This is a living, breathing, ever-evolving fluid space of care, creation, and ancestral remembering, where silenced voices and bodies are centered with tenderness and integrity.
We nurture the practice of re-membering through bodywork, ritual, and the act of creation. We breathe life into this space with the intention to offer room for creativity and connections to those most often left out, vulnerable and systematically disadvantaged.
We are living in a time called to organize and hold spaces for us to further root ourselves into Ancestral Intelligence, collectively growing beyond current destructive paradigms. We aim to embody a space where art and a sense of belonging are practiced as rituals of care and creation.
Envisioning a world where care is collective, creativity is sacred, and healing is rooted in relationship with the self and others. we believe that care is an act of resistance, and art a tool towards liberation. We hold space for the body, for creating, and for meeting — with ourselves, each other, and our ancestors.
A pulse beating towards remembering our return.
Rooted in the body and attuned to spirit, ARUGA was born from a longing for spaces that hold, nourish, and honor those so often pushed to the edges. Here, art is not separate from life; it is a ritual, a practice, a way of remembering; an unfolding path returning home.
In this space, care is relational, and the body honoured as archive, portal, or guide. The work created is intuitive, grounded in remembrance through touch and ritual.
Tattooing is offered as a parallel practice. A ritual of marking, release and re-connection. Through both handpoke and machine methods, the skin becomes a site of choice and transformation. Each mark is an offering and a prayer. In both bodywork and markings we practice presence, and honour the sacredness of being witnessed.
We envision to be a welcoming place to land, and a firm ground to rise from. We center queer, and care-working diasporic communities from the Global South — those who carry so much and are held the least. We remind ourselves that tenderness is power, presence is ceremony, creation is medicine, and care is a collective inheritance.
This is our offering to build relation-ships with one another, a call to root oneself in the medicine held in ancestral memory.