HOW WE HOLD: REHEARSALS FOR ART AND SOCIAL CHANGE
In an exercise from Serpentine Galleries’ collective resource, How We Hold: Rehearsals for Art and Social Change, we are asked what it takes to stay with our bodies, with one another, and with the work when commitment must be practiced over time.
How We Hold: Rehearsals for Art and Social Change 2023, photograph: Matthew Ritson via Serpentine Galleries.
How We Hold: Rehearsals for Art and Social Change is a collective resource shaped through years of work by artists, educators, organisers, and communities engaged in the fight for justice and liberation. At its core, it asks how we sustain ourselves and one another, and considers how care, creativity, and collective practice make it possible to remain intentionally involved in acts of resistance.
In this volume, we turn to How We Hold as a way of thinking about love beyond abstraction. Instead, love is considered something tangibly felt, practiced, and negotiated. We draw on a holding exercise from the book that asks a deceptively simple question: Where does this live in my body?
The practice invites a pause to notice how emotions like love, grief, or solidarity register physically, and how our bodies respond when we are asked to sit with them. This collective exercise offers a way back into awareness and serves as a gentle cue that holding is embodied and that care for the self is also a form of love.
Click on the EXERCISE to enlarge.
For more RECS like this one, check out the rest of vol. 003:
