Some updates from the past few weeks... :)
I received a scholarship to take an evening class at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research on fairy tales taught by Jessie Kindig exploring retellings and what they reveal about culture, power, desire and transformation <3
Here's an excerpt from a fairy tale I'm writing atm...
Once upon a time, the resistance began underground.
Long before the bunkers were rendered useless. Long before their wealthy occupants atomized into the very atmosphere they had tried to purchase eternal immunity from. Long before the data centers recited their final prayers to the entangled network.
The real clouds returned as the mycelium listened closely.
Conspiring. Remembering. Transmuting the poison in the nitrogen.
Enmeshing in its slow and patient way, the location of every buried harm.
The data centers were once the loudest.
I'm sharing work from my series We The People Dissent alongside 14 other artists in solidarity. All proceeds benefit the New York Immigration Coalition who are working to protect the rights of immigrant communities, expand access to services and build civic action networks across New York <3
A recent 2 day workshop led by Maura Brewer and Sam Lavigne expanded my understanding of forms investigative research can take and I was introduced to web scraping via python <3 I've been thinking of ways publicly available data can be used to expose what institutions / corporations keep hidden, especially as it relates to labor, resource extraction and centralized systems of power
I’ve just returned from the Monument Lab Summit in Philadelphia where artists, activists, and cultural leaders gathered under the theme School of Monumaking to ask how do we make and unmake monuments?
The summit framed monument making as a living classroom, exploring who is remembered, how stories are told, and what it takes to build more just public landscapes. Work by Lauren Halsey, Hank Willis Thomas, Kerry James Marshall, Wendy Red Star, and Theaster Gates among others made the case that monuments can teach, move, and empower in ways granite and bronze never have.
A beautiful throughline across sessions was that history is never made by single actors. It is always collective.
Contractor Devon Henry and Shakia Gullette Warren of the Black History Museum in Richmond pushed on how institutions carry that weight, while multidisciplinary artist Nekisha Durrett posed the question ~ what is it like to imagine the interiority of a person through embodied monuments? Poet and researcher Sasha Stiles brought technology into the room, exploring how fine-tuned language models can carry ancestral memory forward, treating poetry as a technology of consciousness. Meaning, she insisted is always polyphonic and multimodal.
All of it pressed against the urgency of the present moment in which Monument Lab is dedicated to advancing justice by reimagining monuments as places for belonging, learning and healing, I’d like to honor these incredible people and teachings into my workshops for nyc public school students <3
Proteus Effect
Virtual Pilgrimage
Chaos Magick
Meditations (on America)
Quarantine
Vestiges 2.0
Verisimilitude
Fairy Garden Face (AR)
Phantasmagoria (Super 8 film stills)
Three Graces / Diaspora
Re-generative Play
Thresholds
Phantasms of the Blue Sky
Trace / In Continuum
Alchemizing Alcoves
Seeds of Revolution Tarot
Behind The Seen Collective
We The People Dissent
New section