Goethe-Institut im Exil: Exit Pathways Workshop | Liberation Mo(ve)ments inside Predatory Landscapes
DO 22.7, 15H ACUD Studio
By registraton only
Exit Pathways focuses on modes of resilience, safety, communion, transforming trauma into empowerment.
In a 1961 radio broadcast, black queer activist and artist Lorraine Hansberry asked the question “is it necessary to integrate oneself into a burning house?”
Hansberry’s burning house is proposed as a symbol of revolution, class struggle, and the relationship between property and citizenship rights in a racial capitalist system. It requires radical change by dismantling the familiar down to its functionality in transglobal contexts focusing on Black revolutionary struggles. She claims the delusion of the nation not as a local problem but that it is shared with multiple world communities. Her account of the home carries systems of oppression (and production) that are performed, challenged and transgressed, it is a conflictual space with two potentials; one for renewal and self-recovery, race identity and gender (“race specific yet unracist home” – Morrison 1997) and secondly a contradictory condition that is contractual, enforces personal needs, power and (delusional) desires.
We do not need to integrate into a nation that conditions our mental, financial, spiritual, and physical entrapment. We do not need to be saviours to save the master’s burning house, but we can walk away embracing our imagination to become something else where we are no longer targets for our predators, our oppressors. What kind of sustainable practices can we form for community-led work, resilience, alliance, solidarity, care and transformation?
During the workshop session, participants integrate this proposition through their own personal contexts through learning somatic body release tools, unlearning and deconstructing modes of patriarchal epistemologies, community sustainability, building emancipation narratives, receiving support and guidance in curating their own rituals.
Using methods developed through theatre of the oppressed, the workshop coaches participants in resilience and safety methods and finding strategies in exiting oppressive systems, that we call the burning house. Both artists Anguezomo Nzé Mba Bikoro and Wirya Budaghi share collective ritual offerings through their practices of abolitionistrestitutions through ephemeral and emotional archives in botanical sound frequencies and somatic body work to respond to (de)colonial archival narratives, hospitality and rematriations.
Free Registration
To register, please send an email to im-exil@goethe.de.
The workshop is open to participants who seek to transform their practice, develop alternative rituals and to those affected by institutional gender violence. Participants are welcome to bring paper for noting references and thoughts, bring a (personal) object to share within the group and as a tool for the collective exercise. An archive of the group’s experiences and development can be archived through the visual
exercises into a collective zine publication.
Deadline for registration: July 15, 2025
Maximum number of participants: 20
Spots will be allocated on a first come, first served basis.
If you register but are later unable to attend, please let us know as soon as possible so we can offer your spot to someone else.
Please note: Photos may be taken during the event for documentation purposes. If you do not wish to appear in any images, please let the organizers know in advance. Every session will request participants for their consent for each activity and archival material.