In preparation for Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Artist in Residency in 2024 there were three workshops led by Ayesha Ghanchi. During these workshops there was collective reading, thinking, breathing and writing, inspired by the work of Leanne Simpson. Leanne is a Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer, poet, musician, activist, and academic whose work engages with Indigenous ontology and resistance.

After the workshops, Ayesha gathered the material from the workshops and created an extensive workbook, with which you can get started yourself.

Workshops
In these three workshops we drew on Leanne's work and collectively reflected on the themes of resistance and embodied relationality. What are the gentle, silent but challenging, introspective, localized forms of resistance in these violent and destructive times? How can our relationship with our past, our present, our identities (in all their multiplicity) help build our connection to the land we find ourselves in, both in terms of nature and other beings?

During the first session we read from the text Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (2011) and during the second and third sessions we read the playful fiction of This Accident of Being Lost (2017). We created our own playful responses ranging from stories, poetry and art around the themes of resistance and embodied relationality.

The workshops took place on March 6, 13 and 27, 2024 at the Academy for Theater and Dance.

More about the Artist in Residency and the full programme of Leanne Simpson's visit

About Ayesha Ghanchi
Ayesha Ghanchi thinks, reads, and works in the field of critical pedagogy. Her PhD examined artist practices in gallery and cultural education, in which she dived into the socio-cultural impetuses for radical pedagogies. She has worked at the Rietveld Academie exploring how to develop safer spaces and refining their Code of Conduct. She has also as worked in other art institutions across the Netherlands as lecturer and facilitator around social justice themes. She is a trained yoga teacher and brings a somatic awareness to her practice.