2024 Workshop

        On September 29, 2024, we gathered to create a collective drawing from our visual and textual sources.¹ The intention was to layer traces of our past selves and phrases of our present textual resonances to build a piece of collective futurity.


The instructions were:

Bring a text that resonates with you today and an image that belongs to a past self. 

Project your image on a large sheet on paper and trace its lines. 

Someone else will pull a phrase from your text and label what was drawn with that phrase. Then the next person will go, all on the same piece of paper.

Ilya is an artist and seedkeeper in training. They offer an image of three blue eggs in a bird’s nest. The text they bring is a songsheet from Selichot, a night of song and prayer. 

Eddy is an interdisciplinary artist and PhD student in English. His image is a postcard of a flock of sheep sent from a past self who once danced with the sheep on a farm in Wales. His text is Dante’s Vita Nuova, a text about the new life that springs from the braiding between love and mourning.

Vivian is a graduate student in Anthropology. She had to leave early, but brought Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism and an image from her research fieldsite: the overgrown ruins of (the promises of) a climate controlled greenhouse destroyed overnight by a typhoon.

Yidan is learning to weave webs with no center. They brought an image of two nestled stones they found on a beach in Providence, RI, a place of formative memories.  Her book is Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology by Andreas Weber, a text brimming with the poetics of aliveness, connections, and love.

Ad is a graduate student living between Philadelphia and New York. They weren’t able to attend, but they would have brought an image of a small, finely woven basket, inlaid with pistachio shells as if they were jewels. They also would have brought a text from their mom about a dream she once had that ends with the words “this is life.”

Dagny-Elise is interested in using landscape and architecture to design a better world. Her image depicts a picture of herself, her sibling, and her stuffed rabbit. Her text is “Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods” by Shawn Wilson (Opaskwayak Cree Nation).

Eissa is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher whose work explores memory, urban space, and internet culture. He brought a digital collage he believes his late grandfather made, depicting blurred text over a blue moonlit sky, a fragmented image that remains because it wasn’t backed up in their chats and is now largely illegible. The text he chose to share is from The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi.

Brittany is an arts worker and interdisciplinary thinker, passionate about philosophy, aesthetics and currently black & white photography. Her text is the lyrics to Kelela’s Happy Ending. Her image is a film photograph of her in Ghana from 2021. She is at a family gathering and is wearing a white dress in front of an old car.

Maria is an artist and writer with a habit of going to the movie theater on Tuesdays. In her image, a figure falls into a deep, blue abyss of water. Her text is Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel.

Maya is a sculptor, poet, and amateur Medievalist who lives in her grandmother’s witch-house with a little black cat. They made a painting years ago—above a rocky seascape hovers a raven, a girl, and an egg. Her text, “when you plant seeds, you don’t dig them up every day to see if they have sprouted. You simply water them.”

Sol is an artist living and working in Seoul and Philadelphia. Their image is a photo of the trace left on my body to enter the US. Their text is Fluxus Performance Workbook.

Mel is a graduate student within Landscape architecture and Fine Arts engaged with evidencing the reciprocal relationship of spatial processing. Looking to the reflexive behaviors inherent to navigating the built environment. Her image is a poster called “Eat Your Sidewalk” from SPURSE art collective and her text is “The Sound of Moving Meditation,” an interview with Merideth Monk.

Alec is a graduate student training in landscape architecture. He did not attend the activity, but he would have brought an image of the overgrown banks of the Houston Ship Channel taken in spring. His text is from Natural History of Vacant Lots, describing how pioneer plants sync calendars with real estate.

Victoria Antoinette is an artist, sculptor, and scholar. She is interested in making the familiar strange and exploring the layered, interconnected interplay between selves. Her image depicts the base of a tree lining a street in Philadelphia—it is both confined and capable. Her text is How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn.    

Amirio is a writer, interviewer, and audio storyteller exploring the relationship between humans and our beyond-human kin through a Black, queer lens. Their image is of him as an infant with his grandfather in McCormick, South Carolina. Their text is Jamaica Kindcaid’s My Garden (Book):, which considers the garden as an archive of all aspects of human life.