Doors open at 9:30am and we’ll start the day with a welcome at 10:00am.
No need to sign up for events in this space – just come along.
Lola Olufemi and Sarah Stein Lubrano
10:30am – 11:45am
No need to sign up to this session.
In this conversation, Lola Olufemi and Sarah Stein Lubrano, writers and organisers in London, pose questions to each other about culture, skill and the work of collective struggle. Lola will make the case that creativity and material struggle are not in opposition but braided together, drawing on embodied creative practices and on organising movements from the 1980s and 90s. Sarah will turn to the role of skillbuilding in community organising and activism. Together they'll ask why politicising our relationships to one another and taking culture seriously as a force in social and political change matters for any ambitious political project. Their shared interest is in work that is joyful, creative and concrete: organising your workplace, tenant struggles, setting up common spaces and resources, and expanding from hyperindividual and professional identity toward the wider community.
Dr. Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and researcher from London. She is a lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths University. Her work focuses on the utility of the political imagination in the textual and visual cultures of radical social movements. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, the forthcoming Against Literature and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. She occasionally curates and is a member of the organising team at the Feminist Library based in Peckham.
Dr Sarah Stein Lubrano has a background in feminist, mutual aid, and other local organising as well as teaching in prisons. She holds a PhD from the University of Oxford and a Master’s degree from the University of Cambridge. Her thinking often reaches the public through the Sense and Solidarity Initiative and the Future Narratives Lab. Her first book, Don’t Talk About Politics: Changing 21st Century Minds is out now with Bloomsbury.
🌐 https://www.instagram.com/sarahsteinlubrano/
House of Annetta
12:00pm – 1:30pm
No need to sign up to this session.
How can a house be a home for spatial justice? Five years into this iterative experiment, join House of Annetta at a moment of imagining the next half decade. We’re getting ready to repair the building through a learning programme based on bio-based materials, reworked supply chains, and care. Spiralling through photo, video, and text, join us to reflect on our relational web, peer-to-peer courses, movement resources, open-access programming, governance systems, economic models, and new construction company.
House of Annetta is a cybernetic building site in the former home of beekeeper, artist, activist and publisher Annetta Pedretti, a Huguenot terrace from 1705 in Spitalfields, East London. The property is owned by Stiftung Edith Maryon, a foundation established to remove land from market and make it available for social good. With this security, in a neighbourhood with centuries of organising, facing intense pressures of gentrification and housing crisis, what else might be possible?