Community Café: Rebuild – Saturday, 21 April
Foreclosed homes and abandoned buildings on Chicago’s South Side, war-torn and depopulated countryside in Sudan, and disaster-struck and destroyed ‘hoods of Haiti… No safe spaces for young folk, people fighting all over the world for land, and families looking for a place just to call home…
It’s time to reclaim spaces and rebuild places to transform our communities. It’s time for Community Café: Rebuild.
This Community Café will connect with and highlight all the work that IMAN has been doing to reclaim housing and neighborhoods as part of its community building initiatives over the last few years. The Green Reentry Project is one such project that has garnered local and national attention. It was launched at the beginning of 2010 and seeks to convert vacant/foreclosed and vandalized properties within the Chicago Lawn Community into vibrant, environmentally sound (green) transition housing. It recognizes that such rebuilding and stabilization of our neighborhoods holds the key to the solution of interconnected and pervasive problems such as decent housing, job skills, public safety, and effective reentry programs that have become endemic in inner-city communities.
The artist lineup for Community Café: Rebuild will include The ReMINDers, from the lands of Belgium, Congo, Queens and now Denver. Café veterans and audience favorites, The ReMINDers, are on the verge of releasing their new album and we hope to hear some tracks from that.
Another Café favorite performing that night will be Zeshan Bagewadi. This will be Bagewadi’s first performance with his new band, Zamin, meaning “land” or “earth” in Urdu.
The final performer at the Café that night will be spoken word artist and community builder extraordinaire Mark Gonzales. He has performed in Palestine and prisons, two places where land and space take on new and contentious meanings. Gonzales will also be leading the discussion the day after Community Café, Sunday, 22 April, at a community art and social justice workshop. The workshop will dig deeper into the issue of land, space and community building and transformation.
The dynamic Rasul “Sul Milli” Miller from the land of NYC will be your host for the night, while the sounds of DJ Arkitek will build up the night.
And we’re at a funky venue for this Community Café. The Zhou B Art Center is an old Spiegel warehouse reclaimed and transformed into a South Side Chicago arts center!
Be there, for it’s time to reclaim spaces and rebuild places to transform our communities. It’s time for Community Café: Rebuild.