Tuesday, June 1 from 1:00–3:00 PM 
Thursday, June 3 from 1:00–3:00 PM 

We are invited to bring our voices into future making at the opening of the Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry, led by Kimi Hanauer. An installation filled with brightly colored manifestos, banners, newspapers and videos, inspiring us to imagine and work towards “a place where we can share in a breath and lean into all the ways we might transform one another.”

The Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry gathers a community of learners around liberatory practices: ways of being, sensing, thinking, and making that enact liberatory politics in everyday life. Through a commitment to mutual aid, political education, collective and creative processes, the Center aims to nourish a network of shared stories, learnings, strategies, rituals, and dreams as the building blocks for future autonomous and liberated worlds. The Center’s inaugural initiative, the Living Resource Library, gathers resources, conversations, and facilitates workshops around the theme: While liberation as a practice and a politic has risen out of contemporary and historic systems of domination, it is not necessarily bound up with their existence. How can we define liberation, as a state of being emancipated, on our own terms?

[Image Description: A bubble chart in rainbow pastel colors, fills most of the image area. Yellow, green, purple, pink, orange, blue lines connect the bubbles with pastel blue and orange behind it. The words: "liberation defined our own terms" surrounds the bubble chart. Behind the bubble chart and text sits a spread of journal paper and an ombre of purple to pink behind that.]

This event is a part of We use our hands to support, a group show and multi-layered project visioned and gathered by Artist/Educator/Curator Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, a member of Southern Exposure’s Curatorial Council. We use our hands to support is inspired by the strategies for collective practice that each of these artists hold in their practices. The exhibition presents newly commissioned installations by Amanda Curreri, Sam Vernon, Kimi Hanauer and Fronteristxs Collective, and is accompanied by a stack of risograph printed postcards designed by Ginger Brooks Takahashi. The stack will be sent out via United States Postal Service throughout the course of the show. Combined, these layers of engagement will be a tool for ongoing learning and interaction with the work. The gallery will be open by appointment from May 29–July 3, 2021.

Kimi Hanauer is a cultural and media-based organizer, writer, and a founding collective member of Press Press, currently based on the unceded land of the Gabrielino / Tongva peoples, also known as Los Angeles. Kimi is currently in the process of initiating the Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry, a virtual and nomadic education center that nourishes a network of shared learnings, dreams, strategies, and rituals as the building blocks for autonomous and liberated communities.