Dreaming Liberatory Ancestral Futures

This collaboration between Ani Ganzala & Taya Mâ Shere is the cover feature in the Spring/Summer 2024 volume of the Interdisciplinary Journal for Partnership Studies, fostering cultural transformation from domination to partnership & prioritizing the advancement of human rights and nonviolence, gender and racial equity, and the adoption of new metrics rendering visible the economic value of care.

Ani Ganzala is an Afro-Indigenous visual artist, activist and mother whose work revolves around the love and spirituality of black women and LBTQIAPN and the honoring of nature and the ecosystem in which we live. Taya Mâ Shere is a ritual artist embracing embodied, earth-reverent devotion as liberatory spiritual practice. Ani & Taya Mâ first connected on the sacred shores of Bahia, Brasil almost two decades ago. Their creative work is rooted in ancestral dreaming, earth reverence and spiritual activism.

Ani’s piece Aruanda (above, acrylic) highlights the relationship between the Black Diaspora and botanical technologies for physical and spiritual healing.

Taya Mâ’s piece Solidarity (below, work-in-progress) is a lovesong for liberation, an invocation of interdependence, and a call for collective care across realms, born from making ritual and offering prayersong for a free Palestine.

Ani’s piece No mundo aquático dos peixes e réptais, nós sonhamos / In the aquatic world of fish and reptiles, we dream (below, acrylic) depicts physical and spiritual connection through black and queer love

may this offering nourish those of us dreaming & co-creating liberatory futures

*with thanks to Eli Ingraham for this curatorial invitation & the Interdisciplinary Journal for Partnership Studies for this feature*