Writing Future Brown Spaces

These are a series of immersive gatherings for writers, artists, and thinkers of the Afro-diasporic world to experiment with language, imagination, and research as tools for liberation.

You can download the WorkBook here, to do the work by yourself.

It contains the basic methodological scaffolding which is then adapted for the specificities of your group/community/institution.

What can you expect?

These sessions will not teach you how to write.

They do not give formulas for writing memoir or fiction or give you seven steps for a best-seller. Since you alone are the secret formula to whatever success means to you, these are designed for self-discovery in the key of black/brown desire.

Discovering that formula is about uncovering what you really want to say and then finding the capacity and training that capacity to write it – and have it ready for when you need to say it. Always have a poem in your pocket. Or at least a clapback.

If ancestral trauma is passed on, so is its magic and knowledge

When black/brown stops holding its breath in majority space (and recall that the majority can invade/occupy our internal space), clenching its muscles in preparation for fight/flight, when it stops holding back its way of knowing the world, minimizing itself, combing itself down, tying itself back and turns away from a suspicious or disdainful gaze, the capacities that emerge from all that new-found, liberated energy being invested in loving/owning one’s brown/blackness on one’s own terms, might just emerge as magical, more-than-human.

At least the idea of “human” constructed by the colonial-settler (lack of) imagination.

Since only you can discover the formula for that magic the exercises are very simple, because you already have it, you already know it, the body doesn’t forget a single thing and if ancestral trauma is passed on so is its magic and knowledge.

Maybe the exercises will seem too simple, at first, for such a grand claim. How could such ordinary creative writing tasks do justice to that claim? Well, it’s about the framing and it’s about the hosting.

When you sit down to write, you should try and imagine what a future black/brown spacetime is to you. That’s your frame of reference. Imagine that black/brown spacetime hosting you, holding you.

That’s the craft you’ll hopefully hone here.

Space craft.

It’s up to you to add the extra to that ordinary

Then it’s up to you to add the extra to that ordinary: your struggles, your compassion, your invisible emotional labour, your incredible, really unbelievable care for those who cannot care for you, your generosity and grace, your deeply four-dimensional, high-definition, multi-sensory, multi-sensual perception of the day-to-day, the fact that despite it all you have persisted and insist on being here as full as you can be. That’s the extra you can bring to these simple, ordinary exercises: these capacities that make you extraordinary.

Exuberant.

Exorbitant.

Extra-sensory.

Ecstatic.

Exceptional.

Extra.

There are currently two online Workshop series on offer

Series One

Black/Brown Practice: Video Embed

Memoir of Microaggression

Intersectionality

Genealogy. Geography. Geology: Video Embed

Home. House. Community. Continuity

Introduction to Speculative Fiction

Series Two

Speculative World-Making through Fiction:

Autotheory

Autofiction

Visionary fiction

Healing fiction

Speculative fiction

Our participants say

Vad gör den här kursen? (svar till en kollega)

En konstnär guidar mig in i mig själv, han håller min hand och alla andras (hur gör han det?). genom att se mig själv kan jag se andra. Genom att se andra kan jag se mig själv. Vi är alla små universum som på något sätt håller Makten att släppa in fler, andra, inga genom dörren till ett utställningsrum, en utlysning, ett arbete, en upplevelse, en fika, ett samtal.

Om vi förstår varandra bättre, om vi är redo att låta Mer av vad det innebär att vara människa få ta plats, då kan vi förhoppningsvis också välkomna fler.
Jag börjar tro eller förstå att jag också gör ett bättre jobb om jag är mer snäll mot mig själv och förstår mina olika identiteter bättre.

The workshop allowed me to connect to both my knowledge, the ignorance I carry, learned patterns, and my inner intuition on where I want to go, who I would like to be, and what I would like to bring forward into the world.

Already after the first day I thought about how this workshop really shows the transformative power of art and what art can do in opening up important subjects and questions, by not only bringing them to the surface of our (my) consciousness, but also actively working with them on different layers.

The workshop uses artistic methods, in particular writing, to tackle sensitive, complex issues from perspectives that I have never experienced before.
It exposes structural and power structures that are diminishing us as human beings, no matter if our ancestry is Swedish from many generations or if we are newly arrived in Sweden.

The workshop provided a group of artists and producers coming from all around Europe not only to collectively reflect on representation, diversity and inclusion but also to individually question our relation to the realities of blackness and whiteness.

It offered a creative introspection which is needed to shift our mind-sets and therefore to impulse change in our perimeters of actions and power.

I left these two days of workshop feeling that I had started a personal journey, as much as a collective one.

Öppnade upp för nya tankesätt, självrannsakan och självmedvetenhet. Att se sig själv som en del av en struktur som är felaktig. Med de mallar och krav vi själva och samhället lägger på oss var det svårt att hantera. Det gav till en början ångest och frustration då jag kände hopplöshet. Men efter ett par dagars bearbetning känner jag ett visst hopp om att vi trots att vi är öar i våra egna universum ändå kan mötas. Måste mötas och att vi kan i alla fall öppna upp för ökad förståelse och medmänsklighet.

I was really grateful to a) have the opportunity to be guided through anti-racism work in such a comprehensive, and b) the format, setting, activities and opportunities were fantastic.

Being at home (online) changed the level of vulnerability. All the writing was only just for me, I was accountable to myself. No obligation to speak in a large group or pressure to do it ‘right.’ I think this format is very generous for people who are invested in it.

In nearly all of the small groups, other participants also expressed their gratitude for the artistic and individualized way the workshop was held.

The workshop and its library is a safe space to encounter hard truths. Two days of expertly organised listening, thinking and writing took me through deeply personal and widely organisational perspectives into intersectionality, racism and othering.

does what it says it's going to do.
It provides a safe space in which to explore your experiences and practice, as well as tools to transform these.
This is jargon others are using like catch-phrases without substance. FBS's workshop has the meat on the bones.
The workshop allowed me a real opportunity to tackle the messiness of my identity, as well as, my role in community during these trying times.

It helped me transition from a blurred image (that I thought was clear) of myself to a more illuminated one, revealing obscured nuances of my behaviors and the effects and consequences they can have.

It made me think about empathy, also from one of the postcard texts in the learning platform. It feels like a practise in deep empathy with a starting point that is me and from that being able to use empathy for myself as a tool for moving in my field.

For me the workshops have shown that we can talk facts and statistics, we can bang on about inclusion and diversity on a structural level, but what makes this different is that it comes from within by creating understanding for oneselves and others.
Is tangible change from within. I think the free form of poetry, writing and art as made that possible.
The main word that come to me is ‘care’ in any and every form.