Join Bristol artist and healthcare worker Louie Howie for a dance performance and solstice ritual (live art action) in Victoria Park at 14:40 (fourteen forty) on Sunday 21st December. Start on time at the basketball court by St Luke's Road, BS3 4DP. No need to book. Please send any payment to Bristol Redistro.

Louie will:
- dance with two already dancing trees
- ritualise at the "discovery of america" stone
- shake it off with sound at the gorgeous graffiti rain shelter
- look westward into the sunset, into the future
- include time for chat along the way

We're in the park, so you can move around, tune in and out, compose your own experience. The event will last 30 to 40 minutes. The 100m route includes a hill to the top of the park. It's on or close to tarmac paths. Please dress warmly.

Louie asks,
"What to do? What to do with the unspeakable, the in-plain-sight, the known-and-hidden?

And about the past, should we digest it, or bury it? Is it for the bowels, or compost, or puking up? What will feed the future?

This performance and ritual is one of my responses to the union jacks (half-mast, in mourning, past their prime), and the anti-migrant words and actions from those with public power.

It is for the brutal and fragile repression of naming genocide, and the knowledge of that genocide.

It is for the interconnectedness of repressive structures, which harm everyone in different ways.

It's a Wynter solstice for what I'm getting from the work of Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter. Here's two quotes:

'About the Pope being the Lord of all the universe in the place of God, and that he had given the lands of the Indies to the King of Castille, the Pope must have been drunk when he did it, for he gave what was not his.... The king who asked for and received this gift must have been some madman for he asked to have given to him that which belonged to others.' Cenú Indians' reply to the Spaniards, quoted in Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation - An Argument. Sylvia Wynter, 2003.

'Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos.
Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities... And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.' Sylvia Wynter, 1995. Quoted in Sylvia Wynter, On Being Human as Praxis, 2017.

Instagram @vivienlhowie
Youtube @louiehowie


Image descriptions:
1 A square photo of a messy scribbly drawing/painting with red and blue on a pale background and a small patch of green. The central dark grey horizontal text is "To decolonise our hearts? (a Wynter solstice)". The bright fuzzy green text around the edge in a circle says "all of our senses" in small letters.

2 Louie (50s, white, femme) dressed in red and blue (unthinkingly), squatting in the woods next to a tombstone that reads, "....commemorate the discovery of North America...". She's crunching on a piece of the symbolic body of england.

3 The tops of two large pollarded trees. The sky is blue, it's sunny.

4 A fragment of painted, decayed, jointed metal-work, of unknown use.

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio) — Read more — Read less