workshops
Soul Candles: Ancestral Practice and Candle Crafting
Museum of Jewish Montreal, February 18th 2024
LGBTQ+ at the J, September 25th 2024
Facilitated by artist Sof Kreidstein, this creative workshop is focused on the old Ashkenazi custom of making soul candles out of beeswax. This centuries-old practice, called feldmestn (Yiddish) was carried out by women in Eastern Europe who would measure the graves of their ancestors with wick thread, making candles as a connective channel between the dead and the living.
During the workshop, guests will learn all about this practice, create candles, engage in a guided somatic ritual, and participate in open discussion related to ancestral connection and embodied memory.
Tactile Stim Toy Workshop
Eyelevel, Wonder'neath, September 25th 2022
Blackwood Gallery, Tangled Art + Disability, September 7th 2024
Stimming with touch can be grounding, satisfying, healing, and playful; a helpful tool for navigating and interacting with the world, especially for neurodivergent folks and those who are sensory seeking/sensory sensitive. While it can take many forms, tactile stimming (self stimulation) may including fidgeting with objects or toys. Guided by Sof Kreidstein (they/them), participants will make multi-textural tassel stim toys through tactile exploration with textiles; creating in response to their curiosities, needs, preferences, and sensitivities. This space is open to all, though it will be centred around neurodivergent experiences.
A Queer Welcoming of Shabbat and Adar II : Ritual Workshop
Radstorm, March 4 2022
Creating rituals, modifying or reframing those we’ve carried through teachings and/or familial traditions, and considering what makes them personally meaningful to us, can be a radical and healing process. This workshop, facilitated by Sof Kreidstein, is about queer Jewish ritual. In this closed Jewish, and queer and trans centered space, we will contemplate, discuss, expand, and create these rituals (and some objects and other tools that can be used for them). This workshop is also a celebration for Erev Shabbat and the Rosh Chodesh of Adar II. On this sacred twilight, we can honour the thresholds we’ve crossed, transitions we’ve made, and intersections we embody. This is a ceremony for connection.
Intentional Processes of Meaning Making: Ritual Workshop
Radstorm, March 11 2022
This open workshop, facilitated by Sof Kreidstein, is about expanding ideas around rituals, developing our personal relationships with them, and creating them. In this open space, we can consider and express our thoughts, feelings, and processes around personal/shared rituals from a broadened lens including (but not limited to) care, healing, soothing, mundane, religious, transitional/rite of passage based, traditional, and spiritual in intent/content. Using language and materials, we will contemplate and create personal and/or shared rituals and the objects around them. This workshop is a space to reflect, create, and connect with one another within this liminal and fluid realm of ritual.
