Join us to collectively reimagine spaces of trauma in NYC into healing spaces for the Black Community*

Creative Urban Alchemy is a Brooklyn-based urban design & planning practice centering on equity and justice. We are partnering with Black Exhale to facilitate a trauma-informed, community-engaged design workshop on October 20 at Pratt Institute that holds space for Black people to collectively reimagine spaces of trauma in NYC into healing spaces. As a tool for co-design, we will use Midjourney — a generative artificial intelligence program that generates images from natural language descriptions. This will provide a vehicle for non-designers to reimagine spaces in real-time during the workshop. We are using this workshop to develop imaginary ideas for the Flatbush African Burial Ground in central Brooklyn. This art & design project strives to visualize new spatial narratives that transform spaces of trauma into spaces of healing and liberation. We are asking workshop participants to please bring an item or image (of color, texture, symbol, or pattern) to this workshop that represents healing or joy to you.

*This workshop will prioritize the African Descendant Community who identify as Black.

“Liberation is a spatial practice.” Mario Gooden — Dark Space

Spatial design is interwoven with the subjugation of the Black body. From the belly of the slave ship — we fast forward to life in overcrowded housing, confined in carceral spaces and/or experiencing police brutality on the public street — there is and has always been, a profound connection between trauma of the Black body and space. The structures that were created for the individual Black body and the collective Black body communicate an imbalanced power dynamic. During the height of the pandemic, the world experienced a collective trauma of being confined indoors in fear that has yet to be processed and healed. We socially distanced on our front stoops, parking lots, and public streets to feel connected and whole. What if those spaces were designed for our collective healing? What if public spaces were designed to repair our emotional wounds and restore our health? This workshop will weave trauma-informed design, artificial intelligence, and design justice into a collective experience of vision building.

This work is funded and supported by the Black Artists & Designers Guild, The Architectural League, the Black Utopia Project, and the Pratt Institute School of Architecture.

This work is supported by the Architecture + Design Independent Projects program, a grant partnership of the New York State Council on the Arts and The Architectural League of New York.

Independent Project grants are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State legislature.

Ifeoma Ebo is a trained Architect, Artist, Designer, and Urbanist with a proven track record in transforming urban spaces into platforms for equity and design excellence. As an award-winning artist, she is a recipient of grant awards from the MIT and Cornell University Council for the Arts and has exhibited her work at the Cornell University Willard Straight Gallery, MIT Rotch Library Gallery, and the Oakland Museum exhibition on Afro-futurism. She has also exhibited her work as a part of the Architectural League Shifting Ground visual archive capturing the relationship between society and the built environment during the pandemic. As the Founding Director of Creative Urban Alchemy, she works across scales and consults on equitable design and regenerative placemaking internationally. Ifeoma is a 2021 recipient of the Columbia University inaugural Anti Racism curriculum development award and is a 2022 Pratt Institute Innovation in Community Design Fellow. Ifeoma holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University and a Master’s in City Design and Development from MIT.

Antoinette Cooper is a writer, TEDx speaker, trauma-informed participatory designer, and founder of the nonprofit Black Exhale, a space for the liberated Black body. She’s committed to healing collective trauma through the arts, ancestral healing, and medical humanities. She’s taught at Columbia, CUNY School of Medicine; and has led writing workshops from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Poetry Foundation, to Rikers Island Correctional Facility. She holds a B.A. from Cornell, an MFA from Columbia, and sits on the board of Narrative Medicine at CUNY School of Medicine. She’s trained with Thomas Hübl, author of Healing Collective Trauma, and the Trauma-Sensitive Certification with HeartMath Institute.

Time: 6:00-8:00 pm EDT

Free!

Registration