SHATTERED
MOON
ALLIANCE
On Time Travelling
A sci-fi worldbuilding session held at and presented by YYZ Artists’ Outlet in Toronto, on Sunday, December 3, 2017 1 – 4PM.
Natasha Myers is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, the convenor of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, co-organizer of Toronto’s Technoscience Salon, and co-founder of the Write2Know Project. Her book Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke UP, 2015), which won the 2016 Robert K. Merton Prize from the American Sociological Association, is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. She has been working at the cusp of art, science, and anthropology for decades, first as a dancer/choreographer and plant scientist, and more recently as an anthropologist of art, science, and ecology. Her current projects span investigations of the arts and sciences of vegetal sensing and sentience, the politics and aesthetics of garden enclosures in a time of climate change, and most recently, she has launched a long-term ethnography experimenting with the arts of ecological attention in High Park’s Oak Savannah. Becoming Sensor (http://becomingsensor.com/) is a research-creation project with award winning filmmaker and dancer Ayelen Liberona that experiments between art and anthropology to design protocols for an “ungrid-able ecology” grounded in decolonial feminist praxis. Links to her various projects, publications, actions, and events can be found here: http://natashamyers.org/
Born in Toronto to Chilean political refugees, Ayelen Liberona began with a career in dance that has evolved toward radical explorations of movement and the moving image as powerful tools for change and social justice. Her dance theater creations have been performed across 4 continents and can be described as multidimensional cinematic experiences often occurring in site-specific spaces and provoking stories of ancestry, ritual and nature. Through her work she has collaborated with artists such as Rubin Kodheli, Harry Mavromichalis, Gabrielle Roth, Jenn Goodwin, Sylvie Bouchard, lal and Noemie Lafrance. Ayelen’s obsession with the moving image led her to film and an evolving partnership with filmmaker Joseph Johnson-Cami. Since 2005 they have directed numerous experimental and documentary films, among them The Shift, Becoming, Keepers of the Water and A Grain of Sand that have garnered awards such as CFC’s Best Emerging Canadian Filmmaker Award (2009), the Miami International Short Film Festival’s Best Experimental Film Award (2009) and the Mark Haslam Award at the 2011 Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival. As an educator Ayelen has developed numerous arts based programs aimed at empowering young people with the tools to express their own shaping ideas as a means of collaboration, conflict transformation and affecting change. In 2011 Ayelen was nominated to TIFF’s Emerging Filmmaker Award and in 2012 she received the K.M. Hunter Award for Film & Video. Ayelen is currently artistic advisor to Corpus, director/producer for the Future of Storytelling’s theater presentations and resident production designer for Music in the Barns. Staging plant-people conspiracies alongside anthropologist Natasha Myers has been the fountainhead of Becoming Sensor, a research-creation project in High Park’s Oak Savannah that cultivates new modes of embodiment, attention and imagination and new ways of telling stories of lands and bodies.
www.ayelenliberona.com
Participants:
Aadita Chaudhury
Amy Siegel
Diana Poulsen
Elaine Stewart
Lo Bil
Max Meyer
Mehrnaz Rohbakhsh
Eoberta Buiani
Daniella Sanader
Shannon MacDonald
Leslie Thurston
Vera Frenkel
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"We" are not "one"
PLANT PEOPLE CONSPIRACIES!!
How do we conjure other worlds while we are within this world?
RADICAL
DISRUPTION!
ANTHROPOS can't possibly refer to us all.

How do we break this world to imagine other possible worlds?

How might we dream ourselves
out of CAPITALISM?
Plants as allies
pulling matter out of the air to transform the planet
--> they made the world liveable and breathable
Planthropocene as aspiration
(conspire with the plants!)
possibilities of seeing + sensing + being.