common /play\ grounds is a reciprocal project hosted by yasamin ghalehnoie and sass popoli. This project sides with our programme strand Mujaawarah (neighbouring)* dedicated to convivial learning, social action, and communal understanding.
The year-long project will end with lip service, a performance and launch of publications celebrating common/play\grounds. lip service is a performance of three playmates (yasamin, sass, hannah) organising, preparing, and attending to a playground of their common desire, bearing the weight of the everyday psychosocial anxieties and disabilities towards taking part. The performance plays out five new publications printed throughout this project, along with an improvised soft score.
/inward. outward. collective play time. words burst into an inaudible murmur of out of tune yells; coordinated repetitions spill beyond their borders. An invite takes place. Going up the slides, through to the assembly point; holding hand up face down closed eyes. “ohhh my playmates! don’t be shy to take part. the world has come to an end and we still,”\
The performance also launches five publications of poetic visuals and words in collaboration with Hannah Clarkson, Angela YT Chan, and Ashkan Sepahvand in response to the workshops organised by the artists at The Mosaic Rooms as part of the project common /play\ grounds The publications /Hold keeping with my insomnia, Pleasures of the Mouth, What are Autoimmune Autographies, Failed Weathered Radios, How to Play out Rejection\ will be available to purchase at the event at and in collaboration with Peer Gallery.
*Mujaawarah (neighbouring) is a concept practiced and developed as radical pedagogy by Palestinian learning theorist Munir Fasheh. At its heart lies the nurturing of rootedness and community, in opposition to hierarchies, and its core value is shared wisdom and wellbeing.
common /play\ grounds (a letter from the artists)
Conceived by yasamin and sass, common /play\ grounds host soft bonds and firm desires to rehearse be(longing), daydream in our nervous tongues, and tongueless languages, and rest in clockless commons: |homes| |lands| |times| |futures| |economies| |{}|
As echoed in their letter of the night, to disengage genocidal futurity, abused histories, and catastrophic times, we want will do should need desire care to love and befriend; make kinships, care networks, solidarity economies, and trust circles.
We hope to translate displacement and distress embodied in our cross-disabled and unruly bodies; and transnational memories to cosmic portals we wander through collective writing, improvisation, walking, performing, and publishing. 🪨🍄
If our societies and material conditions have made you displaced, disabled, distressed, sick, and alienated, and if you are a fugitive, immigrant, qtbipoc diaspora, differently abled, neurologically divergent, in need of play and rest, curious to make subversive friends and fabulations, we invite you to assemble and make time with us in sittings to come; for our collective memory and our will to remember, to imagine our futures past gone, and to think with what has been deemed wasted, failed, unproductive, dispensable and ornamental, for all the timelines we have lost.
Let us roam to places that do not yet appear to us, and in departing with trust, think about the questions around time, spaces and commitments, and the upkeep of cooperatives. For this is a practice of imagination and imagination is a practice of undoings and doings.
yasamin is a restless daydreamer. They are possessed by the unruly ghosts of wasted lands, times, and bodies. sass comes from the moons of uranus where Persian cats scratch and defecate. They facilitate, write, draw, print, and walk in common /play\ grounds, seeking to play, rest, and reset with friends: Maymana Arefin, Ashkan Sepahvand, Hannah Clarkson, Angela Yt Chan and Mandy Merzaban.
Unfolding over five workshops, yasamin and sass invite you to realise playgrounds, dream subversive modes of being, imagine otherwise, and to rest and moaasherat (coming together).
The project offers opportunities to publish collectively, perform, and share work in the playgrounds of our imaginary worlds; through zines, letters, maps, and poems.
How to participate
If you are interested in joining our community and participating in five workshops in London locations and at The Mosaic Rooms, please email us at contact@archive.mosaicrooms.org with your response to the questions below (in any format and language you feel rested in):
What is play to you? How do you want to play on these grounds? Or, share with us why you’d like to join us.
The project is generously supported by Arts Council England.
Image: Artwork by yasamin & sass. Courtesy of the artists.
