Save Your Spaces Festival
Festival Flyer from Year One: 2022
The Theme for 2025: Let’s Rise- Preserving Our Stories
Save Your Spaces Festival– May 16- 18, 2025
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.
Location: Create ATL, 900 Murphy Ave SW, Atlanta, GA 30010
Tickets: Visit Here
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- Festival Day #1: Film Screening- Ticket Here
TIME: Friday, May 16, 2025, 7- 9 PM. Doors open at 6:30 pm.
LOCATION: First Existentialist Congregation, 470 Candler Park Dr. NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30307
“Zavobe Oyen’ike” (The Wise Womb Deserves Honor and Care), directed and produced by Healing Artist and Medicine Woman, Neith Sankofa, and edited by Sonia Matthews, is an affirmative documentary story of the largely unseen work of Black wombed healers within southern social Justice movement building.
The documentary highlights several healers both in Atlanta and throughout the US who are using their gifts to support the healing of the diaspora and the Earth in this pivotal moment. It spans the timeframe of Rayshard Brooks’ murder, the COVID pandemic, and the Stop Cop City movement. The film invites the audience beyond the veil of the public eye into the ceremonies, inner circle supports, costs, lessons, and joys of being a movement healer during these times.
It highlights the ways vastly diverse African-descended medicine folx work alongside each other and other indigenous leaders towards Liberatory practices and care using the ancestral power of the African-descended womb. This is an exciting and heartfelt journey into the stories of some of the most prominent healing figures in the diasporic landscape and provides journeys into their archives and medicine-making practices.
The film also provides a clear and resounding call for descendants of enslavers and colonial settlers to redistribute their wealth and resources into the hands of Black wombed healers who are doing reparative care in ways that provide ceremonial and ritual balance to the energies of enslavement. We are excited to share this culminating offering of the work of so many in service to the healing of the people and the land. Asé.
This work is an embodied example of the work highlighted in the following work:
Robinson-Myers, Karli Sherita, “Sankofa Healing: A Womanist Analysis of the Retrieval and Transformation of African Ritual Dance.” Thesis, Georgia State University, 2015.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/7021647 presents a documentary of her work. More details coming soon!
TIME: Friday, May 16, 2025, 7- 9 PM. Doors open at 6:30 pm.
LOCATION: First Existentialist Congregation, 470 Candler Park Dr. NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30307
May 17- Festival Day #2: Skill-share- Ticket Here
The festival day hosts presenters sharing their skill-set in support of the everyday person to foster their project.
LOCATION: Create ATL, 900 Murphy Avenue SW, Atlanta, GA 30010
Create ATL is a long-time partner- Space Sponsor! We are thankful and truly blessed for this gracious offering. Thankful for the long-time support for a grassroots, community-led and centering project!
COMMUNITY FESTIVAL SCHEDULE
10 AM– Community Preservation Meet-up & Morning Wellness – Yoga with Nedra
11 AM– Workshop- Captura
Workshop Title: We’ll Get There No Matter What”: Collective Visual Storytelling
Workshop Description: “We’ll Get There No Matter What” is a Buford Highway photobook with over 75 photographs compiled by 16 photographers. We’ll go over how to collectively address a community issue by telling one visual story together.
12 PM– Workshop- Lisa Y. Henderson, Black Wide-Awake
Workshop Title: STANDING IN THE GAP FOR THE ANCESTORS: The Why and How of Documenting Local History
Workshop Description: We all can play a role in documenting our communities. This workshop will focus on preserving and sharing local history through digital storytelling. Participants will learn how to create compelling content that highlights family histories, community institutions, and local legends—ensuring that our voices, experiences, and legacies are recovered, honored, and remembered for generations to come.
1 PM– Workshop- Artist TBD
Workshop Title: Art-making Workshop– Printmaking Story-share
2 PM– Kennedie Malone, Community Grant Recipient Presentation (more info coming soon)
3 PM– Anthony Jasso, Community Grant Recipient Presentation (more info coming soon)
4 PM– Honoring Preservation Ancestor, Tanya Debose
Tanya Debose was a preservation icon, leading from the grassroots to the highest levels, initiatives to safe keep, the story of Independence Heights, Texas, a freedperson colony her family helped to settle. Tanya came to Save Your Spaces to share her passion, process, and encourage all of us to do the necessary and required work of holding dear our stories and histories for now and the future.
Save Your Spaces wants to recognize her for all she achieved and for her undefeated spirit. Tanya passed away earlier this year and we want to hold space for her, her family, and her work.
Please bring a photo or object of someone who represents why you are saving and preserving spaces for our community altar.
Food Truck: Adam Js ATL, gluten-free and vegan options!
May 18- Festival Day #3: Community Activation- Ticket Here
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.
West Atlanta Watershed Alliance (WAWA)
11:30 AM – 2:30 PM, Partners WAWA and The Hardnett Family
Workshop Title: Harvesting Histories at Hardnett Garden
Workshop Description: This community-rooted activation celebrates the legacy of Reverend William Franklin Hardnett and the history of the Bush Mountain neighborhood. Through a guided forest walk, oral history recordings, and hands-on garden stewardship, attendees will reflect on their personal and communal ties to the land. The program culminates in a garden-style gathering at the Hardnett Community Garden—honoring legacy, cultivating memory, and planting seeds for the future.
Workshop Location: Hardnett Community Garden, 1401 Bridges Ave SW, Atlanta, GA 30310
Square Room Studio
2:30- 5:30 PM, The Square Room Studio (private home gallery)
Save Your Spaces art show featuring art that contemplates sustainability, human history, and the importance of place.
Artists showing: Julia Skinner, PhD, Lauryn Taylor, Kate Morales, Ezekiel
Square Room Studio address will be given to those who register for Save Your Spaces.
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.
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.
- 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.
