Join us with henna practitioner Heartnouveaux for a gentle, land-rooted session exploring henna as a practice of rest, healing, and collective care. We’ll be discussing what henna means for us, how it’s changed over the last century, and how the nature of henna forces us to change our pace.
Let’s get our hands oranged, offer one another art, and allow henna to truly slow us down…
The henna plant (Lawsonia inermis), is a plant with deep roots across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, traditionally used for adornment, ceremony, and care. Mainly known for its natural cooling qualities, henna offers a moment to slow the body, soften the nervous system, and step away from the pace of extractive, burnout-driven work.
Participants will be invited into a guided, hands-on henna making and application practice, either individually or in pairs while centering slowness, touch (where consented), and creative expression. This will be held alongside space for reflection and discussion, quiet rest, and optional sharing.
Join us, and listen to our kin, henna, as it reminds us that healing does not only happen through conversation or theory, but also through direct relationships with plants, touch, scent, ritual, and the body.
What can henna teach us about time?
This event is for BPOC/Global Majority only.
Tickets are pay what you can with ticket sales going towards covering the cost of the event and LION's Land Pot. If cost is a barrier to you attending, email sumayyah@landinournames for a free ticket.
Heartnouveaux is a multidisciplinary artist employed by the mediums of filmmaking, jewellery design and henna art. Their artwork focuses on the meeting points between culture, religion and clashing aesthetics. With henna, they seek to tell personal stories on skin and push the medium further - from beautification into art. This comes alongside their jewellery making, with which they curate delicate and whimsical pieces in soft colours palettes using only glass, crystals, shell and ceramics. Their films have explored alternative relationships with Islamic prayer, archived Iraqi architectures and questioned art gallery institutions.
Dre Ferdinand is a licensed social worker, artist and therapist, whose practices include movement, energy, sound, soil, and EMDR, a modality that has informed her approach which she refers to as ‘MESSE’. Dre’s practice framework is rooted in healing, social and restorative justice. Her professional journey involves aiding individuals and communities in processing and recovering from systemic harm and trauma as well as advocating for therapeutic support for social workers. Her teachings are centred on helping people navigate their internal landscape, collective care, and processing trauma. You can contact Dre at hello@dreferdinand.com or @idreferdi
Land In Our Names is a grassroots collective of Black and People of Colour getting land through reparations. Our collective is based in London, Britain, and works to reconnect Black and People of Colour to land, both in the city and in the countryside. Our work addresses the inequalities in access to land and food, and reimagines land stewardship towards climate and racial justice. We are organising toward collective ownership and land stewardship by Black and People of Colour, to heal the colonial-rooted trauma that has separated us and continues to extract from the land.
Fallow is a series of community care workshops integrating the healing and repair element of Land In Our Names’ aims and values into our work. We believe that there is a deep need for accessible healing spaces for Black and People of Colour (BPOC) landworkers and earthworkers, and climate, food, farming, land and racial justice organisers. In the context of intensive physical labour, low wages and the emotional toll of organising for racial and land justice, Fallow creates spaces to nurture restorative practices on and with the land.
This work is central to LION’s mission of reparations. Beyond financial restitution, we understand reparations as repair (Chinweizu), where restoring our relationship to land emerges as an important way to repair the intergenerational trauma of colonialism, enslavement and dispossession of land. As BPOC living in London, these histories are part of what brought many of us here, where our separation from land continues. With Fallow, we want to create opportunities in and around the city to reconnect us with the land, food and ancestral practices that nourish us.