BROOKLYN BRUJERIA X ANCESTORS IN TRAINING™
On October 3rd, 2025, the Embodying Change Ancestor Altar, an interactive art installation in reverence of change, joy, and resistance, debuts at the 8th Annual Brooklyn Brujeria Festival.
Tended to by Ancestors in Training™, this year’s altar arrives in a moment when the world continues to feel heavy with grief, injustice, and uncertainty. It can feel almost impossible to imagine joy. Yet through this annual festival, we understand that joy isn’t a luxury - it is a necessary practice of survival, resistance, and healing. Our ancestors navigated oppression, displacement, and violence, and still found ways to sing, to dance, to gather, and to love. They remind us that joy is not separate from struggle, but woven into how we endure and transform.
This altar installation honors change as both inevitable and sacred - a threshold that clears space for joy to take root. Inspired by Octavia Butler’s wisdom that “God is Change” and the powerful orisha Oya, the altar is designed as a portal: one side dedicated to release, the other to invite in possibility. It reminds us that transformation is not only an ending, but also the fertile ground where joy, healing, and transformation can take place. By treating joy as a conscious response to change, rather than a distraction from it, we build cultures of care that resist erasure and harm. This altar, and the practice it embodies, asks us to hold both truths: that grief and rage are valid, and that joy has a rightful place beside them.
Through the dynamic leadership of Chiquita Brujita, those seeking to return to ancestral traditions and magic have an annual opportunity to gather at the festival among kindred spirits, and we are so grateful to return to this space. Festival attendees are invited to step through the threshold of change and imagine a future where healing and justice are not only possible but are already here and shaping the world that our descendants will inherit.
May we always make our ancestors proud.
May we always seek out community.
May we never be an enemy of change.
To learn more about the festival, including the full schedule of events, visit brooklynbrujeira.com
ABOUT ANCESTORS IN TRAINING™
Ancestors in Training™ is an educational project and lived experience that centers sacred traditions, new technologies, intergenerational healing, and grief work. Launched in 2017, this concept has been taught at Sadie Nash Leadership Project and Mayday Space and traveled to El Museo del Barrio, Weeksville Heritage Center, the Caribbean Cultural Center (CCCADI), Ethel's Club, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Black Feminist Future, Decolonizing Birth, and Allied Media Conferences. To be an Ancestor in Training is to embody the elevated ancestor we want to be in the present moment, while we are still here. We understand that our time here is finite without fear.
Veronica Agard (Ifáṣadùn Fásanmí) (she/her) is a poet, writer, abọ̀rìṣà, community educator, and connector at the intersections of Black identity, wellness, representation, and culture. She curated the Who Heals the Healer series and the conference of the same name and facilitates the Ancestors in Training™ educational project. A joy defender and space holder for over 10 years, she wants to be remembered as a force of nature who created sites of healing. Ancestors in Training, the book, arrives in Fall 2026 with North Atlantic Books.