How can communities build power and create solutions for themselves in the face of crisis and change?
Continuing the journey from the MozFest 2022 Parable Path , The Parables Experience presents discussions, workshops, and self guided content connecting lessons from Octiba E Butler’s Parables series to central issues raised at MozFest 2023: Collective Power, Movement Building, Trustworthy AI, Transparency, and Bias..
This experience featured the work of a diverse range of artists, activists and community organizers who shared the unique intersections of their practices with the themes of Butler’s Parables. Explore the Parables Pavillion in Mozilla Hubs, and discover conversations to workshops something something about the artists.
From Detroit to Egypt: Connecting Movements for Climate Justice and Prison Abolition
An exchange between Detroit mother and activist Siwatu-Salama Ra and Egyptian activist and filmmaker Sanaa Seif about the links between Octavia E. Butler’s Parables, technology, climate justice, and movements to end criminalization, militarism and colonialism: from Egypt to Detroit and beyond. Moderated by creative technologist and immersive director Yasmin Elayat. Presented in partnership with Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ).
Water Is Life
Witness an exchange about themes of Climate Justice and Water within Octavia E. Butler’s Parables series and connections to the work of brilliant cultural strategists, artists, scientists and technologists. Tré Vasquez of Movement Generation facilitates a conversation with Talk To Me About Water Collective members Nour Batyne, Martha Bearskin, Devin Ronneburg, Eamon O'Connor and Amelia Winger-Bearskin.
A group of artists, science storytellers, water scientists, artificial intelligence researchers, data scientists, and more, Talk To Me About Water’s website states: “It is said that “The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.” It’s the same way with the water crisis— it will be a crisis for all of us one day, but currently, those shouldering the most of this burden are the global Indigenous, the water protectors seeking to stop the extraction and pollution of their ecosystems. It feels far away now, but their water is our water or will be soon. If we don’t listen to them it’s like we’re ignoring a message from the future. Part of ‘Talk to me About Water’ is also bridging that gap for those who are experiencing the water crisis more acutely to hear from them, unfiltered.”
Moving through the Apocalypse: Considering the Future through the Caribbean's Past
In her Parable Series, Octavia E. Butler sheds light on what kind of future awaits us when the issues at the roots of systemic oppression, criminalization, exploitation and climate change are ignored. At the same time, she plants the seeds that can bring us towards change, if we pay close attention- the power of community-led solutions and strategies in the face of injustice. Join filmmaker, Jason Fitzroy Jeffers and performer and researcher, Valencia James in conversation about the unexpected parallels between Butler’s text and colonial Caribbean history, how the ghastly methodologies and laws born of plantations in Barbados in the 1600s spawned much of the systemic racism that haunts North America and the rest of the western hemisphere to this day, and the artistic movements and community-led strategies of resistance that arose and may yet arise from this.
ill Weaver is a Detroit based artist and organizer. They co-founded Emergence Media and Complex Movements. They are a Trans/gender-nonconforming person of European (Ashkenazi) heritage. They produce and facilitate media and cultural strategies for l…
Valencia James is a performer, maker and researcher from Barbados, interested in the intersection between dance, theater, technology and activism. Her works have explored remote interdisciplinary collaboration, artist-driven open-source software too…