When We Get Together to Talk About God . . .

is a project that seeks to find the true meaning of our spirituality in South Florida. As Queer folks, we find our own families. As people of color, we have often had to leave our spiritual knowledge behind or covertly practice our ancestral spiritualities.

What does it look like to connect to our spirituality in Our Spaces and in Our Art?

We will be excavating the spiritual characteristics of Our Spaces in South Florida, including Opa-Locka, Little Haiti, Liberty City, and Miami Beach. There are elements of spirituality everywhere. In Liberty City, one of the most underserved communities is named Oshun Village. What does it mean for us to have these Orishas watching over the well-being of our community?

What is a spiritual space in South Florida, the Caribbean, and throughout the Diaspora?

There needs to be better acknowledgment of the spiritual reality and deities all around us. 

Often, our spirituality finds its way into our art and creations, harking back to the storytelling tapestry work, statues of veneration, and ritualistic beading of our ancestors.  

What does it look like to connect to our spirituality in our art creation?

Whether that be indigo print making, lineage research, growing herbal remedies in the garden, or even embodying the movements of our ancestors in dance and hearing their music through the beating of the drums.

Through archival research, interviews with fellow practitioners, conversations with community spiritual leaders, discussions with local historians, and the gathering of spiritual creations by folks in South Florida, we seek to open channels of communication that allow us to hold and share ancestral wisdom and spiritual understanding, while growing in relationship with ourselves, our ancestors, and our communities. Of course, calling back to our other homes: Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, Antigua, Brazil, Ghana, Nicaragua, Bahamas, Honduras, Benin, Nigeria…

We will encourage this exchange by creating resources for our community, past, along with future and current; the South Florida elders and ancestors to come. With our gained understanding, we will exalt these Orishas with performances tailored to their liking through art, dance, song, and altar building. We hope this project will inspire others to connect to their own ancestral practices, spiritualities, and each other.

“When two or more people come together to talk about God…That’s Church.”

Meet Us

Jasmine Respess is a Floridian who writes about the intersections of their Black, Queer, Southern, and Caribbean identities. At New College of Florida, they spent much of their undergrad career as a journalist, so they utilize research and interviews with family and community members in much of their work. The tradition of magical realism has inspired them, and they explore folktales and lore in their poems and nonfiction pieces. They earned an MFA in Poetry from The New School in New York in 2020. They live in North Miami with their two dogs. Jasmine is an Acquisitions Editor with North Atlantic Books and Editor-in-Chief of The Islandia Journal.

Akia Dorsainvil is a cultural worker, programmer, transdisciplinary artist, and DJ (Pressure Point) based in Miami, Florida. Their work aims to shed light on the beauty, talent, and brilliance of black queer folks. As one of the founders of the black queer collective Masisi, they have been able to provide programming that specifically highlights the beauty of the diaspora throughout time, but with a focus on the Caribbean. With their background being of Haitian and African American ancestry, it fuels their creative process by tracing the lives of those through Masisi is a platform/event-focused organization based in Miami, FL, whose mission is to share the art, life, and lineage of Black queer folks of the Americas and the Caribbean diaspora through many expressions. Their current exploration shows up in the form of radio art.

Fola Akinde is a Miami-based interdisciplinary artist focused on ideas of Black hauntology as it relates to memory, history, and conceptions of liberation. Their Nigerian cultural background has inspired an interest in archives and research related to the Black diaspora, including history and folklore related to Nigeria, the US, and Latin America. Much of their work is focused on the importance of expanding the idea of what an archive is, its accessibility, and how that documentation can play a role in (re)assemblage of imagery and memory. Incorporating archival items like found imagery, objects, writings, and ephemera, Fola has reconfigured their own conceptions of narratives, mythology, and illuminate connections to sites and spiritual practices.