Activism Activities Projects Workshops

Regional convening of community gathering “Embodied activism and courage to rest” brought together activists from the region

May 9, 2022

May 4th-8th, 2022

On May 4-8, 2022, Artpolis organized the regional convening of community gathering “Embodied activism and courage to rest” held in Frushka Gora, Serbia.

This meeting brought together 32 activists from the region, respectively from Kosovo, Serbia, Albania, Northern Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, in a meeting both personal and collective, a long-term and a daily one, which oriented the participants towards courage, intimacy and dignity, in progress to heal their bonds – their bonds that heal.

Into the 3rd year of Covid, it has been a time of deep reflection and inquiry for many of us. Given the unsettling climate of the world, it’s clear that our collective nervous systems have been in a high state of activation, worry, stress, and change. As we move through these unprecedented times as a collective, we believe that it’s important to resource ourselves to stay grounded and regulated. To tend to ourselves. To tread gently and with love and kindness.

Our idea to come together emerged from the sense that the times call for new inquiries, conversations, and experiments around how we experience, organize, connect, work with and catalyze transformation in our social justice work. As 2022 unfolds, amidst a global pandemic, the ongoing erosion of the ecosystem’s capacity to sustain and generate life, social unrest, economical depression and extreme inequalities, political disconnect from the major challenges of our times, people’s growing distrust of the institutions in place and broken eco-systems of sense-making, our contexts will become increasingly more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.

In our regional convening of community gathering “Embodied Activism and courage to rest” we did not offering a secret formula or the promise of a happy ending. This convening was our collective offering, an invitation to inquire into the dynamics of the present moment we are living in our lives and to open up spaces of possibilities across movements, and reimagine what it means to be human in this time.

This meeting was organized precisely given the fact that we deserve to feel our connections; we deserve to feel belonging to all the life within and around us. This meeting taught us how in 2022 we dare to practice connection, towards life.

This meeting was supported by the Urgent Action Fund (UAF), Mama Cash and the Reconstruction Women’s Fund (RWF).


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