MEMORY: AN OPEN RESIDENCY WITH WATER SCHOOL
inspired by Cy X’ Water as Technology
This schedule is forming and fluid; check back for regular updates
MEMORY is inspired by Cy X’ “Water as Technology Open Residency” which took place during the spring of 2022. At the end of our time together they welcomed people to start their own open residencies, and so through this residency model, Water School joins Shared Body in exploring water, this time as the element relates to memory. During the month of April there will be a series of online presentations and workshops by a number of speakers, asynchronous activities, and space for residents to propose and organize their own activations.
The residency is free and open to all.
This Open Residency is intentionally designed with the template Cy created. Water School acknowledges and uplifts Cy's creativity and labor in creating, sharing and facilitating this open residency model last year. We are also creating this space with the Re-Imagining Education Conference in mind (who also happen to be focusing on water this April too), incorporating their example of inquiry, space-making and collective learning.
Read Cy’s Welcome Text
ONGOING/ASYNCHRONOUS/COLLABORATIVE ACTIVATIONS
SONIC WATERSCAPES: A MUSICAL MIRROR
WITH MAYA NUTRIA
Remembering the diverse worlds that make up, are in and surround water bodies!
In celebration of the sounds that exist in our water ecosystems, we invite you to share a short audio file recorded near a water body, or elsewhere as long as it reminds you and connects you to water. These recordings will then be compiled and made into a collaborative song facilitated by Maya Nutria (IG @aquadogo). Our diversity is mirrored in our water spaces, and this musical tribute seeks to show that. Submit your audio files to nutrixbobx@gmail.com
Residents and people not participating in the open residency are encouraged to contribute!
Bio: Maya is a musician and militant animist working in the ecological and AI (artificial intelligence) realms. They are focused on Interspecies and More-than-human Storytelling that abolishes the lines between lover, God, ecology, otter and self. Maya also makes music with animals and will be releasing many of their musical collaborations with otters, goats, birds, cows and more during an upcoming event in New York City called "More-Than-Otter Showcase" (see graphic on Maya’s Instagram).
Maya writes:
"The music I make celebrates the intercultural story of music and how it is interwoven with the more-than-human world, with the hope of making you open your heart and shake your booty!"
EROSIVE OROGENIES: MINERAL EXCHANGES
THROUGH BODY WITH SHANSHAN CHAN
A plurality of voice and sound will be collected and shared around the topic of minerality as defined by the breakdown, transformation and memory of mineral through border states // the ways they move between living and nonliving beings // fossil notions, coral buildup, erosive restructuring, magma, glacial movement // the ways minerals travel and interact through our bodies, the liquids and fires and bone-building.
shanshan will create a soundtrack of narratives from snippets of everyone's contributions. You can reach them via email at shanshanchan@newschool.edu. Residents and people not participating in the open residency, are encouraged to contribute!
Bio: shanshan (they/them) (plural) @persimmon.luvr is currently based in the hudson valley (munsee/mohican land) and grew up in new jersey (lenapehoking), via their family's migration from southern China, working through a practice as a poet and farmer, a friend and lover. they are currently working with livestock and learning about the connections between grasses, soil structures, and interspecies relationships.
shanshan writes:
I encourage the description of the activation to be the main guiding prompt, but if folks find it helpful to have more specificity here are some options. I got a bit into dreamspace thinking these up!
DAY/DREAM WITH SARA SUÁREZ
Day/Dream is a site-responsive installation that combines a video/sound composition with optical and thermal research to consider concepts of perception, fluidity, collectivity and dreams. It complements the HEAT AID initiative by Materials & Applications, which addresses water and shade inequity through gathering and redistributing crucial resources during hot months. I'm currently creating the sound/image piece for the project, which will weave together water imagery, environmental/soundscape recordings and voice recordings of people sharing dreams, with the intention of illustrating a surreal, collective terrain of dreams.
Long description (of installation project): here
I'm currently looking for individual voice recordings of dreams to include in the composition. This is open to everyone! All contributors will receive public credit for the project, but dreams will not be attributed individually. (You can also participate anonymously if you prefer.)
Instructions/details: There are 2 options to contribute dream recordings to the piece. Please email recordings to saravsuarez@gmail.com by next Wednesday, May 10.
Residents and people not participating in the open residency are encouraged to contribute!
Bio: Sara Suárez is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist working across experimental film, sound composition and social practice, interested in sensory and spatial perception, shared spaces and landscapes, collective memory, and co-creative processes. Her works include visual and sonic landscape studies that incorporate audio collage, electronic composition, and analog film processes. She is currently developing a collection of work considering the physical and social experiences of darkness, sleep, and dreaming, and the forces that degrade these essential needs. Her work has been featured by LA Filmforum, Slamdance, Alchemy Film Festival, ICDOCS, Chicago Underground Film Festival and other venues. Suárez is a current resident artist of Materials & Applications, and a SciArt Ambassador at Supercollider. She is the co-founder of virtual care lab, an interdisciplinary project platform and creative community interrogating issues of care, solidarity, co-creation, and trust in virtual space. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
WATER, THE ANCESTRAL WITNESS, WADE IN THE WATER, CHILD AND WALK IN THE SEA TO BE HELD: A DIGITAL COLLAGE AND TEXT ACTIVATION WITH BAABA
there is a certain poetics concerning the act / art of (re)connecting with water. within the multitude of dimensions through which we dive / swim / float to become one with the flow that goes beyond time and space, there is (re)composition. converging all the waters to one core, and then expanding that core as energy, as dreams, as revolutionary visions.
what informs my practice of collaging is the necessity to (re)assemble reality according to what is revealed through the gaze I hold when I try to "keep my tears together, and not making them fall". it takes courage to move, to flow, in opaque / blurred spaces. we must ask "what it means to only trust our reflection on raging waters? what it means to embrace stillness when aware of the deep and its unsettling hummings?" it takes courage to survive according to ripples that come from a source of pain, helplessness, grief.
so may these collages be portals to the waters within our bodies. may the sounds remind of the times that water had the same sound as our laughter during times of wonder and joyfulness. may the water that flows towards us cover our bodies from the transparent spaces of surveillance and control. may we be remembered that we are formless / free, beyond this world.
connected to “water, the ancestral witness”
Bio: baaba is a Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist and educator currently based in the UK. Her craft avails of visual and sonic poetics, expressed mainly through digital - both in static and moving form - and analogue collage art. The practice behind the acts of (de)constructing, (re)assembling, (re)shuffling images and words in her art is deeply spiritual, informed by alertness, resistance, wonder and tenderness, and rooted in the "unsayable". Her works, as an ongoing motion, are aimed to materialise new modes of viewing and living reality through lenses that are no longer manipulated by the white gaze, allowing space for hope, stillness, and radical imagination. IG: @sun.sonics
AQUEOUS LISTENING PARTY WITH ISABEL VAL SÁNCHEZ
This activation is currently being developed. More details will be made available in a month or so when the digital listening party takes place. As of now, during the first part of the party, Isabel will share her work, and then we will listen to the sound-voice-music activations co-created by other residents. Please check back for more information!
In the meantime, watch Isbael’s video works:
Bio: Isabel Val (Barcelona, 1988) is a visual artist working across photography, drawing and video. Her work explores nostalgia, grief and the invisible connections between past and present. Her practice is based on ritual and repetition, followed by a great interest in analogue techniques that allow space for improvisation and mistakes.
Her work has been exhibited and screened in Barcelona, Budapest, Berlin , Mexico and Canada. She is a founder member of the international art & grief research collective commonplace. Currently she is based in Barcelona and represented by Mymuseum Gallery in Budapest. IG: @isabel_val
---------
MONDAY APRIL 3, 2023
WATER RIGHTS WITH JEREMY DENNIS
12:00pm - 1:00pm EST | Online Registration
In this one-hour presentation and workshop, participants will explore the power of art as a platform for raising awareness about Shinnecock's water rights struggle in The Hamptons. Through discussions, we will learn how artistic expression can help promote dialogue towards reconciliation and justice, and gain insights into how we can better support the Shinnecock Nation in their fight for their rights.
Materials Needed: Paper, pen, (colored) pencils, markers etc for a creative reflection activity
Bio: Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) is a contemporary fine art photographer and a tribal member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY. In his work, he explores indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. Dennis holds an MFA from Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, and a BA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University, NY. He currently lives and works in Southampton, New York on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation. IG: @jeremynative
THURSDAY APRIL 13, 2023
VISITING THE OCEAN, CIRCLING THE SEA: A COLLECTIVE DREAMING WITH WATER AS A GUIDE WITH HIBA ALI
7:00pm - 8:00pm PST | Online Registration
In the artist talk and meditative exercise, hiba ali will share their storytelling framework with swahili-indian ocean and the ways the think about water being a guide and portal and will lead a collective meditation with water through prompt-based exercise in New Art City (NAC).
Materials Needed: Previous experience with NAC is not required, however participants of the workshop portion should create a free account here.
Bio: hiba ali is a producer of moving images, sounds, garments and words. they reside in many time zones: chicago, toronto and eugene. born in karachi, pakistan, they belong to east african, south asian and arab diasporas. they are a practitioner and (re)learner of swahili, urdu, arabic and spanish languages. they work on two long term art and publication projects: the first being an art-based phd project that examines womyn of colour’s labour, and architecture of surveillance as it exists within the monopoly of amazon (corp.) and the second being a series of works that addresses music, cloth and ritual practices that connect east africa, south asia and the arabian peninsula in the swahili-indian ocean region.
they are an assistant professor at the college of design in the art & technology program at the university of oregon in eugene and they teach on decolonial, feminist, anti-racist frameworks in digital art pedagogies. IG:@h3ba.hyba.xba
SUNDAY APRIL 16, 2023
I REMEMBER WHEN I WAS IN THE APPLE TREE
WITH MALLIKA SINGH
12:00pm - 1:00pm MST | Online Registration
In this one-hour generative poetry workshop, we will make poems and rituals that think of water, memory, and space as verbs. We will use language, sound, and movement to create individual and collaborative poems.
This is a low stakes and playful space interested in what we can make together!
Our prompts and games are inspired by Language Aquatics by Ica Sadagat, OOZE by mallika and Rebeca Alderete Baca, and previous iterations of Rivering Towards by mallika.
What is needed:
Everyone is requested to bring a plant or part of a plant that grows near a waterway where you are. If the physical plant is not possible, an image, name, or other representation is also great. Consider that waterways could include the water infrastructures of your city or home. For example, there is wild mustard growing underneath the spigot in my backyard.
Bio: mallika singh is a poet, farmer, and cook who makes work about ecosystems and intimacies.
in collaboration with friend and poet Rebeca Alderete Baca, mallika runs OOZE— an event series that celebrates poetry, ritual, and gathering. mallika also facilitates a study and writing group called Rivering Towards: Desert-Water Poetics and Politics. their debut chapbook, Retrieval, was published in 2020 from Wendy's Subway.
born in Delhi, India and raised in the Bay Area, CA and Santa Fe, NM; mallika belongs to Sikh punjabi diaspora and the open skies of New Mexico. mallika is currently based in Albuquerque, NM and is growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers with their coworkers at Ashokra Farm.
SUNDAY APRIL 30, 2023
INTERVIEW WITH THE MERMAID
WITH ASIA DORSEY
2:00pm - 3:00pm MST | Online Registration
In this one-hour interactive play space, rootworker Asia Dorsey channels the part of her that is The Mermaid to receive and respond to audience questions.
Bio: Asia Dorsey is a Rocky Mountain Mermaid writing Afrofutures into existence by reweaving Black bodies into the fabric of relationship with the earth. She is a nourishment based bioregional herbalist raised by a collective of radical aunties and grandmothers in the Historic Five Points community, the traditional home of the Ute, Cheyenne and Arapahoe peoples. She has apprenticed with elders in India, Ghana, New Zealand, New York and more to discern a practice of a People’s Medicine that is inherently empowering, suffused with ancestral wisdom and highly effective.
Grounded in the movement for reparations, healing justice, and her earth-based practice, Asia teaches ecological design as a permaculture instructor with the Regenerative Education Collective of Denver. She uses her talent of pattern recognition to decipher and reintegrate the sacred instructions of plants and ecosystems into people systems as an organizer and consultant with Regenerate Change. To literally ground black bodies in earth sovereignty, Asia co-founded the Satya Yoga Cooperative, the nations first BIPOC owned and operated yoga co-op in the nation where she is innovating in the field of somatic justice.
You can find her balancing embodiment with botanical chaos and co-creating the Petty Herbalist Podcast helping her people to rise together in power and step into the wholeness that is their birthright. Explore her teachings and writings on Patreon and follow her on Instagram @bonesbugsandbotany.
TUESDAY MAY 9, 2023 - UPDATE - NOW ASYNCHRONOUS
WHAT COULD WATER SCHOOL BE LIKE AS A MUTUAL AID NETWORK? WITH ALLISON MASANGKAY AND SIMONE JOHNSON 5:00pm - 6:00pm PST | Asynchronous
If you are interested in a virtual space where you can share your thoughts and experiences with/around housing and mutual aid, and want to brainstorm and imagine how Water School could also function as a mutual aid network one day, please join this one hour gathering! This session will be guided by questions and prompts from Simone and Allison.
What is mutual aid? Click to read more!
Bio: Allison Masangkay (she/they) is a Filipinx entity—sick, disabled, trans, queer, femme, cultural worker, scholar, aswang, cyborg, and more. They currently reside in Duwamish territory (Seattle, WA) and previously lived in Jamestown S’Klallam land (Sequim, WA) and Lenni-Lenape land (northern New Jersey). Her current work includes prose writing, sound, and collage envisioning Filipinx/a/o and greater brown, Black, and Indigenous embodiment beyond white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and colonialism. This work highlights their experiences as an aswang (shape-shifting entity in Philippine folklore) and cyborg through the lenses of Philippine folklore, spirituality, and magic while engaging critical theories which unsettle colonial constructs of technology, race, gender, disability, sexuality, humanity, animality, and monstrosity. Instagram: @allisonmasangkay
Bio: Simone Johnson (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and cultural worker mostly making work about water. She is usually based in Lenapehoking- NYC area, but is currently spending time in the southwest. Right now, she is on the brink of going in a whole new life direction that she hopes will support her dreams, health and creative life in much needed ways. She is currently a part of a digital project called “a merfolk happening”, preparing to give a short online presentation on water and time travel in the Colorado River Basin, and stewarding Water School’s first event of the year; an open residency inspired by her participation in Cy X’ Water as Technology last year. Instagram: @waterschool.earth/@sjj.nyc
WEDNESDAY MAY 10, 2023
THE SOMATICS OF WATER: USING WATER AS A TECHNOLOGY TO EMBODY AN ABOLITION PRAXIS BUILT TOWARD CONNECTION, BELONGING, CARE & COLLECTIVE LIBERATION WITH CARE 5:00pm - 6:30pm EST | Online Registration
Bio: Care (they/them) is a light-skinned Black trans non-binary trauma-informed care practitioner, transformative justice & eco-somatic practitioner, artist and doula, whose work focuses on re-membering somatic experiences of awe, connection, miracles and care. Their work blooms at the intersection of Black interiority, somatic memory and queer intimacies.
Always reflecting on their longing for home and belonging, they create rituals and ceremonies as portals through which displaced people can step into a healing, imaginative space, unburdened by colonialism's many violences. All of their practices draw from ancestral knowledge, and seek to re-enact and/or re-create rituals. Their practice is grounded in an intimate relationship with the land, ancestors, spirit, the elements, and the more than human.
Website: https://www.selflovetribute.com/
Instagram: @selflove_tribute
SATURDAY MAY 13, 2023
LIVER SWIM WITH CHARMAINE BEE
10:00am - 11:15am EST | Online Registration
During our activation we will deep dive into the space that is our livers.
Our livers support us in so many regulatory functions, it is a filtration organ and supports in regulation of digestion or our hormonal system, and in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) systems, the liver is ruled by Jupiter and is an organ that holds and filters emotions such as anger. Together we think about deep diving into our liver as a way to reclaim and remember our dreams and to use our dream space to speak to our liver. What do we want to gently support in releasing? What do we want to justifiably sit with a little longer?
We will look at liver supportive herbs such as dandelion and burdock and visualize swimming through our liver to support us through shifts and changes.
WATCH: On Our Thyroid and Voice (full length)
(from Charmaine: “this is a thyroid video, but it is in conversation with the liver work that I am thinking through”)
Bio: Charmaine Bee is a visual artist and herbalist who explores time, space and historically charged materials such as rice and indigo. charmaine explores ideas of time and space through examining geographic sites in the Southern United States and the dream world as a bridge/doorway/ portal space.
ways to keep in touch:
ig: @charmainenbee
THURSDAY MAY 25, 2023
THE ECOVERSITIES UN/RESEARCH LAB: OCEAN EDITION WITH ALBERT STEPHEN SALAZAR CORRALES
18:00PM PST | Zoom Link
The Ecoversities Un/Research Lab is an un/facilitated spiraling circle for play, ceremony and deep conversations around the multiplicity of un/research with wider ecologies, within our lives and all-around us, with more-than-human worlds-companions and unexpected guests. It celebrates emergence, and curiosity, as processes for learning, knowledge-making and wayfinding around, towards and with profound questions that do not necessarily posses answers. We will meet via zoom next Thursday 25th of May at 18:00PM PST to talk about the shallow and deep seas, we will sail with the ocean and the inhabitants of the abysses and reefs, and ask ourselves what relationships and entanglements do we share with them, where is the sea leading us? What is the ocean asking of us? What are the bowhead whales gossiping all about?
Partial translation into spanish might be available during the session, in a world so full of communication, maybe what we need is translation, it may provide a path for the dreamer to dream across worlds, across imaginations.
El Ecoversities Un/Research Lab es un circulo espiral para el juego, el conversar profundo y tomar ceremonia alrededor de la multiplicidad de des/investigar con ecologías más amplias, dentro de nuestras vidas y alrededor de nosotres, con mundos y compañeres más allá de lo humano y con invitados inesperados. Este santuario celebra la emergencía y la curiosidad, como procesos para el aprender, para hacer conocimiento y orientarse alrededor, hacía y con preguntas profundas que no necesariamente tienen respuesta.
Nos veremos via zoom el próximo Martes 25th de Mayo a las 18:00PM PST para hablar de los mares someros y profundos, navegaremos con el océano y sus habitantes abisales y arrecifales, para sentir las relaciones y alianzas que compartimos con elles, hacía donde nos estará guiando el mar? ¿Qué es lo que el océano pide de nosotres? ¿De qué chismean las ballenas francas?
Traducción parcial al español puede que se halle disponible durante la sesión, en un mundo tan lleno de comunicación, tal vez lo que necesitamos es traducción, pues puede proveer una senda para el soñador para soñar a través de mundos separados, a través de imaginares distintos.
From Albert:
"[...] By ‘posthumanist researcher’, I do not mean the philosopher trained in the art of thinking about the porosity of the human figure or the posthuman. And by ‘researcher’, I do not privilege the human gaze. By posthuman researcher, I refer to the crossroads of yet-to-be-named subject-objects; I mean to say that the world is so rich, so abundant, that to suppose we are the only ones entranced by this wonder is to perpetuate a kind of blindness that is especially problematic today; I mean to draw attention to wider and wilder coalitions we have always been a part of; I mean to say trees, cetaceans, and bacterial communities living as immigrant ecosystems in human guts are conducting research of their own; I mean to nod in the direction of ancestors lingering in the hauntological sites of our furniture and exotic/monstrous bodies that disturb the fixity of what it means to be human; I mean to sing to a world that is more-than-world, more-than-knowing, more-than-being, always-becoming. " I like these words from Bayo Akomolafe, in The Myth of the Gilded Researcher.
READ: The Myth of the Gilded Researcher.
Bio: Albert is an ocean storyteller, oceanographer, unresearcher, trickster, inhabitant of many worlds. He lives along the California Peninsula, in Kumeyaay Country, in-between the desert and the sea. He feels profound reverence and sympathy towards fossils and water stones. At times, his night dreams are visited by wandering whales. He currently collaborates with the Ecoversities Alliance as an eco-communicator and translator.
Albert es un narrador del océano, oceanógrafo, desinvestigador, bufón, habitante de muchos mundos. Él vive a lo largo de la Península de las Californias, en Tierra Kumiai, entre el desierto y el mar. Muchas veces, una profunda reverencia y simpatía hacía fósiles y piedras acuosas colorea sus sentires. En ocasiones, sus sueños de la noche son visitados por ballenas andantes. Actualmente colabora con la Alianza de las Ecoversidades, como eco-comunicador y traductor.
Please check back throughout April and early May for more activation updates! Water School is also on Instagram @waterschool.earth