Ohlone College Diversity, Inclusion, Advisory Committee (ODIAC) in collaboration with NAKA Dance Theater present:

5th Annual Social Justice, Inclusion, and Equity Symposium
Radical Resistance, Radical Imagination

A monthly series of virtual performances and discussions with prominent local artists exploring the intersection of contemporary art and social justice, ritual and community empowerment. This year's conference will be a 6-part virtual series.

Thursday, November 19, 2020
3-5pm
Brontë Velez's Lead to Life

brontë velez’s (they/them) work and rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). as a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, designer, trickster, and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking & prophetic community traditions, environmental justice, and death doulaship.

they embody this commitment of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice and hospicing systems of oppression through serving as creative director for Lead to Life (leadtolife.org), a collective of artists, healers and ecologists transforming guns into the otherwise through ceremony and using those tools to host ceremonial plantings at sites impacted by violence with predominantly black families who have lost their loved ones in the wake of police terrorism.

in this talk, brontë will present Lead to Life’s newest ritual short film called “between starshine and clay” that traces a public alchemy ceremony Lead to Life hosted in Oakland on MLK Day to close out the annual Anti Police Terror Project’s Reclaim The Radical King March. families and community present melted guns into star-molds reflecting the constellations above Oscar Grant the evening he was murdered ten years prior at Fruitvale Station. the film dances between the city and the wild between as an exploration of the earth being in consort with black liberation. brontë will speak to lead to life’s work, commemorative justice, black feminist prophetic attention, and performance as ceremony.