POOL: What Can We Learn When We Find New Ways to Gather?
2020
2020
Workshop series created and facilited with with Annie Canto and Nura Ali, through the Satellite x DESIS Residency.
POOL fosters community-based practices that explore new ways of gathering and collective learning. Anti-racist pedagogy, decolonial methodology, and peer-to-peer solidarity make up the core of our practices. With these interests at the heart of our work, this project expands our understanding of community support and activism by exploring new ways to gather that embody relational and mutually supportive ways of being, and challenge the hegemonic structures that disconnect us from the communities and ecologies we live within. We explore new kinds of connectivity that can be fostered in this time of precarity and to learn from the practices of labour organizers, artist/activists, and social justice scholars who are beginning to transition their work to and from distant spaces.
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POOL fosters community-based practices that explore new ways of gathering and collective learning. Anti-racist pedagogy, decolonial methodology, and peer-to-peer solidarity make up the core of our practices. With these interests at the heart of our work, this project expands our understanding of community support and activism by exploring new ways to gather that embody relational and mutually supportive ways of being, and challenge the hegemonic structures that disconnect us from the communities and ecologies we live within. We explore new kinds of connectivity that can be fostered in this time of precarity and to learn from the practices of labour organizers, artist/activists, and social justice scholars who are beginning to transition their work to and from distant spaces.
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Micro-Care: Small Acts of Resilience for Living within the Earth’s Caring Capacity
2020
2020
Rearched and facilited with with Laura Kozak, Avi Farber, and Julie
Van Oyen, ECU Research, 2020-2021.
In April of 2020, while we and the world scrambled to come to terms with a global pandemic, a small group of us assembled to respond to a Policy Horizons Canada report called The Next Generation of Emerging Global Challenges: Living within the Earth’s Carrying Capacity. This project began from a place of searching for optimism and agency in the shadow of massive and systemic forces. We documented and discussed modest actions of resilience and care for ourselves, each other and the systems surrounding us, our weekly discussions themselves became a typology of care through the tumultuous spring of 2020. Compiling our observations, actions and conversation, the Micro-Care publication holds our divergent but intersecting reflections on care, beginning from the smallest seed of ourselves. Through remaining humble relative to the global challenges laid out in the Policy Horizons Canada report, we hope our work can create a container for complex and meaningful interactions to spill from.
Digital publication featured in Wendy’s Subway x Libby Leshgold Gallery Archive of Mutual Care and Action, Publishing the Present, 2020.
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Van Oyen, ECU Research, 2020-2021.
In April of 2020, while we and the world scrambled to come to terms with a global pandemic, a small group of us assembled to respond to a Policy Horizons Canada report called The Next Generation of Emerging Global Challenges: Living within the Earth’s Carrying Capacity. This project began from a place of searching for optimism and agency in the shadow of massive and systemic forces. We documented and discussed modest actions of resilience and care for ourselves, each other and the systems surrounding us, our weekly discussions themselves became a typology of care through the tumultuous spring of 2020. Compiling our observations, actions and conversation, the Micro-Care publication holds our divergent but intersecting reflections on care, beginning from the smallest seed of ourselves. Through remaining humble relative to the global challenges laid out in the Policy Horizons Canada report, we hope our work can create a container for complex and meaningful interactions to spill from.
Digital publication featured in Wendy’s Subway x Libby Leshgold Gallery Archive of Mutual Care and Action, Publishing the Present, 2020.
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Propositions for a Place-Based Practice: Implicating the Designer in Care and Relationality
2020
2020
This thesis reflects on the role of the designer within a place-based practice, exploring the implications of being knowingly and intentionally embedded within community and building a design practice rooted in relationality and reciprocity. Propositions for a place-based practice emerged from a methodology of material and collaborative making, as examined through three case studies (two completed, one proposed) within Prince George and Vancouver, Canada.
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Float School:
Pedagogical Experiments and Embodied Social Actions
2020
2020
Publication design and editorial with Justin Langlois,
Holly Schmidt and Annie Canto, published by Living Labs, 2020.
Float School is an infrastructural sculpture, a platform for dialogic and socially engaged work, and a vessel for dissemination created by Vancouver-based artists, curators and educators Justin Langlois and Holly Schmidt. This artist-led research, creation and programming initiative explores “floating” as a response to precarity as a contemporary condition intertwined with a diminishing investment in the notion of progress and its forward trajectory. As a platform for envisioning a shared future through artistic and pedagogical experiments, In recent years, Float School offered a series of intensive performative actions in Prince George and Vancouver with ECUAD & UNBC faculty, graduate students, local artists, teachers, and social workers. A digital publication that captures significant learning and strategies to support floating as a pedagogical stance was launched in the summer of 2020.
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Float School is an infrastructural sculpture, a platform for dialogic and socially engaged work, and a vessel for dissemination created by Vancouver-based artists, curators and educators Justin Langlois and Holly Schmidt. This artist-led research, creation and programming initiative explores “floating” as a response to precarity as a contemporary condition intertwined with a diminishing investment in the notion of progress and its forward trajectory. As a platform for envisioning a shared future through artistic and pedagogical experiments, In recent years, Float School offered a series of intensive performative actions in Prince George and Vancouver with ECUAD & UNBC faculty, graduate students, local artists, teachers, and social workers. A digital publication that captures significant learning and strategies to support floating as a pedagogical stance was launched in the summer of 2020.
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