Amor Mundi:
The World(s) We Inherit | The World(s) We Make
Participatory Workshop with Inheritance –
Amber Ginsburg, Claire Pentecost, Sara Black, Sarah Lewison, and Kayla Anderson
The practice of orienting ourselves as a culture through cosmological representations can be found everywhere that humans have flourished. For this workshop, we pose a question for ourselves and our participants: What futures are we choosing? How might our present orientations be changed in order to meet the future from an earth-centered, care-driven perspective?
Together we will examine our inherited ways of perceiving the world, with a focus on cosmologies that are interconnected and highlight the ways we are dependent on one another, human, non-human, mineral, and photosynthetic. Using familiar forms of ordering relationships, participants will make cosmograms, drawing on elements in their past, present, and future that signify our material and spiritual survival. Through game card prompts, writing prompts, playful sketching and discussion, cosmogram drafts will be collaged, drawn and painted. Materials, prompts and reference models will be provided.
In Manifesto for Mutualistic Tendencies, Dao Nguyen and Kayla Anderson attempt to find intimacy with and build care for synanthropic creatures. Prodding at the miniature worlds nested alongside ours, the artists create playgrounds, sanctuaries, and narratives as bridges between human and non-human experience. The exhibition explores the erotic landscapes of others, and our unruly impulses towards sympoesis, or “making with”.
Kayla Anderson is a Chicago-based artist, writer, and educator. They spend their spare time staring lovingly into the eyes of insects.
Dao Nguyen is a Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist. Their name is a homophone for the Vietnamese word for knife.