Category Archives: Uncategorized

Flaherty Summer Seminar Miami Gathering

2025-05-30

I’m excited to be hosting ONWARD! A Gathering for the 70th edition of the Flaherty Film Seminar at O Cinema in Miami Beach on Friday June 27th from 4:00-6:00 PM

The annual Flaherty summer seminar is revered as one of the most significant convenings around non-fiction cinema in the world. Curated collaboratively by Janaína Oliveira, Carlos A. Gutiérrez, and Richard Herskowitz, this year’s program poses the questions: In moments of great upheaval, can cinema provide fuel for a radical paradigm shift? What cultural momentum does the cinema offer us today? The very acts of making and watching non-fiction films are rooted deep in legacies of solidarity and resistance. How does this moment call on us to nourish those legacies and forge our own? We encourage you to read more about the theme here. We are grateful to explore these questions and ideas with you, and we can’t wait to hear how they resonate with our community in Miami-Dade.

The Flaherty upholds a tradition of non-preconception. To this end, no one knows what they will be watching until the lights go down. Film notes and trigger warnings will be made available to participants before each screening begins. In the Socratic tradition of the Flaherty seminar, the program will be followed by discussion, facilitated by me!

Please register for the Miami gathering through Flaherty so that you can receive a discount code for the full online experience: http://tinyurl.com/flaherty25

This Gathering event is offered to you for free, instead you’re encouraged to donate generously to O Cinema using this link: https://www.o-cinema.org/donate

Transformation Playground

2024-09-09

Transformation Playground is a new social meetup to explore the connection between performance, live arts, gaming, and experience design. We gather together to play games and learn from a variety of game experiences, role plays, and participatory exercises— engaging immersive and personal games as tools for political education and social change.

Creative world-building can be a powerful way to challenge injustice, not only imagine new worlds but also to rethink our place in this one. Transformation Playground is a space where people can come together to experience, discuss, create, and play. And maybe every once in a while, this play will help us imagine more equitable and inclusive futures. It’s also important to make space for play without expectation of transformation—play is valuable even when it is frivolous.

🔗 Here’s a link to sign up for all the gatherings I’m hosting. 🔗

Registration opens soon for the School of Oil and Water

2023-09-16

Mark your calendars for the launch of School and Oil and Water, a mail-order kit to examine your relations with petroleum through a collection of artist-made objects and activities.

🔗 Registration opens Monday October 16th at 12 noon, Eastern time.

This contemplative correspondence school takes the form of an artist book packaged in a box. Our curriculum explores these guiding questions:
-
Who is oil and what does oil desire from us?
– Is oil merely a fuel source and material for humans, or could it have other reasons to exist?
– How can we practice relating to petroleum with reciprocity?

School of Oil and Water is designed to be experienced by an individual at home, over the course of a week.

The project is a limited edition of 50, produced in 2023. Once we’re sold out, there will be no more.

Over the next few weeks, we will be posting more information about the contributing artists and their process, so please stay tuned!

Creative Director: Fereshteh Toosi
Artists: Lindsey french, Ginger Brooks Takahashi & Nica Ross, Kate Joranson, Alex Young, Liz Ensz & Skye Fort, and Fereshteh Toosi

School of Oil and Water @oil_ancestors is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight New Work Award @knightfdn

that feeling when…

2023-07-06

A hazy full moon hovers in the grey sky of early morning. There is a paved road that curves into the horizon, The trees are dark and the street is tinted with a glow of dark orange-brown light. The text “announcing the launch of TFW” is superimposed on top of the photograph in yellow typeface. Under the photograph is a rectangle of a plain black background with more text that reads “a study group about climate change, wellness, and technology from a feminist, queer, anticolonial and racial justice perspectives / DM oilancestors-at-gmeail to join us!”

One of the questions that the participants chose to ask each other during the Pelican Island workshop I hosted earlier this year was: “Have you noticed algorithmic bias in climate news and other media?” I did not expect this subject to come up, and it has inspired the way I’d like to continue the different facets of this project.

For the final post of my weeklong IG takeover for @radicalarchives about my Artist as Archivist project, I announced the launch of a study group based on feedback from participants during Solar Salutations, my Artist as Archivist project. Here is an anonymous quote from one of the participants after the Pelican Island workshop:

“My favorite moments were having open back and forth dialogue about our environmental anxieties as a group. I often talk about climate change but have never put a name to the worries that constantly linger in the back of my mind about that topic.”

The study group is called TFW… (that feeling when) and it will be designed as a supportive space for conversation about climate change, wellness, and technology from feminist, queer, anticolonial and racial justice perspectives. As an in-person community aimed at creative people, discussion will focus on the intersection between digital media like AI and NFTs, and environmental issues.

My role as the facilitator will be informed by my experiences as a professor of digital art, as well as my studies of forest bathing / forest therapy, horticultural therapy, and Buddhist philosophy. An example of the works we will engage with together include texts by Ruha Benjamin, Sarah Jaquette Ray, everest pipkin, Mimi Onuaha, Nabil Hassein, and Octavia Butler, among others.

Would you like to join us? Do you know a place that would like to host our meetings? Please be in touch if you’d like to be involved and/or can suggest or offer a space that can host a monthly group gathering on Sunday afternoons.

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