Save Your Spaces Festival
Festival Flyer from Year One: 2022
Save Your Spaces Festival– May 16- 18, 2025
The Origins of Save Your Spaces
In 2022, Save Your Spaces, a community-located preservation festival launched with the idea to empower community members to engage in efforts to identify, create, and implement projects centered on and within a community. With broad goals, these projects could be advocacy-oriented to save historical legacies, organized to tell fuller, richer, and more diverse historical narratives, and center those with lived experiences including individuals who are most proximate to sites, history, events, and memory. Engaging community members who are rooted in these geographies are our best resources for inaccuracy, multi-perspective, and complicated retellings.
The Theme for 2025: Let’s Rise- Preserving Our Stories
We hosted a second dynamic festival in 2023. Once again people who attended were able to take time to engage one another and have grounding and supportive discussions. For 2025, we want to host a Save Your Spaces festival to assist community members in achieving their goals by facing the harsh social and political moments with a renewed sense of what is possible. We are the preservers of our communities. We are the collective fire of memory and together we will fortify our skills by coming together– Let’s Rise!
New for 2025
For festival 2025 Save Your Space added a little spice to the festival.
- Foodways are a centerpiece of culture and one of the first ways we learn about the world. Save Your Spaces will begin with gathering the community to eat and play on the land.
- Select partners will host an activity at their location. Save Your Spaces wants to continue to institute a network across the city. A network of like-mindedness will further an intention of sharing knowledge and resources. And supporters for the sharing of history and locally voiced narratives that foster a sense of identity and connection.
- Young people are on the main stage as presenters for all three slots! Their blend of creativity, innovative techniques, and curiosity will inspire people of all ages to embrace human experiences.
- An art show that contemplates sustainability, human history, and the importance of place. The gallery will be held in a home space.
- The festival will initiate four months of events, from June to September, including discussions, workshops, activations, gathering meals, and art making and viewing.
Save Your Spaces is a volunteer-led organization.
Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.
~ bell hooks
May 16- Community Gathering, 6- 8 pm
John Lewis Freedom Park – come bring blankets, food, and games. We will parlay in the field for playful delights. We are launching a series of gatherings focused on a community of practice centering community-led preservation. All are welcome.
Location: Enter from Memorial Drive, the meadow behind the hills, inside the path loop.
May 17- Festival Day
The festival day hosts presenters sharing their skill-set in support of the everyday person to foster their project.
Schedule:
9 am Morning Wellness – Yoga
10 am Community Preservation Meet-up
11 am Workshop
12 pm Presenter
1 pm Workshop
2 pm Presenter
3 pm Presenter
4 pm Film Q/ A
Location: Create ATL, 900 Murphy Ave SW, Atlanta, GA30010
Interested in being a presenter, leading a workshop, hosting a table, or joining in another way? sign up here!
To submit a film:
May 18- Community Activation
Community partners will host preservation events at their locations. These are either projects preserving places, spaces, and narratives or using skills like documentation, oral history, and the arts. Other partner sites will feature resources useful in preservation practices such as archives, libraries, and a gallery.
We are scheduling activations 12- 5 pm.
Partners include:
West Atlanta Watershed Alliance (WAWA)
The Square Room Studio (private gallery)
To host an activation: Share your idea with us.
Art Submission
Art Submissions are being accepted for Save Your Spaces Gallery!
Our festival theme is: Rise Up! Preserving the Future
Save Your Spaces is a skillshare to equip, inspire, and activate the everyday person to preserve culture, history, and narratives- grounding in a place, embodied experiences and practices, and extending care towards our kinfolk.
We will accept up to 10-15 pieces. Any medium. The exhibit will at least partially be installed outdoors. If electricity is needed, design a sustainable option.
Submission due: May 14th. An art show will be on Sunday, May 18th during the community activations! Location: TBD
