Leila Heidari lives in her hometown of Columbia, SC. She is an environmental health scientist, knitter, and a member of the Soda City Mask Bloc. Her Persian/Iranian American and disabled identities, environmental justice research inform her work.
Artist Statement
My work explores the concept of the “care web,” a term coined by disability justice leader and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice), centering disabled community as essential to providing reciprocal, complementary care and aid.
Using repeating phrases and beads that spell “care” in Morse code (-.-. .- .-. .), this work investigates and invites questions around the strength and precarity of being held in community. How do the same needs and offerings that tether us to one another also underscore the gaps that remain? How do we offer care? Could what you need be what I have to give? How can your limitations be a gift of requesting care? How does my community hold me? How do needs and offerings feel: constricting, liberating, both?
This piece highlights a handful of local Columbia-area organizations doing mutual aid work around reproductive justice, food access, education, and more. Representatives from these groups responded to the prompts/ questions repeated throughout the web.
The following groups contributed to this piece:
Liberation Is Lit
Peaceful Gatherings Nature School and Agile Learning Community
Soda City Abortion Access Collective
Carolina Abortion Fund
Techies for Reproductive Justice
Soda City Mask Bloc
Sunset Felines
Columbia Community Fridges