Underground Futures: Anarchy, Ecology & Relationships
As we contend with facism and shifting political landscapes, how can our relationships, the mycelial glue holding together our resistance to oppression, sustain us as we cultivate alternative systems of liberation?
Relationships are the foundation for all organizing. Mushrooms are natural anarchist revolutionaries; if we pay close attention to what they have to teach us, we can engage in praxis which decomposes the empire through growing mycelial networks of mutual aid.
This collaborative workshop opens space to ponder the question of how to love like a revolutionary from engaging with theoretical and practical intersections of liberating relational technologies such as mycelial mutual aid, relationship anarchy, and decolonizing care.
How can we relate to other species in a way that recognizes their full being? And how can this nurture our own capacities for care of other people and our world?
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Logina Mostafa, MPH (she/they), founder of Queering Existentialism, K. Eskins, (they/them), founder of Queer Philosophy, and Sal Chen, will be co-facilitating this interactive workshop.
Logina Mostafa, MPH (she/they), is an educator, writer, and the Founder of Queering Existentialism, a grassroots public health initiative weaving together healing-centered harm reduction, transformative justice, and communal secure attachment. As a queer Egyptian American scholar of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, Logina advocates for the practical applications and therapeutic potential of pleasure activism within liberatory third spaces, with a focus on altered states, sexuality, bodily autonomy, relational technology and communal care. Their practice draws from public health, philosophy, and lived experience to challenge systemic failures of care and to nurture networks of solidarity rooted in mutual aid and decolonization. Logina creates spaces where we can expand our capacity to relate to ourselves and other beings in ways that resist disconnection/oppression and cultivate unity/liberation.
K. Eskins, M.A. Phil (they/them), founder of @queerphilosophynyc and co-organizer of Trans M.A.S.T. NYC, is passionate about philosophical inquiry as a method of opening up pathways within communities to forge stronger bonds. Inspired by their academic engagement with Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexuality studies, and Trans Philosophy, they aim to facilitate spaces committed to the political project of reconceptualizing how we relate to one another in service of birthing a new world. One of the central questions they are interested in right now is: How can we grow mycelial networks of radical trans care through the decomposition of relational philosophies of empire?
Sal Chen (she/ they) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator from Brooklyn, NY. Sal facilitates communal containers dedicated to nurturing connection and creativity. She believes our creative practices are our pathways and tools for liberation & reclamation of power over individual and collective narratives. Sal creates process-oriented art, rooted in her experience of participating and assisting in expressive arts therapy groups throughout the city, for over a decade. The act of creating becomes a bridge for inner and outer worlds, and ultimately transforming the way we express, experience, move, relate, communicate, and share our multidimensional selves. Sal has performed as a collaborator at the Grace Exhibition Space, the West Chelsea Arts Festival, the Church of the Little Green Man (for the Big Red Woman Special), the Catskill Zendo (Baklimsa) for Ontopo, The Source Space for Upstate Art Week, and at the Mothership for the Awakening Festival in Woodstock. She has also done work as a teaching artist for the Loisaida Center and for Thrive Collective.