QTIPoC+ Community Care Festival

The QTIPoC+ community care festival intentionally takes place a week before Glasgow Pride as we wanted to provide an alternative offering, in the spirit of the early Pride movement, rooted in resistance and community solidarity.

The festival will feature guided opportunities for networking and movement building, learning your place in the social change ecosystem and nourishing workshops to alleviate inner tensions and stressors, equipping us with tools for our personal and community wellbeing.
As an organisation aiming to build community as a unit of resilience, we believe that having community care events such as these could help to reduce the effects of systemic injustice that our community faces by supporting people with mutual aid, organising, and self-help tools. Helping to provide an alternative model of care to the statutory services which often are not suitable or safe for our community.
We want to use the opportunity of Pride to remind our community to look after themselves and each other, and help them find new ways to do so.

Information about the accessibility of the venue (Transmission Gallery) can be found here.

Parallel Session 1 - Building our collective power with nusa

This session is for those already involved in community organising and activism (all forms welcome), and invites participants to an ongoing conversation centring critical thinking and generosity in / and / as / of care; Are we mobilising or organising?

In which ways could we identify and counter the systems which are designed to divide us, in and through our organising and mutual aid spaces? Where can our connection with our bodies guide us? At which points could our collective threads of work meet, while giving ourselves and each other room to grow?

This space for discussion, critical reflection, processing and imagining will seek to unearth and co-imagine strategies for care, solidarity, peer support & accountability across difference to cultivate our collective power; in the communities we seek out and in those we find ourselves in.

About nusa

nusa is an interdisciplinary artist with a body-based practice across live performance / movement / sound / research / writing and facilitating. They are interested in unknowings and bodily knowings as sites of potentiality; in opacities, in parallel existences, imaginings; things and nothings and being and thinking, and doing.
nusa's wider work involves project producing, facilitating and organising / advocacy with QTBIPOC, as cofounder of ID.Y, a collaborative arts support entity centring anti-racism in practice in the arts.
nusa has also been a member of the underground ballroom scene since 2017 joining the Iconic House of Revlon in 2018, consistently organising in and nurturing the ballroom community Scotland. They founded House Ball Scotland in 2021 following the initial platform Vogue Scotland, as a values-based community support entity and connection point for QTBIPOC and the underground ballroom scene.

Parallel Session 2 - Dancing with race and queerness with Jj

Join this workshop to move through, dance about and discuss the ways in which race and queerness have been demonised and othered by white supremacist ideals of ‘acting right’.
Together we will reject assimilation and celebrate malleable, magical and troublemaking ways of life for black, and PoC, queer folx, with examples of dykes, trans folx, lesbians and gays from the present and recent past.
This is a space to bring your intuition, and existing knowledge and build a fuller picture of the world and forces acting on the way in which we are allowed to present and love.
This workshop welcomes anyone categorised by race (black, latinx, asian, brown etc.), with an understanding this workshop will centre the experiences and history of black queer people as an anchor to the content of this workshop.
This workshop is inspired by Mojisola Adebayo's queer black performance art practice.

About Jj

Jj Fadaka (any pronouns) is an Edinburgh based writer, facilitator and radical. Their poetry speaks to the political urgencies of abolition, feminism and love. Jj’s workshops draw on Afro-futuristic traditions to rebuild a world without barriers. She facilitates a radical approach to education and finds belonging in music, visual arts and performance.

Relaxation Practices for Wellbeing & Resilience with Gee Katungi

Opening with an intro to polyvagal theory and the impact of embodiment practices for nervous system regulation, stress reduction and relaxation.
Group discussion: How do we know when we are feeling stressed in our mind-bodies? How do we currently deal with being stressed? How are these working for us? Are our current ways of dealing with stress working for us? What are some of our own practices for stress reduction? Together we will explore these questions.
Group practice: Together we will go through some tools the group have shared for stress lowering and relaxation and some additional tools for use when we feel our habitual stress reduction responses aren't working for us anymore.
Finally we will enter into a sound healing, aimed at facilitating deep relaxation in order to support the bodies natural restorative, self healing power.

About Gee

Gillian Katungi (PAIX) (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, organiser and director based in Glasgow. Through PAIX, Gillian experiments with new forms of expression and finds freedom in the space between established (art) forms. Expressed through audio and visual, their inquiry is influenced by the divine, remembering indigenous practices, Black feminism, love, speculative fiction and oral storytelling traditions.

With a desire to create new paradigms, their artistic process pursues collective liberation, decoloniality, emotional honesty and playful exploration without judgment. They aim to centre black liberation/freedom fighters in their offerings and spaces. PAIX loves participation with and in community and views play & embodiment as tools for liberation.

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