 Okay, so maybe we can start now. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining Refest. My name is Iris Zhang and I'm a director of Culture Hub LA. Refest is Culture Hub's annual festival which brings artists, activists, and technologists together to explore our role in reshaping the future. Today, as part of Refest, we're presenting a conversation on ritual spirituality and healing practices and we're excited to partner with Superglider for our festival once again, this year, and present a works of Superglider's 2022 Sayar cohort. So today's conversation will be moderated by Isabel Bevers, Superglider's artistic director and Culture Hub's past resident artist. So I'm going to pass on to Isabel. Thank you, Iris. Good morning or good midday. I guess everyone, if you're tuning in from Los Angeles or New York, we're really happy to be here with you all this morning. As Iris mentioned, my name is Isabel Bevers. I am artistic director with Superglider. We're so happy to collaborate with Culture Hub for the third year now on presenting at Refest. So we're just really grateful to be here, especially in light of recent world events. Focusing on reunification seemed like a really apt theme and we're excited to include some of our Sayar ambassadors from our new cohort to engage in this presentation and dialogue on how ritual spirituality and healing practices operate in their own creative practice. We will do full introductions and tell you more about what to expect during our time together today. But before starting, I wanted to hand the mic over to Paige Emery to lead us through a land acknowledgement. Everyone, we would like to acknowledge that we live on and benefit from the ancestral and unceded territory of the Indigenous peoples of this land, the Gabriolano, Tongva, Tumash, and Tattivian tribes. We recognize these tribes are still here and there is still ongoing violence and tension that still persists and with that we acknowledge our shared responsibility in decolonialization, reconciliation, and reparations. Wonderful. Thank you Paige for leading us through that important part of our dialogue today. To further settle ourselves into being together and sharing the space on the Zoom call, I will have Naomi Stewart lead us through a quick breathing and somatic activity. At this time you can either soften your gaze or close your eyes entirely. We're going to do a breath connecting exercise. If at any point in the exercise you feel dizzy, you can stop the exercise and breathe regularly. Get start by taking steady breaths, place a hand on your heart and a hand on your stomach. Bring yourself into this moment. Relax the space between the eyes. Relax the jaw, the back of the neck. Relax your throat, your tongue. Bring ease to your shoulders. Relax your entire body. Once you've relaxed, take an inhale for four counts. As you're inhaling, imagine your breath starting at your feet and floating up the front of the body. Once it reaches the top of the head, pause for four counts, holding the breath, and then exhale for another four counts. Imagine the breath now sinking down the back of the body. Pause and hold at your feet for four counts. Repeat this cycle, breathing up, holding it for four, breathing out, holding it for four as it goes up and down your body. Repeat for three rounds of breath in this rhythm or you may breathe at your own pace. I'll give us a minute or so. One more cycle of this breathing. Once you reach your feet, take a deep inhale in and exhale together and now just sit and feel your body. How does your body feel? Are any emotions coming up for you? Try to observe these without judgment or meaning making. Once you've identified those feelings and emotions, take another breath, slowly move your extremities and blink your eyes back open. Take in your left, your right, around your surrounding. Once you're ready, center back on the screen and with each other. Wonderful. Thank you Naomi. That was very grounding. I hope now that we're all situated together and grounded, we'll be ready to take the next 90 minutes together. I'll introduce Super Collider a little bit more in-depth, each of our speakers and then we'll move into some presentations. I will say during that I could hear my dog snoring so I think everyone in the room was very relaxed. So thanks for that Naomi. So for those of you who might not be familiar with Super Collider, we are an art sci-tech organization based in Los Angeles. We started out as a small brick and mortar space in Englewood featuring local contemporary artists and over the past few years have grown into an organization that really focuses on how to bring critical conversations around art, science and technology through exhibitions and programs. Our exhibitions include art festivals, this is an image from Spring Break Art Show. We also organize pop-ups and curate both in Los Angeles and beyond. On the right here you see an image from the Matsudo Science and Art Festival in Japan and Super Collider is really interested in partnering and collaborating with other art spaces and organizations. So we utilize a satellite model to work with other art spaces and exhibition venues to bring our ideas and our curatorial concepts to broader audiences and to foster a sense of community with other art spaces. A core part of Super Collider is our SciArt Ambassador program and we have an incredible group of ambassadors starting this year for our 2022 cohort and Refest has timed really well for us this year as we just started a new cohort of which Naomi, Paige and Mish are a part of but we have nine incredible artists, creative technologists, curators and creative producers who come together to both engage in a community building program in which we share in having dinners together and curating exhibitions in Los Angeles as well as a professional development program where we hope that through this collaboration through the cohort we all learn from one another and have the opportunity to expand our creative practices. So we're so lucky and humbled by our cohort this year. Everyone is just really incredible. At the end of our talk today I'll share some links where you can stay up to date with Super Collider. Each of our cohort members will be working towards curating an exhibition or organizing an event based on their own research and inquiries so definitely stay tuned. There's a lot of exciting programming coming up this year as this new cohort has started. And I'll take a moment to introduce our three cohort members that are presenting today. When the theme of reunification came up I thought immediately of these three artists. There's a lot of resonances in the cohort this year of folks thinking about spirituality and ritual as ways to practice healing and move forward in the face of disease, war, inequity, and justice. And so I was really excited to work with Miesh and Naomi and Paige to share some of their projects and practices that are inspiring. And also we hope to leave you all with some ideas about how you might engage in ritual and healing practices in your own lives and your own artistic practices. So I will read some quick bios and then we can get started with our main event which are our artist presentations. So first I'll introduce Naomi Stewart. Naomi Stewart is a Los Angeles-based curator and writer. She curated the Super Collider's Mothership Multimedia exhibition The Emergent in 2020, among other projects in recent years. She has also published pieces in the in-brake residency journal and her blog The Wandress. Her curatorial interests currently center on the cultivation of brave spaces for personal and collective healing and education. So welcome Naomi. We're so excited to be speaking with you all today. Our next speaker that is here with us is Miesh Miller. Miesh Miller is a Los Angeles-based painter, printmaker, muralist, and installation artist. Miesh's practice is informed by commitment to abstraction and investment in color theory, printmaking, painting, graphic design, queer histories, and queer theory. Miesh's work employs saturated color, gradients, shapes, symbols, and text, referential of scientific, environmental, and cultural metaphors relevant to their trans identity. So hey Miesh, we're so excited to have you here as well. And Paige Emery is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring the ecological body and intercommunications that weave worlds. She has exhibited and performed at places such as the Getty Museum and Human Resources, Los Angeles, and upcoming at HKW Berlin. In addition to being a SciArt ambassador, Paige is currently working on a long-term regenerative ecology project exploring more than human relations with Regan Network and is also a researcher at the New Center for Research and Practice. And I was especially excited to invite these three artists for their distinct practices thinking about racial equity, queer joy, and ecological justice. So welcome everyone and I'll hand it over to Naomi to lead us through our first part of the dialogue today. Thank you, Isabel. I'll go ahead and share my screen now. You can all see that. Wonderful. Okay, well, it's such a pleasure being able to speak and just share a bit of my, not just my practice, but some of my story and experience in light of racism, racialized trauma. It's so important in this time to center back on self and how we can heal from all the disunity that's going on. So I'm just really excited to share a bit of what I've been working on. Before I get started, I wanted to bring attention to the painting I chose as the title slide here. It's from South African Painters, left in Machepa. In reference to this work, he had a beautiful quote and I'll read that now. It says, the works attempt and seek to reimagine and reinvent ideas of self-awareness to establish a new meaning of identity and beauty by creating conversation between the known and the unknown in light to liberate ourselves, our consciousness and to self-realize. I thought that was a beautiful quote. And as we focus on refest theme of reunification, in light of racialized trauma, I invite you to consider four things. One is reflexivity. Two is relationship. Three, response and rest. Number four. Yes, I'm a fan of alliteration as a writer, so I find it sticks better to have for our reflexivity, relationship, response and rest. I would like to present these ideas to you and contextualize them through the lens of my practice and my personal story and experience. So reflexivity, my background is an anthropology that was brought between my bachelor's then and minor in our history. And a big part of the research practice in anthropology is reflexivity of the researcher. So it involves examining relationships with research informants, the people who give you your data and insights. And it involves also involves taking into consideration the traits that the researcher has and how those traits shape the way that their informants might see them. So basically introducing and recognizing bias in their own research. I love Turner's take on reflexivity and I think it really connects to this idea of feeling as we're talking about this. He says it refers to moments in which social actors can become conscious, us being the social actors, can become conscious of and can reflect upon social life in ritual and other cultural performances which are reflexive in the sense of showing ourselves, ourselves, arousing consciousness of ourselves as we see ourselves. And this idea was not, it was introduced to me in undergrad but I think even before in my writing and poetry coming into my practice, this idea of self-reflection and introspection was important to me. And I think it is important if you are an artist or anyone trying to heal is understanding your own story and how it connects to the broader context. And so in that same vein, I'm going to share a bit of my story and experience with racial trauma. So yes, I'm baiting you with beautiful family photos and me as a cute baby. On the left you can see pictured here my family, my parents, two parents and us four kids. I'm the one in the bottom right hand corner there. And then to the right, the picture to the right is a photo of me as a toddler with a head full of hair. So these visuals up as I as I speak on a bit of my story. So most of my parents met as teenagers and they've been pastors my entire life. They work for the Salvation Army and part of being pastors of the Salvation Army is moving around a lot. We go to different churches I think I've lived in four or five cities, went to a multitude of schools. And the idea and big part of the Salvation Army is apart from obviously Christianity is service. And so while we served in many underserved communities, touching those who are ex-cons, addicts, homeless populations, you name it, it was ingrained in me early on that I'm not any better than anyone else. And I would say that moving around though, we also while we've served in those areas, we lived in suburban areas, we were housed in very nice white suburban areas that went to decent schools and I'm thankful for it. But I recognize that privilege and sort of being shielded. And I would say that my parents did shield my siblings and I from that overt racism being in the church, it rarely came up. And our focus as a family was to draw near to God and to lead in service. And so it really wasn't until grade school and onward that I realized that I wasn't black enough being mixed-raced. I have part Hawaiian, part Dianese American and Black American. And being mixed and talking the way that I do having come up in the areas, I wasn't black enough for either space. And so realizing that I sort of put it to the side and focused on my studies and my extracurricular finding diverse friend groups to really survive that time of my life. I knew racism could exist and I think many of us have this experience. It could exist in places like the American South and was taught a bit about during Black History Month, you know, with racism, slavery, etc. But systemic racism was a new concept to me until I reached college and onward. It was hard for me to believe, but I had a reckoning in 2020 as many white friends and family friends from church spaces, especially deny the existence of systemic racism, primarily in the criminal justice system. I realized that they were denying the experience of so many who had gone through the exact same thing, people who looked like me. Albeit it took me time to fully understand its existence. Up to this point my mission was just to do and work my race aside. That's what I was taught and to take opportunities as they arose. But 2020 forced me to stop and take an honest look at where I stood among my white peers on the issue of race. And in that it inspired me to really dig deeper than I've already have in this issue and in my work. And I came to realize this quote for myself. I finally understood that what I was unable to communicate or understand at the time as a Black woman with my background, I could not risk breaking free from the mold I learned to work within. That I realized was my racial trauma, wearing at my self-esteem and mental health, trying to be enough and not too much in these spaces, which has led me to needing therapy and implementing some of these practices to really gain confidence in my own identity and moving in my life. And so reflexivity was a huge part of me cementing my interests and my practice. And I know that it can be useful for every one of us and part of reflexivity, once you know yourself, you can help and know others. And that's part of what the importance of relationship is. Often our relationships can inform ourselves of who we are. So the couple of projects I'll share with you that I worked on really emphasized this idea and my interest in in relationship. The first being the project I did with Super Collider at their mothership location. And it was the exhibition for emergence I curated with Maru Garcia. And the concept of emergence suggests that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, meaning us being the individual parts, how I was interpreting it, but also in how the world works and in life works. We are the parts and the sum of those parts working together creates one whole unique thing. And so behavior at a large scale arises from detailed structures, patterns and relationships at a finer scale, bringing to life something new and distinct. The emergence characterized by its novelty and unpredictability is a result of a process of self organization through complexity. This exhibition presented work that explored such patterning to discover the emergent, a restored form that continues to unfold through varying media, including soft sculpture, video, watercolor, mixed media, software, painting, and poetry. So this idea of the banality of repetition in a lot of these life processes really honed in on that idea of relationship that that is required for us to even function. And the works obtained Kim, Dia Jenkins, Julian Lombardi, Arielle Maldonado and Santiago Renteria really their work spoke to this idea and conversation of the emergent. And so this is initially the kind of overarching thesis, I guess, that I was interested in with this project. Another project I worked on in 2021 was in partnership with Dia Studios and it was for their in-break residency first cohort. The in-break residency I think is a wonderful program and it's a four month residency where artists are challenged to integrate their practices with community outreach to answer this question. How do we heal racialized trauma and what can a post-racialized society look like? And so this really specified, I mean, although I had projects in between those two, this one really honed in on racial healing and really looking at a post-racial future, what can that look like as a society? And we focused a lot. We read a bunch of different authors, but one that we focused on was Resma Menekin's book, My Grandmother's Hands. And he stated in our exhibition theme, Into the Deep, Unto the New, we're sort of rooted in this. But he states that in today's America, we tend to think of healing as something binary. Either we're broken or we're healed from that brokenness. But as we know, that's not how healing operates. And it's almost never how human growth works. More often, healing and growth takes place on a continuum with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health. And so each of the artists in their projects had to navigate this continuum and bring people on that journey through their practice. Andrew Nemmer, Arnishia Williams, Stephen Johnson, Liberty Worth for the Four Artists. And I recommend you go and check out their projects, but today I'll just share a couple and sort of what they did. So the first is Liberty Worth. And her project, she's LA-based quilts maker, textile artist teacher. And her project, Where We Have Been and Where We Hope to Be, was inspired from a series she started in 2020 in response to George Floyd, his death and the protests at the time. And she created a series of these quilts implementing collected African fabrics and other fabrics, using triangular pieces and creating these images that stood for immense emotion. And she was processing the tumultuousness at the time. So this is one work divided. But beyond this work, she then invited in for her project, her community of a diverse group of artists and students and teachers to create their own quilts, digital quilts answering those questions about how do we begin to heal our traumas? Is there hope moving forward? And so her project was really influential in starting those conversations. And she had another exhibition where she presented those works and created quilts from those participant digital quilts. And people were able to also build quilts at that exhibition. So it's something, it's one of those projects that has a life of its own, coming from the Andrake residency. Another artist, choreographer, teacher and writer, Arnisha Williams, she's a black artist. And she, her project, she brought her dance troupe together and they all happened to be BIPOC. And her heart was towards the BIPOC communities and creating space to really feel and to really speak freely and not feel trapped in doing so. You can speak freely. And so for her project, she recorded, took audio from their Zoom meetings, worked with a sound design designer and created this soundscape. And then members from that same community choreographed dances along to that soundscape. So I'll play a little brief bit of this so you can get a sense. And now I'm gonna mute myself. I feel exhausted, exhausted on many, many levels, hypocritical, angry. I feel left. I feel frustrated, feel really sad for the state of the world. I also feel at peace. This is a confusing time right now. I often feel like the world is having an experience and polarity on one hand. It's a calming time because some of us are finding pockets of quiet in the storm. On the other hand, there are in fact storms and human lives are being caught in the middle. So I wish I could play all of it. It's about three and a half minutes. But you can certainly check all of this out at inbreak.co. And I'll share that link with you all as well. And so her work really brings this sort of dichotomy that I want to present to you as a BIPOC individual if you are here or as a white or non-black ally. There are two houses in relationship as an ally or potential ally. It's learning. It's understanding people's stories. It's giving space to other people's stories and listening for the BIPOC individual. That is finding spaces where you're welcome and you feel safe and you can be fully yourself. And so part of that is in relationship. And now that same dichotomy I think exists in the last two points here, response and rest. I think response really is for those who want to be active. And in practical ways, it's really promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in either your place of work or in your sphere of influence. If you have privilege, practicing reflexivity, using those relationships to give you that foundation, educating yourself to then stand up when you notice something isn't right on that individual basis. And then for the BIPOC individual, really it's rest. And anyone really who's gone through trauma, but especially the BIPOC individual is rest. And for me, part of that rest includes therapy, it includes music, it includes yoga, it includes just taking time and quiet away from everything, taking those mental health days that are needed. And also just not responding if I don't feel that if it's too much, I think in 2020 there was a whole lot of, hey, teach me everything I need to know. And I'm like, oh, I'm still learning about myself, learning about myself. I can't really explain everything to you. And so really just having that care and radical empathy towards one another and towards these issues is sort of the next move here. And I'll leave you with a poem I wrote in 2020. It's a spoken word video that sort of speaks again to this idea of the disunity and how we can begin that path. Followed by the moth, waiting for decay and full consumption of fire food. For thoughts have kept me speechless. Cotton in my mouth, unquenchable by water. Living seems so much more complex, peace so much more of an imaginary. Divisions splitting borders, splitting states, splitting communities, churches, splitting families, friendships. Nature groans. The earth and human existence grown in labor pain. No birth in sight. Convince the end in years and I'm right to righteous your wrong evil holistic considerations evil grace and evil you have to get what's yours and what's due vindicate me. The earth groans in unison. That seems to be our unifier. The utter suffering and denial of the suffering of others unless you've clearly suffered more. My heart, my heart breaks either way. God's heart breaks either way. And not equally, but equitably personally resonating with the whole of your being. Healing starts with finding the whole of your being putting together the broken pieces. Restoring them as a new thing. First fire food now refined by flames. Moth drawn to flame to burn. Do you see it? The new thing. Thank you. And here if you wanted to follow more of my work, I recommend my the adoksa underscore exhibit Instagram. If you follow my personal, I mean, I might you see, it's just my life. But if you want to see more of my art and work, go to those exhibits. And then in brick.co, if you want to see any of those projects from the in break residency. Thank you. Thank you so much Naomi. Yeah, snaps for the poetry incredible. I don't want to say a lot because all of your words speak for themselves, but I loved when you said still learning and I think that's a great spirit for today and for all of us here in this space together. So thank you for all of that. Really wonderful. Next I will hand it over to Mish Miller. Hi everyone. Thank you so much, Naomi. That was really wonderful and I feel lucky to take the reins from here. I'm just going to go ahead and share my screen. Okay, so hello. My name is Mish Miller. I'm going to be using a combination of notes that I wrote and kind of going off the cuff. So I apologize for any clunkiness there. I am a painter designer installation artist. Also, as you heard in my introduction, a transgender non binary identifying person and a super collider ambassador. And my work is really dedicated to color theory, abstraction and investigating queerness. And in this sort of presentation, I'm going to go through a bit of my own work. Some other artists who I feel are using color very powerfully some of my own research both environmental and scientific into color and perception. And then I'm going to show you a short video I made kind of indulging me in an experiment together that will hopefully get our brains and our eyes working together and kind of feel that happening in real time. So I really appreciated that this kind of panel had the theme of unification and spirituality because I feel that color perception is really uniquely related to that. And it's definitely very related to me as a queer person who is kind of trying to let go of binary ways of thinking and embrace spectrums. And also just as a trans person, I'm kind of really in a way fixated on perceptions and kind of my own truth within them and without them. So color is just a really important way to kind of think about cultural associations, personal associations and environmental associations with those things. And I'm just going to go through a couple of my own personal works to kind of ground the research. I use color in my work as a manipulator of emotion to reference or create association to explore and research and as a tool to understand the way we perceive and experience the universe at large. This is an example of personal work in which I kind of very specifically utilized a cultural and associative color taken from this kind of Valentine's hearts sort of motif, which is like a very literal example. But in my work there's a high sense of digital color space and something that's kind of important to note is the difference between the way color mixes in light and the way color mixes as a physical property in a liquid or pigment. So that's something I'm kind of always working in the translation between those two to create the obstacle experience within an object. And this is a painting on panel that also has a painting directly on the wall. So really trying to replicate that feeling of light and light really being intrinsically connected to the way we experience color, which I'll go through a little bit later diagrammatically. And this is another painting on wood tonda. So I want to go through a couple artists that I feel are really leading with color in a way that is really exciting and expansive. And I really am drawn to color as a place of expansiveness within the universe. The first artist I wanted to start with is Caitlin Sherry, whose recent series of work is really using thermal and heat vision as a source of inspiration for both color and content in the work, which has a lot of cultural associations with kind of like surveillance and different imaging across spectrums and screens and interfaces as well as heat and kind of a visualization or translation of that into painting. Here are two very different cultural moments of color, one being Lil Nas and like a full hot pink look. So really like a reclamation of a typically feminine color and also a very big moment for queer joy and celebration in a very public space. And then on the right is a painter who I really love, Deborah Koss, who is a very text heavy painter and then employs color to bring a cultural association, humor and power to a piece. And this is kind of a more literal like hyper-rainbows kind of, you know, gay pride. And then also the slogan, Daddy, I would love to dance, has its own sort of complexity of emotional tenor. But the combination of those two things really empower the work. And another artist who uses not only color but explores perceptions and the meaning within that is Anoka Furuki. So Anoka is a Joseph Albers expert who is kind of a color theorist icon. And what she is exploring of his work is the idea of the factual versus the actual. And the, an example of this is that these three paintings consist of only three colors in offset stripes. And that creates what's called a moray pattern and that moray pattern will create a fourth or fifth color. And so in that moment, we know we are only seeing factually three colors, but we are actually experiencing five colors. So the question there lies, where is the truth? Is it in our experience of the five colors or the factuality that there are only three colors in front of us? And that's where color and perception really start to shake our, just our own notions of what is our full reality. This is just kind of something I love as an inspiring source, which is color palette cinema, but it's really just extracting the main color palette from a single frame of a movie. But what I find really interesting is that lighting conditions and saturation hue and value create so much emotional power within an image and can then be extracted and used in other applications, whether it's design, painting, architecture, et cetera. Before I show you a short video that really focuses on the way our eyes physically see color and operate and translate to our brains, I wanted to go through a little bit of it visually. So I'm really interested environmentally by color, by animals, by just our environment. And something I find really interesting is that humans can see around 10 million colors, but the mantis shrimp can see over 16 million. And it's really just a clear metaphor of the limits of our perception and the way that we hold ourselves in kind of a hierarchy of knowingness to other animals within our universe and that we can really look to look looking from a different angle at things and perhaps in places we wouldn't have thought can really expand our understanding. And so on the right here is just a diagram of the human brain and the highlighted are the most kind of relevant parts that perceive color and our brains work by experiencing color trachromatically, which is red, green, and blue sensitive cone pigments. So there are three cones within the eye that are cones and rods that each perceive to complementary colors on the color wheel. As you can see here, it's just kind of a very basic human color wheel primary and complementary colors that will be very highlighted in the video. And, you know, it's a more complex way of thinking about the way we know color and categorize color. And, yeah, so David Katz, who is just someone who talks a lot about color and light and perception really highlights that light and color are, you know, inexplicably connected. And this really is intriguing because the question of what is and isn't a subjective experience is really just connected to our experience of color. And I want to go to this slide really quick because this is kind of arguably the most famous color theory moment in the last 20 years, but what's really interesting to me about this moment was like the argument for kind of the correct truth and different people perceiving the different colors within this image and kind of being shaken in that moment and kind of feeling the need to argue their perceptual truth when in fact all were existing in the same space. And with that, for the sake of time, I'm going to lead into this video. I would like to say with a warning that this video has a lot of flashing lights in color. So if that's something that bothers you or you are unable to watch, I would suggest not participating in the next five minutes. And I apologize for that. That being said, take a deep breath with me. This is my first video I've made like this. And so I hope you all enjoy it. Thank you, everyone. And look forward to your questions later. Okay. Thank you, Misha. That was so cool. I could the ghost of Albert Einstein is still like flashing in my brain. But yeah, that was awesome. Some takeaways for me. I love thinking about this idea is color is expansive. And then also like on the other side of that how and I think this also ties into a lot of what Naomi was speaking up to about the limits of our own perception so that there's some really nice threads building. So thank you so much for that. Excellent. So now I will hand it over to Paige Emery. Hey, everyone. Thanks so much for your presentations Naomi and me. I'm going to share my screen in the current terrain of the climate crisis. There is a prevalent conversation around sustainability. And I've been thinking a lot about sustainability in regards to endurance, especially within the turbulence of the pandemic layered on the geopolitical landscape. Sustainable coping, because sometimes we develop practices to cope. And then after some time or some change, they don't work the same anymore. The practices I found to be sustainable are healing rituals that catered to change itself. Because solutions aren't just realized and then done, there's no on and off switch. Rituals for reflection of change, holding space, grieving and releasing change, planting seeds for change, expressing gratitude for all what still is being amongst all the change and finding different ways of saying I love you and things you love change. A sustaining container by way of inspiring and moving with repeatedly. And here I think of course a lot with Octavia Butler. So I could generalize formulas of rituals roughly like this. Slow down time and attention and stillness. Purify the space of negative and stagnant energy. Acknowledge and set an intention of a relationship to be healed. Place value in that which is helping with your healing. Offer reverence for those involved. Use symbolic representations to bring a narrative into materiality. Be open with a mind of play and imagination in order to be able to receive such healing. And offer gratitude for the experience and those involved and then repeat continuously. And I've been relating how this praxis can be bridged with a type of world building that is desperately needed for eco social renewal in this moment. Existing in a designated realm of enchantment. Ritual allows for imagining avenues outside of the limited arenas of knowledge and possibility constructed within Western capitalist society. Enchantment itself has underlying connotations of magic. A space intrinsically dedicated to a reimagining outside of a conventional reality. If we need ways to reimagine and renew our current epistems, this is a type of realm we can play with in order to transcend our preconditioned form of knowing and creating. Ritual can imagine alternative realities due to its affinity towards an enchanted realm of transformation. While its re-worlding is sutured with day to day object beings making it simultaneously grounded in the material world. Rituals can make transformation and art a state of mind that can open alternate constellations in order to relate and respond to the world differently to shape shift a sensible rigidities. It is the repetition of a specific practice and this process focused repetition that makes it a continual catalyst of change. A grounding framework I've been influenced by is the work of Caribbean decolonial thinker Sylvia Winter on being human as praxis. Thinking outside of conventional Western thought to reconstitute narratives of what it means to be human and how we can interact with our world in our daily practices. To materialize the modalities of meaning making we can locate the places where they convene with intentional praxis and how to orient ourselves in those locations towards renewal. Ritual is situated in this meeting place between poetics and praxis establishing catalytic channels from the internal landscape to the external landscape. Humans are creatures of habit and ritual praxis can have a reprogramming effect on the habitual psyche due to its underlying form of repetitive attentiveness. Through receptiveness while responding to valued enmeshment with others non-humans or object beings ritual can be instrumental in the re-territorialization of relations departing from anthropocentric ordering. So this is an exploration of how we can implement rituals for healing what I call the ecological body. Or the body and its extension to its environment. This means practices of care that are simultaneously for the self and for relating to others and the earth. Capitalism has spread the narratives of individualistic separation of oneself from one's environment in order to prioritize the body as a force of labor. Our bodies are moving memories and the practices of how we relate ourselves and our interactions can uproot the fabric that weaves this normalcy. Malleable implementations within ritual with a fluid framework meant to be adaptable to its ever-changing surroundings can reconfigure the space of objection as an ambivalent one taking the point where boundaries are distinguished between self and other and uprooting it as the point where other relations can be transmuted to a more than human reciprocity continually holding awareness and reverence for the subtle needs of a place whether that place is the individual body or the earth body can move beyond both purely individualistic and purely collectivist assumptions in such an urgent time can we slow down time slow careful practice of attention towards this atmosphere of interaction is a preliminary condition to reconfigure the fabric we are enmeshed relations weave the infrastructure of world making requiring ethical nuances of how entities are related within complexities a body as an extension among entangled bodies can learn to respond to such through practices of reverence and care shifting towards planetary perspectives and new realities of coexistence may be an enormous project but at its simplest form live the reciprocal commitments for being and becoming human as praxis as we collectively dream of new worlds to help the planetary withstand anthropocentric and capitalist effect can we implement practices for how we want the world to exist by how we exist in the world rituals for the ecological body as a practice or a model for practice can be a container that adapts to and for its ever-changing atmosphere ritual is not completed with an end goal rather the solution is the process a continual catalyst for renewal an attentive and adaptive practice producing drastic change by being the process of change itself ritual can of course animate a broad range of happenings for moon cycles and rites of passage to a morning cup of coffee or an art opening an example I'll focus on to explore the catalytic avenues is that of plant ritual and its effect on ecological awareness especially with all that we can learn from plants about cycles of change and here in this video that's playing now I shared a plant ritual through an art installation and performance called ritual Viriditas in which I performed a daily ritual of meditating with singing to and carefully watering an altar of plants a practice that I commit to in my garden every single morning outside of this show Viriditas is a term used by 12th century mystic healer Hildegard of Bingen as the self regenerating power in plants analogous to the entrance of the healing power of human beings to renew their own future the notion of Viriditas is used here both as this comparative metaphor of the force of renewal within plants to that within humans as well as the actualization of such renewal put into motion by the interaction between humans and plants the plant ritual I performed elaborated and awareness and care outside of oneself paving the way to an enchantment of the plants to the point where the relationship with such plants is transformed the act of opening to the interweaving influences creating a new perspective among the senses the installation of ritual Viriditas consisted of an altar of plants with intricate compositions alluding to references of mandalas and significant directions and forms giving off divine emanations that accentuated their enchantment of being in their imbued charisma the plants become objects of value to a heightened sense and thus their presence promotes a stronger influence within empirical knowing of them and other outside of the self the ritual performance requires embodied presence and exchange of senses the act of watering is deliberately orchestrated with a first vessel to cater to each individual plant in its locality while the excess water expelled from its roots is captured by a second vessel to be saved for reuse a process illuminating the offering and care and replenishment throughout the performance I would expressively lean my body into the acts of watering the plant bodies alongside accompanying paintings of leaning figures at the gateways of the altar to convey the somatics of leaning within relationality there is a bidirectional influence between posture and feeling of affection feeling of affection draws posture to lean meanwhile leaning arouses affection this affectionate posture permeates within ritual offering embodied awareness and value to that which is ritualized and in return an altered receptivity feeds into the day to day ritual Viriditas proposed creating alternate pathways towards knowing by leaning into our interactions with other beings altering the threads woven through intersubjectivity this brings attention to what other bidirectional influences are shaping our bodily positions and being shaped by our body positions what local atmospheres we can lean into and lean away from with embodied awareness is about dangers writes how capitalist powers do not draw their power from one tool in particular but rather from a definition of the tool from a relation to the tool which makes of it a neutral instrument that is indifferent to the hands that handle it designating all its users as interchangeable and extending on this I state that by being able to redefine relations we conduct we can redefine fabrications of power this plant ritual is an atmospheric alteration that can be applied to a grander narrative of ecological awareness the noticing and responding of one's body and one's environment a ritualistic modality that can be honed in on is the softening of barriers the formula's mutability eroding bodily edges extending the body to its extenses to its senses in a way that defies geo-ontopower a concept termed by Elizabeth Pavanelli as the governance of existence through divisions between life and non-life at the heart of anthropocentric collodial ordering this type of care and awareness with cycles of change can also be seen through a community gorilla garden I started with my houseless neighbors in the middle of echo park lake a highly trafficked iconic place at the intersection of rapid gentrification and increasing houseless encampments a place where it is illegal to start a garden without an exclusive permit one that is nearly impossible to obtain a place where it is legal to live yet disenfranchised houseless people were resorting to tents there as a result of housing insecurity started in august 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when housed people were trying to figure out how to maintain solidarity and handle grief in isolation when unhoused people were at constant risk of their tented homes being displaced even during shelter in place all amongst the looming doom of the climate crisis knowing that planting community garden there illegally was a risk we took things into our hands during a time of necessity gardening is a landscape of embracing presence amidst the uncertainties of crisis the garden is a continuous place of listening to plants with hands on the soil getting to know the life that grows learning the healing properties of each plant and the soil itself these are openings for building empathetic caring relationships with each other and within ourselves every day at the garden someone would gift or plant something and someone would harvest and learn something all through non-hierarchical interactions between housed and houseless humans and non-humans we had a ritual every day where every time a seed was planted the planter would also plant an intention they wanted to grow along with the seed a practice of hope in unstable times there were multiple layers being experienced everyone working through individual grief figuring what was morally sound on how to be in community along fear of human proximity figuring out how to take care of plants on top of depleted dirt constant conflict and the possibility of being uprooted uprooted at any moment while finding forms of care that could function in a sort of decentralized governance the significance of sustainability not only lies in environmental practice combating the climate crisis but in the daily practice that can uphold joy and hope against streams of struggle and loss that can feel perpetual community gardens are a landscape of this type of processual healing interweaving the earth and humans fertile soil for sustainable degrowth pathways in tandem with physical and emotional regeneration working with plants has been proven therapeutic but this community garden cultivated a multi-layered collective healing expansive through rhizomatic modalities against the extraction exploitation and stressors on the planetary body and human bodies from the beginning of the planting we were worried about starting a gorilla garden in a place where the city could tear it down at any moment but as our houseless friends and collaborators pointed out that is how they felt about their own homes their shelters at risk of being removed at any moment after seven months and many protests eventually that time did come when it was torn down by the city in march 2021 squads of police came to displace all of the houseless tents and fence up a barricade around the whole park and with that the garden a mass support for the community at echo park lake protested to defend the park which only led to unnecessary injuries and arrests but after the despair and loss something of the garden still remained what remained was the practice of mutual aid and mindset of resource allocation the ideology of collectivity outside of capitalist oppression the hope of planting new life amidst uncertainties this garden was an experiment of hope and when the garden ended the experiment of hope didn't end because that is all it was meant to be experimenting with how we can learn to live both individually and collectively and interacting in the spaces between stop so as we continue experimenting with hope and with building new narratives in spaces that can be disorienting in their uprooting and disheartening with their limits we can stay grounded in practices of collectivity and solidarity the day to day acts of care and openness that can endure throughout these times and I wanted to end this with just offering three practices to share beyond this talk that had to do with what we were practicing in the garden so the first is one I mentioned of planting seeds of intention with planting seeds in the soil and this is something that we would do every day in the garden but also you can do it every month especially the spring equinox is coming up on the 20th it's a good time to do it but just a constant reset and reminder to constantly check in with with your intentions as also giving life to your intentions and giving life to the earth and then a second practice is when working with plants practicing listening and being present and paying attention as each plant has its own unique needs and asking for permission when you harvest a plant and thinking the plant you work with and always only taking what you need and then also when we would take a plant we would offer something back in return whether that is water a prayer of gratitude whatever whatever kind of offering that you see fit and then the third practice is proper propagating grown plants or sharing seeds with others to grow their own and do the same an act of sharing and spreading new life which is also against notions of scarcity and individualism yeah I'll end there thank you page wow so many notes that I wrote down during that and I really appreciated you referencing some readings so hopefully we can find a way to share some of those resources after one particularly exciting quote was um collectively dreaming of new worlds I loved when you brought that up and I think that's what we're hopefully doing here today with each other um incredible I'm feeling very inspired we do have about 20 minutes left for some dialogue questions I have questions and if there's anyone in the audience who would like to ask a question I think you can put that in the chat and we'll find a way to get that to me so that I can share that with our our panelists but I'll start off with a question that I snaps oh yeah snap school are in the in the chat I totally agree I'm interested to hear a little bit from each of you about how you came into this relationship with healing spirituality and ritual in your own practices at what point in your life did that start how did that become integrated into your creative practice and anyone's welcome to jump in I think the emphasis of spiritual practice and ritual is always integrated in my life coming up in the church having rituals of prayer song collective worship we're already habits that I had coming up and then of course my own personal writing and poetry I think now today I sort of repurposed that into more introspective and I just take a lot of more time processing on my own I think to to sort of using using tools of prayer and the nasophotic that audio practices like yoga and some of those breathing exercises grounding exercises as needed and just listening to my body and doing the best that I can taking care of my body so yeah I mean I think painting is really ritualistic as a practice and like a real something you really have to dedicate yourself to on that level as well consistently and then yoga for me as well especially like in like a trans body sort of connection just like stretching and yoga have been really important as a ritual in that um and yeah kind of going between the two physicalities of painting and stretching recently like cyclically um have been really important uh during the pandemic as well and I was thinking about this page when you're kind of giving some last like you know rituals to think about adapting um was going on color walks um just kind of going on a walk whether it's like somewhere you go a lot or somewhere new and just really taking note of the color that stands out um in that moment um was just important to my COVID quarantine times for me um I've been on this healing path for a long time where I've been devoted to daily rituals and also not just individually but collectively with friends and community and the way that integrated into my work is just um wanting to be as brutally honest as I can with my work and and really asking myself like what I need right now and what my friends need right now and what I want to share right now and that just really naturally crossed over into being something I really wanted to share because it's something that I just feel is uh really really deeply needed um for for myself and yeah thank you all for that and yeah I think there's there's a lot here that I'm noticing we we're talking a lot about expansion and and dreaming and building new worlds and a lot of that seems to be rooted in these very grounding daily rituals that might seem like small actions but when um thinking about the concept of emergence Naomi like when taken and and ordering into a larger system really do affect change um not only in ourselves and our own consciousness and well-being but hopefully in the broader world um and I think another aspect of that that I noticed in all of your practices is the use of or leaning on the power of empathy as a tool for social change and what that can open up for us so I would love to hear anyone speak a little bit more I think you all mentioned empathy in different ways and maybe not by that exact word but how you relate to the idea of empathy and how that might you see that playing out in your practice in your research and thinking um and in this collective dreaming that we're all doing um this is kind of like a maybe more lighthearted approach to this uh question but you know those videos of people receiving the chroma glasses like colorblind people who receive the glasses that then eliminate a broader color space um and like evoke so much emotion from that person and the people around them um there's just something really special about that like moment where you're taken out of your own knowing and connected to maybe a greater um experience or collective I don't know there's always just something special about that um and that makes me think about like James Terrell's work in kind of those collective experiences but yeah I don't know I made me think of that I think in my experience growing up in the church and then uh even in an in break there was an emphasis of that empathy but more so a radical empathy that you're not just identifying or listening to a person's experiences but you're also offering what is that you need um and how can this space um be safe for you and inspire you to you know be great go be great you know I mean um and and to just be yourself so I think when it comes when I'm you know looking for spaces where empathy emphasized or if I'm building relationships with individual people that's always something of okay can you just say whatever and with gentleness and love kind of guide you in the right direction or take what they're they're saying um without judgment uh without and with a lot of grace um with a lot of humility I think those are some of the things that need to be present in those types of spaces and in these types of conversations when it comes to healing race race and racism so one of the thinkers I referenced Sylvia Winter talks a lot about needing to think outside of conventional western forms of knowing and and how there's a sort of mutation of knowledge needed and I relate empathy to this in ritual because of the practice of of listening in a very humble way where you don't you are thinking you're knowing by way of offering more listening than assuming or um really making space for other types of languages or perspectives than your own and I think that comes a lot through the types of um the focus of attention and like very slow and careful attention that it takes to be able to be open and receptive to this so you can um really that is something that uh a practice that helps us to be able to respond in the best way that we can page to that as well and I think um me she also mentioned this uh this limitation of knowing I think having that humility is is really crucial because we don't know everything we can't possibly know everything about a person just because of what they look like or their what we think their experience is um there was a resident for in break that had made this comment and they said are we did God create us or are we meant to metabolize over 400 years of traumatic history all at once and you can say the same for human history are we meant we're learning of course we're growing but are we meant to metabolize it all at once and try to solve everything you know I think it takes those small intentional steps those rituals to slowly heal and no self and no others so thank you for all of that it makes me think a lot about what we do and are aiming to do as a community within Super Collider and I think all of the work you all presented really exemplifies that and again thank you to Culture Hub for inviting us to to be here and I think it helps us as a community within Super Collider discuss and have a dialogue about some of these practices I hope that we are always bringing in to everything we do and the way we approach our exhibitions our programs um and so to bring it back for my sort of final question um to the Super Collider community in in who we are and I think who we are trying to be um Super Collider we talk about ourselves as being an art science and technology organization so like why are we talking about spirituality and healing practices today and I think of a quote by Hans Ulrich Oberist hopefully I'm pronouncing his name correctly that um talking about the techno spiritual binary and how he thinks about the future of artists as rejecting this binary um he says we are also interested in questioning the principles that have been driving the construction of technology for example body versus spirit or secular versus spiritual we want to go beyond these binaries and become a place that welcomes new inquiry I think it is very important to go beyond pre-existing divisions and work at the intersection of technology and spirituality so I wonder um if and this doesn't need to be about technology specifically but if anyone would like to offer some sort of final words about the value of thinking about spirituality and juxtaposition to art practices creative practices um and sort of that intersection of technology and spirituality if anyone would like to expand on that um so I wrote a piece um for in break uh it centered on this idea of a transient dream space um and kind of relating back to I know me sheer work focuses on the color spectrum and then spectrum in general and then uh in the into the deep unto the new focusing on this continuum of healing and so there's just this thread of blurred lines almost and just this consistent journey not necessarily a final destination and so that's how I sort of contextualize um this relationship between tech and art um the the concrete and the imaginary or the dream um and so I think it's it's important to kind of make those connections because that's how we're able to actualize those dreams um in art art practices and then sort of the work that I've already been doing so um that just uh I guess to like thread the needle back to between that question and my presentation um and and I guess to open a greater question on top of it um is just the importance of um you know the way our eyes see color and light in different lighting through like conditions and kind of project and adjust when what they think they're supposed to see it's very relevant to like screen technology and definitely virtual virtual reality and VR technology um and those are spaces that people are holding are you know they're holding more space for human uh you know activity and though that that's also going to have moments of spirituality and ritual within it inherently um and art so it's just an important I think connection to bring up um for me I very much look at technology as an extension of of humans of the bodies and um the sort of creative infrastructure that we are constantly building but being built with at the same time and also like in a bi-directional way and so with that where we are at spiritually is always going to inform where the technology is at and how we are deciding that we want to um interact in our day to day and what types of intentions we have is going to be reflected in the technology that is acting back on ourselves um so yeah I really think they are uh inseparable in that way fantastic thank you all yeah I think all of those points make a lot of sense to me and I in things that we're always thinking about also how to bring some of these ideas around empathy around social change around building worlds and thinking about bringing those that critical ones to the way we utilize technology and create with technology and um and all of this and I know we we have about five minutes left um those are all the questions I had I'm happy to open it up if there were any questions that came in through the audience or if anyone would like to say um some final words I also would like oops um I'm going to share my screen one more time just for the last few minutes so that anyone who's interested can write down super collider's website or um social uh social media handle um as I mentioned we'll have a lot of upcoming exhibitions and a lot more coming from page mich and Naomi and also all of our other ambassadors um the next super collider uh event you could participate in we have a show opening at the torrents art museum um on april second focused on extraction um thinking about extraction and ecological cultural and social sense so we welcome everyone to join us for that opening and if you sign up for our newsletter on our website you'll be able to find out when all of the upcoming exhibitions programs events will be happening so yeah unless there are any more questions from the audience I'd just love to thank everyone for joining thank you so much mich page and Naomi for all of your time and sharing your research and questions and work with us um and I really appreciate you all talking both about projects that have happened but also leaving us with nuggets of rituals that we can take into our everyday lives of readings and um thank you all so much for sharing with us today it was wonderful thank you thank you thank you thank you culture hub yeah and thank you culture hub yes thanks thank you for hosting