Community Care As Liberation

By Rocky Douglas and Eastlyn Frankel

Through community-centered projects, communal and personal care, and artistic works that reimagine our shared history, the Haus of Glitter is reclaiming and advancing the ways that communities of color and traditionally marginalized peoples find liberation. 


Photo by Rey Londres

The homestead of a colonial enslaver and an iridescent stage of mermaids: a site of trauma and a site of magic. Providence-based collective Haus of Glitter is infusing poetry, dance, magic, and radical imagination onto historic stages of violence. The Haus is a catalyst for grassroots organizing, healing, and activism that seeks to “shift the energetic center of the universe towards Queer, Feminist, BIPOC Liberation.”

Through a two-year Artist Residency with the Providence Parks Department & The Department of Arts, Culture, and Tourism, Haus of Glitter has taken residency in the historic home of American naval officer, Esek Hopkins. In 1764, Hopkins commanded the slave ship Sally through a disastrous trip that led to the death of one hundred and nine enslaved Africans. Despite this bloody voyage, Esek Hopkins continues to be commemorated through Esek Hopkin’s Middle School, Park, and House in a predominately Black and Brown neighborhood in Providence, known as the North End.

During their residency, Haus of Glitter has physically remodeled and spiritually reconstructed Hopkins’ deteriorating house into a home. Similarly, the Haus has launched a campaign in hopes of healing and transforming memorials dedicated to Hopkins. In this way, the collective is an experiment in reimaging colonized settings into spaces of healing and reckoning through communal care. Their historical intervention requires us to think critically about who is allowed to occupy space and to be memorialized for over 250 years. They do not seek to erase Hopkins’ legacy. Rather, the Haus hopes to uplift, and honor the Black women, femmes, and queer folks across space and time who were harmed by colonial violence.


Photo by Rey Londres

The impact of this work is felt in the many projects that Haus of Glitter has generated. During the past two years, they have created an activist dance opera and community garden, hosted virtual and in-person workshops centered around somatic healing, cultural preservation, and community care, created relationships with local elders and schools, hosted “rest-idencies” for other queer and BIPOC artists of color, and found many other ways to accessibly embody ancestral, communal, and personal healing. Their mutual aid work, spaces of community building, and spiritual care offerings have met vital community needs throughout the COVID19 Pandemic.

To further their artistic, spiritual care work in partnership with local and transnational communities, the collective has launched a GoFundMe campaign that is just above its halfway point as of April 8th, 2022. The attached QR code leads to this campaign, which includes more details about their upcoming plans and the work they have been doing in service of community.

We were fortunate enough to sit down with co-directors Matt Garza, Assitan 'Sita' Coulibaly, Steven Choummalaithong, and Anthony “AM” Andrade Jr. for a conversation about the Haus of Glitter, its origins, and plans for the future. A brief excerpt of this conversation is included below.

Photo by Rey Londres

Q&A 

Rocky Douglas: Please tell us about the role of your community in building actions of healing care and contemplation?

Assitan "Sita" Coulibaly: It’s important that we all come from such different cultural backgrounds, and a huge part of each one is the ritual around celebrating our ancestors, honoring our ancestors, as well as honoring our elders, and the wisdom of our elders. We leaned on that as our first offering. We asked for their feedback. Everything we did, we did on our terms. We designed this process to take care of ourselves, to take care of our community, to take care of our neighborhood. And, as A.M. has said, it emerged into this beautiful community of artists and collaborators who also wanted to be a part of the process. We looked around and said, “wow, these are a lot of people who are with us, and who believe in what we also believe in.” We did not start this process with this show being the end goal of it. We just had this idea, and things materialize along the way. It was so beautiful and also felt authentic to ourselves. We never felt like we had to go outside of who we were as individuals. We may have felt the need to expand our knowledge and to grow, but never in a way that felt like we were compromising who we were as individuals or as artists.

Photo by Rey Londres

Uwa Ede-Osifo: On the website, I saw the line "we need to feel ourselves on racism.” What does that mean to you all?

Garza: There's so much intellectualism around anti-racist work. So we tried to think about how to create experiences that, instead, invite deep feeling. Our show was really meant to be a space, where we thought about the different intersections of our audience. That requires movement. At our show, we invite the audience to dance as a way to preserve our histories. This notion of the written word is a white cultural value and not all civilizations pass down history through the written word. We pass them down through visual art, through music, through song, through drumming.

Uwa Ede-Osifo: Can you dismantle a system that has historically oppressed Queer and BIPOC people, or do you have to navigate through the resources that are provided for you? 

Assitan: Radicalism has to be embodied and we have to show up as our most authentic selves. In order to create change, we have to embody and empathize with the experience of others. I'm sure each one of us knows individual people who like to talk the talk but can't walk the walk, and this is walking, feeling, empathizing, creating action, and embodiment. And it's something that has to be done every day and it has to start with yourself, it has to start with your heart and soul.

Photo by Rey Londres

Any final thoughts?

Garza: One of the issues that we see in the world is messy choreography. We need new choreography to move forward in unity. When you see people dancing together, that's an expression of our resilience, an expression of our unity, and an expression of our ability to build systems that move us forward together n. That is something we aren’t seeing enough in the world. When we talk about freedom, we believe that it is an embodied experience. It's not something that just exists up here (in our heads).