A Homeplace (The Meeting Place)

Kitchen tables, hair salons, dancefloors, and holy sanctuaries have served as sites of exhalation for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) women for centuries, and the conditions of our sociopolitical ecosystems have sustained their survival. While the needs of women have historically been deprioritized, there has been an active attack against the livelihood of BIPOC women in particular. Such spaces, and the convening that occurs within them, have survived because of their perpetual need. These conclaves serve as a hedge of protection, a conduit for remediation, and an opportunity for knowledge exchange, and are each inextricably linked to the persistence of BIPOC women in personal and political realms.

In bell hooks’s 1990 essay HOMEPLACE: a site of resistance, hooks defines the term homeplace as both a physical site and a state of being. Containing a myriad of meanings, homeplace is: “the site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization,” the place of a “radical political dimension,” a space of “regenerating dignity for oneself,” and “home crafted into a community of resistance.”[1] Most importantly, hooks makes clear that homeplace is, and always has been, a space made by Black women, regardless of the aesthetics of its locale. hooks emphasizes that despite sexist intentions to keep women trapped in the conventional role of caring for the home, the distinct differentiation in a homeplace is its allowance for expansion, enabling women to create conduits of care for themselves and those who reside in the nucleus of their ecosystem. She continues on to say “historically, African-American people believed that the construction of a homeplace, however fragile and tenuous, (the slave hut, the wooden shack), had a radical political dimension.”[2] By establishing a homeplace resistance toward political adversity, and the teachings required to become a revolutionary, can be born.

In the Spring of 2024, interdisciplinary artist Helina Metaferia rightfully anticipated the vitality of a new kind of a homeplace–one born within institutional space, coalescing two sites which seem incongruent, but in doing so proves their intertwine to be deeply necessary. As part of the “Session” program, a project room for socially engaged artists at the Brooklyn based organization Recess, Metaferia developed the exhibition The Meeting Place. The exhibition was designed to expand the encounters one would expect to have within a space such as this, while preemptively quelling anxieties for the upcoming presidential election. Metaferia draws on her early conversations in the home about politics and Pan-Africanism with her father, a political science professor, and her mother, an organizer in Ethiopia and in the US. She combines these with her own background as an educator, resulting in a practice that is equally creative and pedagogical. While Metaferia sought to create a safe space, she ultimately created a homeplace––a place of radical political dimension for BIPOC women. While exhibitions typically focus one's attention to an object, Metaferia uses the design, objects, and activations in her exhibition to redirect one’s focus to themselves. An impetus for communion, combined with somatic practices from her Ethiopian heritage, and care practices from feminist political teachings all coalesce to create regenerative encounters in The Meeting Place. In alignment with the expanse of Metaferia’s interdisciplinary practice, The Meeting Place extended far beyond the observation of aesthetics; the exhibition instead “acted as a place for dialogical research” and embodied practice.[3]

The transformative properties of gathering spaces, specifically in spiritual contexts, was a significant point of reference for Metaferia and was imbued within each detail of the exhibition’s design. The room’s glowing hue of orange referenced the underground Church of St. George (Betä Giyorgis), one of eleven churches carved out of an earthy-red colored sedimentary rock in Lalibela in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. Known as the eighth wonder of the world because of its architectural complexity, this site was the last of eleven churches, all built in an effort to recreate the holy city of Jerusalem. To this day it serves as a place of pilgrimage and gathering for members of the Ethiopian Orthodox church.

Back in Brooklyn, visitors who entered the space were greeted by images of Ayọ Tometi, Co-founder of Black Lives Matter, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and creator of the 1619 Project. Flanked on both sides of the entrance, Hannah-Jones and Tometi are rendered in the aesthetic of Metaferia’s best known series, By Way of Revolution. Highlighting overlooked, but crucial, BIPOC women in care politics and activism, the series includes collages of celebratory portraits of women and nonbinary femme activists using archival imagery and regalia motifs.[4] Hannah-Jones and Tometi stand erect with dignity; life-sized and familiar, yet divine. Their crowns, radial and sprawling, are an assemblage of ornamented shapes and images of historical figures from the recent past–seemingly spreading beyond the paper’s edges. Hannah-Jones and Tometi’s saintly depictions reference the drawings of brown skinned angels found inside of the churches of Lalibela. By forefronting both figures, Metaferia designates who this space belongs to and who it is guarded by. The security in their stature mimics the warm greeting of an usher in church and the comfort of an outstretched palm on a dancefloor, proving that a homplace is as mobile and modular as it is necessary. Their presence reinforces homeplace as exhibition space, homeplace as a spiritual place, and therefore, an exhibition space as an opportunity for spiritual encounter.

Situated close by is The Work, a participatory installation designed as a circular table, containing prompts and divots with reflective sentiments from multiple waves of visitors; three large posters calling for change through action; and a feminist reading library featuring foundational texts like Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey, Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and communion by bell hooks. The literary selection connected to four gatherings, known as Meetings, organized over the course of the exhibition. Metaferia facilitated the first Meeting, examining the relationship between performance art and protest movements, leading participants in practices that release stored trauma and foster creative healing. Participants engaged in writing, mindfulness, somatic exercises, and performance techniques inspired by social change movements. In the second Meeting, OlaRonke Akinmowo of The Free Black Women’s Library used Octavia Butler’s 1983 short story Speech Sounds to consider Afro-Futurism, daydreaming, and worldbuilding as paths to liberation. Akinmowo also led participants through the written practice of creating their own short story. In the third Meeting, Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre (YSDT) Artistic Director Samar Haddad King and lead performer Samaa Wakim led a movement-based gathering, grounded in contemporary performance that explored Palestinian culture, history, and resistance. The final Meeting aptly occurred on Juneteenth in partnership with the Wide Awakes. Meditation and calligraphy rituals took place in honor of participants' ancestral connections, followed by a night of community spirit in celebration of the holiday.

The premise of each gathering evokes Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, which describes the necessity of emotional recognition. By acknowledging our deepest feelings, she says, we release any satisfaction of suffering, self negation, and numbness which too often feel like the only emotive expressions in our society.[5] Performance art, daydreaming, movement, and celebration dually reject subjugation and heighten empowerment. In doing so, one becomes “less willing to accept powerlessness or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self denial.”[6] The Meeting Place and the gatherings within it, equip us with a gimlet and a homeplace to etch our existence into being, continually and daily, at the refusal of the conditions of our surroundings. The quality of our livelihood is reliant on our determination to use feminist care practices that treat the sanctity of our aliveness and our joy as something to fervently protect.