“Be like the flower that gives its fragrance even to the hand that crushes it.” —Bill Mollison

What does it mean to be a regeneratively-minded media artist in a world dominated by speed and extraction? What does it mean to be queer/trans in a world ruled by ‘the marriage plot’? What does it mean to live ecologically as an artist working in media made perpetually obsolete? From animated cloudscapes to a drowned New York City, to a family archive that spans distance and generations, this workshop will explore alternative space-times as liberatory worldbuilding structures.

Media artists Isabel Beavers, Michelle Salinas Wamungu, and Halo Starling will co-facilitate a workshop where we offer participants guidance, space, and time to imagine slow, queer, and deep regenerative places of their own making. These places operate beyond notions of ‘utopia’ and are real or imagined worlds of resistance, healing, and revolution. 

Using strategies rooted in chrono-non-normativity, positive intervention, and worldbuilding, we will invite a different relationship to time that prioritizes process over product, and relationships over results. We use analog technologies as tools, and exercises derived from our personal creative approaches to guide participants.  

In the first part of our workshop, we will each read aloud a regenerative place of our own making, while participants write, draw, doodle, and reflect on large sheets of paper.

In the second part of the workshop, we will each share specific work, with accompanying interactive exercises, to contextualize our stories of place and to give audiences a way into their own regenerative placemaking.

In the third and final part of the workshop, participants will be guided, through several iterative exercises, to build on their accumulated notes, doodles, drawings, and reflections to coalesce and share their own regenerative places.

Isabel Beavers is a media artist exploring queer climate futures that rely on alternative modes of knowing as structures for living. Michelle Salinas Wamungu is a media artist currently exploring the documenting and archiving of familial history and assigning value to the practice, time, love, care, healing, and labor associated with it. Halo Starling is a lower-income, disabled trans media artist of immigrant experience, worldbuilding positive futures via narrative, collage, and essays films, as well as screenwriting and creative critical writing. 

Through our collaborative approach, we hope that our workshop at Human Resources creates a space for slow, queer, and deep regeneration.

Doors at 6pm; event at 6:30pm

Please RSVP here to help the organizers know who’s coming.