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Please note: This workshop consists of two two-hour sessions, conducted via Zoom, on June 7 and 9. By registering, participants are expected to attend both sessions. 

About Frog & Toad Hauling

Revel and Sun are the friends behind Frog & Toad Hauling, a junk removal and creative reuse service dedicated to seeing the treasure in trash. Community members hire them to lovingly handle the belongings of passed loved ones, to bring spirited presence to home clearouts and cleanups, to dispose of moldy and hazardous materials with knowledgeability and non-judgment, to collaborate on creative demolition, salvage, construction, and repair projects, and generally to move junk around! Through Frog & Toad, Revel and Sun work to connect excess with need by helping furniture, housewares, clothing, tools and more flow in the direction of greater equity and freedom. They named themselves Frog & Toad as a tribute to the queer amphibians from the books we knew as children, whose expansive and playful friendship allowed them to do far more together than individually. 

Revel and Sun are passionate about trash: the saturated-with-life, the discarded, the moldy, the worn-in and worn-out. For them, trash is the shadow side of possession, of belonging. Their work calls on them to understand material possessions as embodiments of living stories and locations of potential transformation, dignity, and belonging. They understand their work as trying to reconnect the very intimate nature of personal possessions back into the collective: moving, transforming, and reshaping “stuff” to create a deeper sense of belonging for more people in our community—against the individualizing, hoarding currents of White supremacy and capitalism. 
 

About This Workshop

In this workshop, we will explore through conversation, practice, and self-reflective, multimedia activities many of the questions that guide our personal and professional work as Frog & Toad.

What is trash? How do we determine what does and doesn’t belong to us? What can we as individuals do about unequal distribution of things people need to survive, be comfortable, have agency and freedom? How can we mold and shape our relationships with “stuff” to create a deeper sense of belonging for everyone around us? If we were to consider the lives of our possessions before and beyond ourselves, how would we interact with them differently? What insight can our relationships to our material “possessions” reveal about how we relate to security, deservingness, memory, and community? 

Workshop attendees will be invited to get up close and personal with some precious and less-than-precious belongings of theirs in a multimedia exploration of what our things might tell us, if only we would listen! Participants will leave with a keener perception of the stories our material world tells, fresh ideas about how to shift from practices of personal possession toward those of collective belonging, and some tangible commitments to moving toward gratitude-based relationships with our things.

Click here to RSVP.