around us // inside us will immerse attendees in multisensory experiences that call on us to examine our relationship with the natural world: that which exists within and outside of us; those we can and cannot impact or control.
Waterfront Patchwork: Social Ecologies, Coastal Peripheries and the Latent Spaces of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal • Chloe Smolarski
A close up of an in-process tapestry containing quilt squares that have been dyed using foraged materials.
This multi-pronged project consists of a patchwork tapestry composed of quilt squares dyed with foraged biological and chemical materials: ochre earth stains, "under-the-BQE" soup, rusted iron nails and bolt juice from the Atlantic Basin, ashes from a studio building fire, neglected copper wires, basil leaves, bladderwrack seaweed dyes, and more.
The tapestry serves as a meditation on place, an incomplete archive of South Brooklyn's coastal peripheries, and a point of departure for an associative performance lecture, workshop, and loosely structured discussion. Drawing on oral histories and research, the project explores the proposed BMT/EDC development, the Red Hook Coastal Resiliency Project (RHCR,) the working port, the Blue Highway, greenways, berms, and related urban interventions, examining how these projects intersect with climate change, flooding and sea-level rise, and gentrification.
Woven into this non-linear performance lecture and workshop is the concept of walls. Walls are optimized to shelter and protect, but in a dynamic and uncertain world, does their rigidity produce fragility, sacrificing robustness?
This headshot is of an European American woman with disheveled hair looking at the camera. The image is backlit and makes her hair glow, orange and casts a slight green light onto her. She is wearing a black sweater and a blue shirt collar is visible. The background shows a bright light on the left and a blurred vertical object on the right.
Chloe Smolarski is an interdisciplinary research-based artist, media maker and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice combines oral history methodologies, decentralized storytelling and the co-creation of dialogic spaces rooted in memory and ecological imaginaries.
Kin Between / Kin Within • gil lopez
Collage of dendritic fractal patterns in river deltas the body, bloodstream, root system and neurons.
A small ceremony for remembering the invisible relationships that make us who we are. Explore the relationships within and around you through ecological divination, symbolic encounters, and chance.
For those standing at a threshold, carrying a question, or seeking a moment of connection. Enter a temporary sanctuary of symbols, stories, and ecological wonder. Through a guided encounter shaped by chance, intuition, and the wisdom of the living world, you may discover new ways of seeing yourself and your relationships. Bring a question, an intention, or simply your curiosity. Something unseen may be ready to reveal itself.
As an environmental educator and activist, gil lopez creates earth-based installations and works within land-based movements to produce socially engaged art and bioremediation outcomes. Working with multiple stakeholders, including more-than-human entities, gil creates opportunities to engage with and activate space and time.
Invasive Kin • Shenghan Gao
a black and white film still of mugwort with sil.
This is an interactive presentation that recounts the past year of endeavors to understand the concept of "invasive kin," specifically through the plant portal of "mugwort." The presentation will not be an ordinary powerpoint. It will be a nonlinear telling that will include an origin story of the project, how Shenghan met each of her collaborators, tangents that led her to the core of the project, the people who fed her throughout, the attempts (workshops) they did in New York, the connections and plant relatives in China, as well as some film clips and physical traces from this journey.
Captured on film camera in the afternoon light, Shenghan smiles in front of an intersection with some scooters behind her. She has long hair and bangs.
高胜寒 Shenghan Gao (b. Chengdu, China) forages from many disciplines such as dance, history, film, and cooks with mediums such as 16mm film, cyanotypes, animation, social experiments, performance, participatory workshops, walking tours. She is interested in unlearning all the systems of belief that settler colonialism and capitalism have instilled in us, starting from the most mundane units of our lives: the names we call ourselves, the food we cook, the steps we dance in, and the "weeds" we walk by everyday. Every encounter is a portal to reimagine how we can root differently together.