What if we listen to and view Nina Simone’s “I Put A Spell On You” through a different lens, as a reorientation back to ourselves? How can all the beautiful spells spoken during the Read My World festival suddenly turn into something we’re told not to engage with?

How do we keep reinventing what it means to enchant when hope requires skills that are often criminalized? And what if all the spells, all this enchanting, all the words and all the worlds leave you with the urge to just… sit? Is that okay? To take one moment to – amidst everything that must be done and mourned and broken and burned and cared for – sit still? For a moment? And if so… what might liberated and liberating interpretations be of ways to, as Nina Simone sings, ‘love you anyhow’?

Spells need time to settle, to find their silence amidst an abundance of emotions. This program centers around three lectures based on memes and gifs about silence, calm, and creating space for goodness.