high vibes
EMPIRE FALLS
V Woods (ve/ver)
nomadic healing artist shifting relational fields at ancestral sites across the diaspora.
Painter. Scholar-practitioner. Clinician. Writer.
Over 600,000 Black women lost their jobs in a single season. We go missing and the world looks away. We are the most educated and the most violated. We have outrun every obstacle, outlasted every attempt to erase us, and kept the culture alive with our bare hands.
We are still here. And we are finally claiming joy as our revolutionary birthright.
THE COUNCIL
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“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change."
How do you see yourself as a steward of planetary transformation?
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“This is how I learned that if I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive."
When will you grow tired of living in the confines of other people’s imagination?
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"You are your best thing."
Who told you you were not worthy of pretty flowers? -
"Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape."
When did you last sit with yourself long enough to remember you are good company?
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"Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets."
Why do you not see that you are easy to love, baby?
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"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them."
When have you decided to be an enemy of the culture that enslaves you?
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"History isn't something you look back at and say it was inevitable. It happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities."
Where are you, in the boldness of your beautiful becoming, making good history?
THE GAY ARCHIVE
Many of us are building a new internal and external reality with no earthly guides and not enough capable elders. This is one of the greatest thefts of colonialism and capitalism: the loss of longevity of life, and the myth that we are without wisdom, without tradition, without ritual because our elders have been stolen too soon. But the gag is, we are and have always been deeply, cosmically, ancestrally connected.
V’s gay archive holds art, zines, books, playlists: digital and neurological tools as a channel for moving shit through, up, and out.
Welcome to the gay archive.
COMMUNITY
One of the tools of white supremacy culture is weaponized legibility: the demand that we compress ourselves into categories that only serve racialized capitalism. Every time we reclaim ourselves in the grey, in the muddy, in the vast expansiveness of who we actualy are, we resist. A binary hate to see us coming.
This new world is being built for:
Black people and descendants of the African diaspora
Black women & femmes
Queer Black folks
Black lesbians & gay women
Black trans & gender-expansive folks
Black nonbinary folks
Bisexual & pansexual Black folks
Black bois & studs
Black men (gay & queer)
Kink-forward & kink-affirming Black folks
Black folks in ethical non-monogamy & non-traditional relationship structures
Black families and children
Black girls, trans & nonbinary teens
Black boys, bois & masculine-presenting teens
Neurodivergent Black folks
Disabled Black folks & those living with chronic illness
Black folks in recovery
Black folks living unhoused
Black folks in religious recovery & spiritual deconstruction
Black singles, couples, partners & chosen families
Black parents & caregivers
Women of color: Black, Native, Asian & Pacific Islander, MENA & Latina women
Global majority (non-Black people of color)
Co-conspirators(all races, seriously vetted by community)