🗓 6 sessions, Oct 13 - Nov 17
🕰️ 2.5 hour sessions, Sundays 4:00-6:30pm
🗺 Location: Alternating between the wilds of Prospect Park, living rooms in BedStuy/Park Slope, and other undecided locations
💰 Sliding scale: $0-$100 (scholarship) to $350 (based on a $10/hr rate per facilitator) to $600 (supporter). Tuition goes toward compensating facilitators for prep & class time, course materials (snacks, adventures), and other admin costs.
🐌 Max 12 participants
Eyes as Big as Plates by Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth
"The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal." - Melanie Challenger
We are each constantly embedded in a web of interdependent creatures, from the microbes in our gut to the plants we consume to the ecosystems we inhabit. Becoming Creature is a pedagogical experiment in exploring these webs and our place within them. We’re curious to learn from non-humans (beetles, walruses, sea otters, mold, mycorrhizae). Are you? We find them capable of spectacular, awe-inspiring, and often troubling ways of being. Academic talk might call this non-human phenomena.
Humans have seemed to develop various theories for how to sense-make of ecological phenomena. How does it happen? Why does it matter? What relationship(s) ought we cultivate? We call these nature-based ideologies. They guide us through conceptual and ethical frameworks that interweave capital “N” Nature with our unfolding human drama: past, present, and future. As newcomers to some of these ideologies, we find ourselves lost in a philosophical mess, especially as new technology thrusts us into complicated entanglements with carbon and silicon alike. At their root, these ideologies speak to a relationship with non-human phenomena.
A practice of embodying creatures can help us better understand what that relationship is and can be. Our take: we are all already creatures, we just need better practices for becoming them.
In this class, we hope 𓅻 fellow creatures 𓅻 will join us in exploring the following questions through discussion, play, and collective creation:
$$ \text{If science lets us talk to plants, what rights do we owe them?} $$