“The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”
—James Baldwin
Dear Reader,
How do you define place? What gives the spaces around us meaning? Is it memory, imbued within us, both ancestral and collective?
Over the past year, Deem’s editorial team has considered the conditions in which the spatial becomes personal. Working alongside our contributors, we have sought to reclaim place and “placemaking” from the design, marketing, and planning lenses, and to work against the power of language to commodify and theorize what is deeply felt. Belonging is ritualistic, highly relational, and intimate, and happens over time. Place is so fundamental to human culture and society that the practice and philosophy of making it is as ancient and varied as history.
It is through this journey of discovery, traversing through places both real and imagined, that we bring to you Issue Four, “A Sense of Place,” which is now available for pre-order at DeemJournal.com.
And as we reflect further about belonging and liberation in this newsletter, who better to catch up with than Activation Residency, whose mission “aims to soothe ecological despair through local organic farm to table produce, integrated hand-crafted cabins, and wood-fired hot tubs, and sauna soaks. We are tired of hunching over laptops in apartments. We want to be in the forest with you.”
Catching up with Activation Residency:
Activation Residency invited writer Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa to discover and share secrets of the residency’s whimsy. Shirley spent two days at Work in Wellness, an Activation Residency x shocks of love program about input over output. Shirley articulates the freedom dreaming journey this residency founder, Kamra Sadia Hakim, is on, and his plans for living it more regularly.
Who gets to see the stars at night? I considered questions like this at Activation Residency, a space for QTBIPOC art-types to engage in some of the most audacious behavior to which any of us had ever been entitled. We did a lot lying around in the sun, forest floor decorated by a wondrous carpet, furnishing our living room en plein air; soaked in the hot tub—a large wooden barrel filled with water heated by wood fire; crunched fall foliage under our feet walking from tiny house to bungalow for tea visits or an evening massage.
We canceled all time but our own, which for nearly a week was free from capitalistic drumming to produce—here, no suggestion of participating in our oppression. We played—remnants of childhoods crept in. Wood chips strewn about brought us back to soft landings of youth, fights for joy so far away—though, at Activation Residency, joy was constantly in the air, in our lungs, in our laughter, and in our food. We pondered, how do we live this more regularly? Activation Residency founder, Kamra Sadia Hakim, knows how.
Hakim recently purchased eight acres of land, envisioning a forest farm able to host and soak. We made the half-hour drive to Hakim’s plot and cried tears of joy as we relished in the dream with him. Activation Residency and shocks of love built this residency experience for PaviElle French, a Minnesota-based musician centering healing. There, in the forest of Hakim’s land, we all stood, wooded and mossy ground giving slightly underfoot, listening to PaviElle belt an ancestral West African hymn of blessing to Hakim. Her voice swirled around us, into our slice of sky, vibrating rustling leaves of trees. Then came rain, watering seeds of vision and love inside of all of us.
Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa is a writer, actor, and creator. She is a child of Nigerian immigrants and is based in Brooklyn, NY. She writes about art, race, gender, and politics and has bylines in the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, the Nation, Artforum, and other places. Follow her on Instagram @theartfulshirley or on Twitter @artfulshirley.
A question to close:
We invited Kamra to leave us with a question to close this month. His response:
How do you get closer to living your freedom dream more regularly?
We look forward to seeing Issue Four, “A Sense of Place,” reach you.
Until next time,
The Team at Deem
Beautiful to read about the Activation Residency. We need more spaces of ease where time can be forgotten and we can simply be. Working on creating this kind of space out here in WA. Thank you for this feature 💚