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"This is what Darwin was trying do hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature's organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the "whole machinery of life". The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the "convenient" lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives" Lulu Miller
Humans have made up thousands of different ways to study nature, developed tools, microscopes, cameras, telescopes, space stations, and even hadron colliders. In my workshops I explore the ways humans have to study nature, and, with studying I mean perceiving, making sense of, listening to, experiencing, contemplating, embodying it to understand it.
In them, I talk about the way in which humans have made sense of nature, and matter, using different strategies: from the five known senses to the other possible senses of the human body, to the development of tools and technologies that augment them making it possible for us to see inside a cell, and the light on the horizon of black holes. The theoretical framework is based on the history of taxonomies, on research on queer science, and on indiscipline: the hacking, mutating and re-thinking of Western academic disciplines. These workshops critically explore scientific research, theories and understandings of nature, opening a space where our human bodies are perceived as part of a complex network of existences, as part of a bigger more complex web that spans from the protons and electrons in our atoms, to the iron in our blood, to the soil, forest, animals, the planet and the universe.
The workshops are directed to anyone interested. I have previously worked with university students (in all levels of academia), with artists and art students, with teenagers, professors, musicians, scientists, researchers, anarchists, and many others.
To give workshops is one of my favorite activities of artistic practice.
in the featured image: Solon Morse at the Allenberg Bog, in western New York
"But can you actually stop the explosion of "is connected to"-s? Think of a dictionary. The meaning of a word is a bunch of other words. And so on: you look those words up in turn. You keep going. What do you think will happen? Will you arrive back at the first word in a nice neat circle? Or will your journey look more like a tangled spiral? Even if you made it back to the first word, by chance, would that look circular? I don't think so. And I think the same thing happens when we consider how lifeforms are interrelated" Timothy Morton
