Holding Space / Take Up Space

2022–ongoing | A collaborative project by Holding Space (Maya Kincaid & Natasha Brune Goodey)

Holding Space / Take Up Space is an ongoing artist-led research project developed by Maya Kincaid and Natasha Brune Goodey, exploring how to hold space for uncomfortable conversations around race and inclusivity within arts education ecologies. The project invites collective dialogue, critical reflection, and shared accountability, rooted in diasporic identity and lived experience.

This work began with a provocation:
How can we host generative, intersectional conversations about race that do not reproduce harm — particularly within institutional spaces that often struggle to hold them?

Working across arts pedagogy, participatory practice, and anti-racist research, Holding Space / Take Up Space unfolds through two interconnected workshop models:

Holding Space

A dialogue-based workshop model grounded in shared inquiry, theory, and conversational structure.

• Facilitated using a “menu” format inspired by Lois Weaver’s Long Table, it draws from accessible theory and shared quotes to open space for cross-positional dialogue.

• Emphasises collective accountability, discomfort as learning, and the decentering of facilitator authority.

• Integrates references from adrienne maree brown, bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Afua Hirsch, and others.

• Includes a reflective care activity, where participants share personal images and stories related to nostalgia and identity — expanding the conversation beyond verbal language and creating moments of repair and connection.

Take Up Space

A tactile, care-led workshop designed specifically for people of colour, focused on visibility, memory, and embodied identity.

• Participants bring personal materials (photographs, objects, textiles, food packaging, etc.) to create assemblages of identity within institutional settings.

• Emphasises self-representation, emotional safety, and reclaiming physical space.

• Inspired by the work of Ellen Gallagher, Theaster Gates, Mammalian Diving Reflex, and diasporic practices of care and craft.

• Designed as a counterpoint to the discursive labour of Holding Space, centring joy, nurture, and resistance through making.

Theoretical Grounding

This project emerges from Maya and Natasha’s lived experience as Black mixed-heritage, queer, neurodivergent women working across education and art. Their collaboration is rooted in friendship, shared positionality, and a desire to interrogate how identity and power operate in pedagogic environments.

Influences include:

• bell hooks’ framing of theory as a location for healing

• adrienne maree brown’s emergent strategy and brave space

• Stuart Hall’s and Paul Gilroy’s writings on diaspora and cultural identity

• Mammalian Diving Reflex’s use of intergenerational familiarity

• Lois Weaver’s open-source participatory methods

• Theaster Gates’ and Isaac Julien’s frameworks for Black space-making in art