What We’re Thinking About: the Power to Rest
In this month’s What We’re Thinking About, we explore the political role of rest and the ways its intrinsically linked to power.
Euella at the Power Shift Immersion Day in Manchester, as part of our work with the Transformational Governance Stewarding Group in October 2023
This month we’ve been thinking a lot about Power. You may have seen that we’re running an event this month, called This Is The Work: Power in Partnerships, exploring the ways power manifests in the cultural and creative sector.
Power comes up alot in our work. As a radical youth-led agency, we exist to scrutinise the unequal distribution of power in the cultural sector. We do this through our campaigns, programmes, consultancy, creative commissions and training. We also do this through the spaces we hold, the community we represent and the care we give each other
We’ve found through our work and through our research that when it comes to redistributing power, it isn’t just having ‘power over’ others that’s important, it’s also having agency and ‘power to’ that counts - the power to say no, power to say yes and power to advocate for what you and your community need and want. But regardless of the amount of agency you may have, something that our peers and community still struggle to advocate for is the power to rest.
Rest is political and interrogating who gets to rest and when is intrinsic to redistributing power in the sector and society at large.
Earlier this month, I co-facilitated the Power Shift Immersion Day in Manchester alongside Siana Bangura and Jamie Prett as part of Rising’s work in the Transformational Governance Stewarding Group. Power Shift is a year-long facilitated learning journey with a cohort of organisations and collectives across the UK who are grappling with a live governance challenge and actively transitioning from traditional to more transformational models of governance. Being able to be with comrades who are thinking about how to redistribute power within their organisations’ governance was nourishing and needed. And as part of the day, I volunteered to run a session called ‘Rest Is Resistance’ - inspired by the work of Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry.
While most of us understand just how valuable rest is for movement building. How rest sits in direct opposition to capitalism and the commodification of our labour is still something that feels simultanously fundamental to and at odds with our activism. In the session, I wanted to hold space for us to think about why that is and why feeling empowered to rest is integral to creating the change we’re desperate to see.
‘Rest Is A Political Act’ poster from Rising’s 2021 Whose Future billboard campaign.
As long as we’re in a capitalist, ableist, white supremacistand imperialist system, rest will always be ‘a practice’. Something that we’re actively working towards, rehearsing and trying to get better at. When you’ve been conditioned for so long that wanting to rest is wrong or that you can “rest when you’re dead”, no wonder it’s a struggle (literally) - even for those who are committed to transforming governance and redistributing power. It begs the question, what bodies do we grant guilt-free rest to, if at all? Who do we penalise for resting? What labour do we deem worthy of rest? What is it about rest that is so threatening to the oppressive and harmful systems that silently govern much of our sector?
Rest is political and interrogating who gets to rest and when is intrinsic to redistributing power in the sector and society at large. We know that marginalised and oppressed peoples are often denied the right to rest - whether it be due to (ideological or literal) attacks on our communities, preserving energy to care for yourself and others, trying to counter harmful stereotypes such as being lazy or criminal, having to justify that their lives matter or having to working in hostile environments that mean we can’t switch off or dream-up the liberatory futures or utopias we’re trying to create.
In the session we explored our barriers to rest, and I shared some prompts to help us interrogate our personal relationships to rest, you may find this helpful too:
How was rest modelled in your childhood?
What feelings come up for you when you rest?
What spaces do you need in order to rest?
What do you need from others in order to rest?
What do you need from your organisation’s policies, procedures and systems in order to rest?
What does permission to rest look like to you?
What forms of rest come easy to you? Which ones feel more difficult?
How has your relationship to rest changed throughout your life and why?
We know that when there are atrocities happening in the world and on our doorsteps, it can feel self-indulgent and insensitive to rest. Even in our work, sometimes it feels like there’s so much work that needs to be done, how can we possibly rest? But we must, and that is why we rest loudly and visibly - and even pay our community to do it too.
We centre our work around creating systems and processes where rest is embedded and real, not just for us but for our partners and community too. When you’re trying to create change, ‘the work’ will always be there, but if we want to genuinely create an equitable sector, we need to interrogate and speak openly about visible and invisible labour - who’s doing it, how often? what kind of labour?. and that means also speaking passionately and fervently about who has the power to rest.
Thank you for reading this. If you want to support us to share our ways of working across the sector and beyond, please consider joining the Rising Alliance or increasing your regular donation.
