About Us
Rehearsing Freedoms is a month-long, multi-site festival of community health, healing, movement building, arts and culture initiated by Healing Justice Ldn which asks:
“How can we root visions for radical and just health in safety, dignity, and belonging in order for us all to live whole and flourishing lives? What capacities, skills, and strategies do we need to practice to help us get free together?”
Our title provocation, Rehearsing Freedoms, is inspired by scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work on abolition – abolition is life in rehearsal. In our use of the phrase, we seek to collectively envision and call in futures free from oppression by creating spaces to live them. Our programme aims to dismantle structures of violence and, in their place, build community-based structures of care, health and healing. We want to create spaces that restore our agency and nourish our joy, while sustaining our movements as we build towards collective liberation.
This work enables us to respond to and disrupt structural violence and intergenerational trauma. Using art, organising and culture to encourage imagination, we are cultivating the exchange of critical ideas, knowledges and practices. We’re exploring what is, what could be, and the actions and infrastructure required to facilitate transformation
We are what we practice. Rehearsals are where we practise getting free together.
For more information about the festival, please find a member of staff at any of the festival events or reach out to us on social media. Otherwise, please email info@healingjusticeldn.org but expect that the response may be delayed as we’re a very small team.
Community Partners
Partner Venues
Supported By
Lineage
Rehearsing Freedoms emerges as part of a two-year body of work rooted in community-based healing, structural interventions, spaces for collective capacity building, joy and restoration, while practising the collective skills needed to realise liberatory health, and just, sustainable futures. It combines Healing Justice Ldn’s longstanding practices approaches and strategic interventions into a cohesive programme, space for practice, narrative, and journey to build with. It does this while creating opportunities for sustained and consistent collaboration, co-production, and coalition building across many fields, sectors, communities, struggles, solidarities and movements.
Rehearsing Freedoms references visionary abolitionist Ruth Gilmore Wilson’s ideas that state that we need to ‘rehearse the social order coming into being’ in order to collectively envision and practice futures free from oppression. In this time of compounding and cumulative trauma, loss and violence, we are confronted with the culmination of many failing systems and structures. It supports our findings on a community, movement and grassroots level support the need for skill and capacity building in relational and social ways to create, repair and build alternative life-affirming ecosystems, infrastructures or economies amongst marginalised peoples.
Rehearsing Freedoms sit with our work on building access to holistic and equitable healthcare provisions that tend to our physical and mental health needs, and support us to live well and dignifying lives, creates a unifying strategy across many groups, sectors and communities (including those that appear in conflict with one another). We anchor this work in our ongoing watershed Deaths By Welfare Campaign which locates our work and gives us an identifiable mobilising effort to resist and build with.
Our Deaths By Welfare Project interrogates deaths linked to and/or caused by the welfare system, welfare reform and the violence of State austerity. The project locates health and care as a unifying strategy, connecting different struggles, marginalised groups and the new constituencies that have emerged during the Covid 19-pandemic. Integral to this work is honouring and learning from myriad forms of disabled people’s resistance in order to re-envision justice and re-imagine ecosystems of care. The scope of this project spans across broad intersections of our preexisting work, connecting State violence with disability, spatial, racial and economic justice.