Sept 1-16th: Southern Tour tour flier; photo; video playlist aya videos to facebook, youtube and instagram as a series / playlist

Photo journal of my 2017 Own Your Voice Southern Tour with Aya Chebbi over the course of #16Days

http://www.wussymag.com/all/2017/10/16/aya-chebbi-queer-youth

http://ayachebbi.com/madame-gandhi-southern-tour/

New Orleans

Mobile

Montgomery

Atlanta

Raleigh

Asheville

Washington, DC

Philly

As soon as I got booked for Hopscotch Festival in Raleigh, I knew I wanted to craft an entire Southern Tour around those September dates. I wanted to explore Southern cities and exchange ideas of liberation and global feminism, and also explore the music and artists coming from the South. It had been several years since I had explored New Orleans and Mississippi with Cioffi when she made her documentary subSIPPI in 2012, and I missed the vibe of the South that had come to inspire and move me so much. After working with my badass agent Amy at Paradigm and making some calls out to my community, we were able to route a 6-city performance and speaking tour, that I was poised to do myself. One month before, however, I was at the Rockefeller Residency in Bellagio Italy, and encountered the extraordinary pan-African feminist blogger and activist Aya Chebbi. After spending days learning from each other about our various work and missions, and finding so much in common, we knew we had to continue to link up and find more ways of working together. She travels internationally for her work with her organization Afrika Youth Movement and had all of the fall booked up, except for 2 weeks in September. Those two weeks happened to be the exact dates of my Southern Tour, so I invited her to join me in documenting and speaking, and she said YES!!!

Tour life is so incredible because it forces you to shut out the noise of day to day life and focus on the needs of the moment: health and mission. You have to be well enough to travel and you have to get yourself to the venue to deliver the show. Every day felt like this. What is the intention of the evening, what is the message we are delivering, who is the audience, what is the band configuration and clothing for the evening, how is it being documented, how do we make an impact and how do we manage our energy such that the impact is the highest.

The best conversations happen on the road, but also when each of us would get into the zone with our respective audiences. I remember learning from Aya critical lessons that I continued to take on my journey and speaking engagements after the tour. She taught me about how we must control our own narratives, how women have often been erased from history, and how in this fourth wave, social media has been one of the most effective tools for organizing because it allows us to control the narrative in real time, map the online to the offline and generate the empathy often required to spread difficult messages to more people.

New Orleans

Montgomery

Atlanta

Raleigh

Asheville

Washington, DC

Philly