Collective Conversations: Observing a Year
How can we share meaningful actions and rituals that connect us to land, place, and beings beyond the human experience?
What is a moment or time in which you exited yourself and entered into a larger conversation with nature?
Collective Conversations: Observing a Year, is a decentralized and growing knowledge bank that will unfold over the year 2021 through collective imagination and participation. Please visit conversation-projects.com for more information.
This project percolated out from our experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic, current social justice movements, and the climate crisis. Through our explorations in the confluence of these spheres, we see a need for a tool that could bring together different practices, beliefs, ideas, and stories about an interdependent world. In response, we are creating a participatory, ecologically-focused, socially engaged digital library that collects submissions of individual experiences, practices, and wisdom(s) about a More-Than-Human world. Our intention is to organize the collections and form a ‘pluriverse’ of stories that help make meaning in this more-than-human world. The project is an effort to collectively build a space that engages in healing practices, democratizes art-making, and is a resource for learning.
This project is supported in part by the 2020 F.E.A.S.T. Grant. Organized by Sobia Ahmad & Monroe Isenberg.
We are currently archiving shared practices that approach a more-than-human world. To create this library, we are inviting 365 people (symbolizing a year) to respond creatively to the following sample prompts. Participants may submit any and all formats and mediums ranging from photos and videos, to sound, writing, poetry, books, and other types of conversations.
—What does a more than human world mean to you?
—Imagine practices that allow you to participate more fully with non-human beings.
—Share a moment or experience in which you exited yourself and entered into a larger conversation with nature.
Submissions will be accessible through a digital library organized into themes that will organically emerge. Encouraging active participation and knowledge sharing, we will host four quarterly events using the archive (online or in person pending COVID-19). Facilitating these workshops and larger discussions is an invitation to learn new and evolving languages that enable greater participation in the world around us.
Our first workshop will take place in April, 2021 in though CULTIVATE.