Room to Bloom Manifesto for Feminist Decolonial Arts and Culture
We are the artists of the future. We are storytellers and healers. We are caregivers and children. We believe kindness is an act of revolution. We create kinship through care. We are acknowledged and compensated for our labor. We work out of joy and decide our own wages. We honour, value, and respect amateurs and professionals. We distribute funding with transparency and consensus. We nap at least once a day. We free ourselves from the pressure of production. We work in studios that are playgrounds. We create nurturing, healing spaces for rest and movement. We grow our own food. We make art accessible to everyone through education. We abolish entrance fees and capital accumulation and profits. We are brave enough to deconstruct and interrogate our own intentions. We dismantle dominant power structures. We inspire consciousness and legislation. We bring forth abundance. We listen to the animals and give voice to the trees. We are mountains, plants, and earth. We paint with the colors of the earth. We cry together with the rain. We make art from the moment of birth. We make art to communicate across species. We tell stories about the past. We dance and hold hands and close our eyes together. We swim with the fish deep in the ocean. We communicate through mycelial networks. We merge with the rest of creation. We experience pleasure and pain in a kaleidoscope of emotion. We are everything and nothing. We time travel. We call upon the Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. We call upon the previously oppressed – people who are Black, Brown, Indigenous, women, queer, and disabled. We reclaim and rewrite our own history, identity, heritage, spirituality, cosmology, territory, culture and our body! We reinvent ourselves. We are reborn. We dream of the future and we wake up within it.
– A manifesto for feminist decolonial art by the Room To Bloom network
Edited by Lena Chen
