A reading session with Layla Feghali and Asmaa Al-issa (Intima2 group). Together with participants Layla and Asmaa will discuss Layla’s recent book “The Land in Our Bones” followed by Q&A.

Participants are encouraged to read the book and come to the session with selected passages to read together. Access to a digital copy of the book will be sent shortly after registration.

 
LAYLA K. FEGHALI is an ethnobotanist, cultural worker, and author who lives between her ancestral village in Lebanon, and California, where she was born and raised. Feghali’s work is about restoring relationships to earth-based ancestral wisdom as an avenue towards eco-cultural stewardship, collective healing, and liberation. Feghali hosts a line of plantcestral medicine, community education, mutual aid efforts, and other culturally-rooted offerings, with an emphasis on land-based lifeways from the Crossroads (Southwest Asia + North Africa) and its diasporas. Her recent book, The Land in Our Bones, documents cultural herbal and healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai, while interrogating colonialism and its lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world.

Asmaa Al-issa (b. Baghdad, Iraq) cultivates an artistic practice that responds to her lived experiences and interactions with the land, materials, and people around her. Her recent works explore regenerating and reviving ancestral lands and cultures, and focus on the power and potential of imagination within these processes. Asmaa’s projects are sometimes developed alongside workshops and gatherings as a way of nurturing creativity, while building relationships and cross-cultural alliances.