Green Pastures, Still Waters, and Black Rhythms: Rituals as Rest and Resistance

Curated by Kerry-Ann James

I’m exhausted. Completely burnt out. With my soul starved and my body wilted, I smile. Everyone applauds as I spread myself thin. But a single caring and worried voice utters, “...be sure to take some rest.” My mind replies, “I don’t know how to do that.” My body cries, “If we sit still, I’ll remember for you.”

“Green Pastures, Still Waters, and Black Rhythms” explores the tender knowledge of nature, spirit, and the Black body, despite neo-liberalism’s demands to exploit it. This is a journey of discovering the resistance in rest, the healing in realignment, and the care in communion through honouring ancestral memories, frolicking in fields, dreaming, floating in bodies of water, and writing love letters to past, present, and future selves. Bringing together Black/indigenous filmmakers and performers, this program depicts a dimension in which the systems forcing our entire species into extreme exhaustion and detachment from our bodies and minds are disrupted. Tricia Hersey, an American poet, performance artist, activist, and founder of the Nap Ministry—an organization that advocates for rest as a form of resistance—inspires this meditation on Black rest. Hersey often repeats that we are not machines; we are divine human beings with a right to rest.

The history of Black liberation tells us that the dispossession of land, attacks on spirit, and the exploitation of bodies are fundamental to the speed and efficacy of capitalism and neoliberalism. Our ancestors were denied stillness. So, we must resist, slow down, and return to the Black rhythms of dance, compassionate relationships with the land, and tending to our minds, bodies, and spirits.

The artists featured in “Green Pastures, Still Waters, and Black Rhythms” share an interest in landscape, spirituality, and multidimensional temporalities. Emerging from the works is a peculiar form of resistance, connection, and joy. This selection is an affirmation, a passageway, and a prayer to reconnect with slowness. This intentional rest is not a means to re-emerge into a cycle of productivity and exhaustion but an enactment of political warfare and collective healing.

Be still, and remember: you are free to rest.

— Kerry-Ann James