage. Create a poster, using the model of The Justice Tarot card.