Zissel Aronow and Yema Rosado organized the multi-faceted community event Rosine 2.0 in Practice, which will take place at Icebox Project Space on March 18, 2023. The day’s event is one leg of the larger project Rosine 2.0, “a socially engaged art project that specifically centers collective practice to engage with topics such as harm reduction, sex work, drug use – liberatory futures,” said Aronow.
Funded by Pew and initiated by Swarthmore College, Rosine 2.0 is co-directed by Katie Price and Jordan Landes, and curated by Carol Stakenas.
The March 18 event consists of an afternoon of workshops on harm reduction, healing and environmental justice, art installations, an immersive storytelling project, free professional photography by the mutual aid organization Homies Helping Homies, local organizations tabling, and physical materials like zines that attendees can pick up before they leave.
Rosado said that the organizers wanted to ensure money went to those who have been on the ground doing the work of mutual aid and harm reduction.
“One thing we keep saying is that Rosine 2.0 did not invent mutual aid, we didn’t we didn’t invent harm reduction. We want to be able to highlight and spotlight the people who’ve been doing that in Philadelphia for decades. There’s an entire lineage in Philadelphia that I feel like often gets overlooked. It really feels like a bolstering of people’s work, specifically BIPOC and queer folk in Philadelphia.”
One of the workshop offerings is Community Care and Herbalism by the Circle Keepers, which will allow attendees to take a deeper dive into community care from a holistic standpoint.
“Our project has been all about connecting with the people, places and plants in Philadelphia that provide healing ways and restoration,” Circle Keepers co-facilitator and music therapist Pamela Draper said in an email. The workshop will also be co-facilitated by 5th-gen African-American and herbalist Folami Irvine and somatic healing practitioner Lillian Dunn.
For Irvine, this kind of work is not work at all, but a calling and a passion.
“Where there’s no justice, there’s no peace,” Irvine said in an email. “You have to be a voice. It’s such a disparity.” She explained that grassroots healers do not have the same opportunities and time for self-care that many medical professionals do.
“When you’re a grassroots healer you don’t have the opportunity to get massages, may never have been out of town, may not have money to get dental care but are giving to all the children up and down the street,” Irvine said. “It’s not the bending tree that falls first — it’s the caretakers that do it all. Our grassroots healers — nobody’s pouring into them, we need to replenish them. That’s what it means to have an ‘unbroken circle’ like we say in Circle Keepers, you have to have the filtration and the pouring in, [you] have to replenish the care where it comes from.”
Draper framed singling out and trusting commonplace healing tools that are at everyone’s disposal as “a little act of resistance in a culture set on leveraging compassion against workers in many different fields. The beauty that emerges when people gather together in this resistance and community care keeps me doing this work. BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and other historically marginalized communities deserve greater access to healing spaces and resources.”
Another workshop and microgrant project is the Reimagining Series: the Fight for a Land Revolution, facilitated by Black youth organizers Essence Gaines and Keyssh Datts of DecolonizePhilly. The workshop entails community conversations and activities around Philadelphia’s environmental justice crisis.
“My workshop is important for BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other historically marginalized communities because Indigenous people, their history, and present-day experiences in all lands, should be further discussed and acknowledged, especially by non-Natives like myself,” Gaines said in an email. “Attending the workshop, doing your own research told by Indigenous Nations themselves, and joining other community-led organizations in conversations, practices and reimagining work, will prove to us not just that colonization (the re-occupying of land, erasure of people and their story) is nothing new as it parallels contemporary or current events, but that we as members of the Philadelphia community can change our city’s future for the better.”
The third workshop of the day will be Philadelphia Principles, helmed by the group behind Mad Ecologies (which grew out of Rosine 2.0), as well as the Kensington organization Project SAFE, which centers sex workers. The Mad Ecologies group collaborated with different groups of people including those who do sex work, people who use drugs, and people experiencing homelessness, to co-draft a set of principles that address the questions “what does radical harm reduction stand for,” “what does radical harm reduction fight to change,” and “what does radical harm reduction envision for the world?”
“[Harm reduction] has been so co-opted by the state and by people who use the words harm reduction but aren’t actually enacting it in practice,” Aronow said. “[The principles] are really meant to be used as a tool to think critically about the work everyone’s doing.”
Homies Helping Homies’ free photography for businesses and individuals is another of the event’s offerings and microgrant projects, as is Generational Feasting, led by Sabriaya Shipley and Rosie Morales, which consists of audio, visual and written stories created from the standpoint of five Black youth artists.
“People will be really immersed in the stories of these young people at a literal, physical table that they’re creating,” Aronow said. “And people will be able to lend their own stories to the table.”
The event also features the What Heals You project created by Aronow and Rosado. The project consists of interviews and film photography of Philadelphia organizers, healers and people who do mutual aid work. The interview subjects will be displayed on a gallery wall, and guests can scan QR codes to listen to their answers to interview questions, where they discuss what heals them, what Philadelphia has taught them and whether they frame their work as an offering.
Other Philly organizers and artists will contribute to this event, including activist Naiymah Sanchez, trans justice coordinator for the ACLU of Pennsylvania; designer, researcher, artist and educator Elaine Lopez; the Nightshade collective; and Dont Rhine, who co-founded the international sound art collective Ultra-red.
Rosine 2.0 in Practice is “kind of a love letter to Philadelphia organizers, specifically Black and Brown organizers,” Rosado said. “We know that in this world what really matters right now is that you have material resources. That looks like money and cash and just to be able to support your work. That felt like an important way to do that with the funds that we have.”
Rosine 2.0 in Practice will take place from 2:00 to 6:00 p.m. at the Icebox Project Space in the Crane Arts Building (1400 N. American St.). An after party will follow in the Icebox space featuring music from organizer and musician Sam Rise and DJ Love, who curated the queer party CUNTY PHL. Guests can also enjoy free food and drink from The People’s Kitchen.