Rosine 2.0 in Practice

March 18, 2023

About the Day

Rosine 2.0 is inspired by Philadelphia history, specifically Quaker activist Mira Sharpless Townsend, who co-founded the Rosine Association in 1847. The original Rosine provided aid and refuge for women facing systemic harm and barriers to care. Today, Rosine 2.0 looks back on that moment in history through preserved archival materials, including the Association’s casebooks.

Germinating from the casebooks, Rosine 2.0 has been a venue for bridging past and present, looking backward and forward at the same time. We create a throughline between radical history and future change, specifically attending to historical and contemporary modes of harm reduction, mutual aid, and collective healing. The project has brought a constellation of people together to co-create over the past two years and today is but a snapshot of our collective work. This installation celebrates the culmination of Rosine 2.0.

We have been dreaming into the future, and we invite you to dream alongside us—to imagine a world of community care and collective action in solidarity with Philadelphia’s drug users, sex workers, and unhoused communities. Together, we will envision and enact a future that listens, a future that cares… a future that holds all of us.

Rosine 2.0 in Practice, curated by Zissel Aronow and Yema Rosado, was imagined as a love letter to Philadelphia, its artists, and its organizers. It features works from Chat & Chew - Sex Work & You (ACLU-PA & Naiymah Sanchez), Circle Keepers (Folami Irvine, Lillian Dunn & Pamela Draper), DecolonizePhilly (Keyssh Datts & Essence Gaines with Sam Rise), Generational Feasting (Sabriaya Shipley & Rosie Morales with Eileen Rosario, Jaheim Faison, London Parker, Malik Staton, Mukhlis Jabbar), Homies Helping Homies (Kevin Bass & Mario Cabral with Peter Dalapaz), MadEcologies.com (including Raani Begum, Lulu Duffy-Tumasz, Nick Angelo, Dont Rhine & Project SAFE), Nightshade Collective: Bound Together (LoPress Press - Elaine Lopez & Nightshade), Olu Okiemute, What Heals You? (Yema Rosado & Zissel Aronow). The afterparty features music from DJ Love and food & drink from The People's Kitchen.

Presented as part of Rosine 2.0: Futures + Histories of Collective Care, on view March 1-April 16, 2023 at McCabe Library, Swarthmore College.

Workshop Schedule

2:15-3:30pm

Community Care & Herbalism

with Circle Keepers – Folami Irvine, Lillian Dunn, Pamela Draper

Join us to welcome and initiate the Circle Keepers Deck: a collaboratively created conversation deck featuring the healing plants, people, and places of Philadelphia. We will share in a Circle Keeping practice together: a simple, yet nourishing, gathering and sharing structure. You will get to not only experience the practice that we used with healers and helpers across the city to create this deck, but will also receive a deck of your own. Along with being invited to engage with your deck, we will create herbal At-Ease kits for walking with herbs that support your well-being.

Circle Keepers is a multi-faceted project that seeks to bring folks together to support each other and learn about resources for healing in Philadelphia. The Circle Keepers card deck, created in 2022-2023, has three categories of cards: People, Places, and Plants. These cards are simple, practical touchstones that can function as conversation starters and catalysts for play as well as future Circles. The deck holds special emphasis and reverence for networks of Black folk healing and Black women in Philadelphia who provide life-giving care to their communities. Into this circle of celebration, the Circle Keepers invite the networks of plant life, cultivated and wild, that cradle our concrete city.

3:30 - 4:45PM

The Reimagining Series: The Fight for a Land Revolution

with DecolonizePhilly – Keyssh Datts & Essence Gaines

Join youth organizers Keyssh and Essence for a facilitated community discussion that focuses on the environmental justice crises in Philadelphia. Together we will find ways to imagine a new and sustainable society. Our goal is to collectively create a list of demands to hold power structures accountable to community members. We will not only take notice when it comes to our dying community and world but ultimately take action in reimagining ways that we can save our planet. We are building a revolution!

DecolonizePhilly is a multigenerational anti gentrification and colonization project started in Philly by community. Focused on putting power back into communities’ hands.

4:45 - 6:00PM

Philadelphia Principles: Radical Harm Reduction And The World We Want

with MadEcologies.com & Project Safe – Dont Rhine, Raani Begum, Lulu Duffy-Tumasz, Nick Angelo

A workshop on radical harm reduction and the world we want. The Philadelphia Principles, published January 1, 2023 by Mad Ecologies, emerged from interviews and listening sessions conducted in 2022 in Philadelphia. Participants in this process were asked to reflect on their relationship to drug use, sex work, and the larger harm reduction landscape. The accompanying zine, Mad Ecologies, is a compilation that contains snippets of this process, fragmented reflections on the state of harm reduction, and tools for those wishing to continue asking “What is a radical practice of harm reduction?”

Our workshop is designed as a continuation of this process, using the Philadelphia Principles as a catalyst for further inquiry. Taking inspiration from the listening sessions the principles were formed out of, participants will explore together both their own relationship to harm reduction and the world they want to build, and if the Philadelphia Principles serve as a useful tool on this journey.