Writing Towards Ecological Becoming: a workshop of playing with ecological tension

FREE
RSVP required: please use the sign-up form 

Please Join Art in the Park in welcoming artist Marc Herbst, who will be leading a workshop in focus, play and writing.

Through methods of focused play, this workshop aims to produce individual and collective writing through the social tensions of ecological entanglements.

Through the spirit of a culture of becoming, this daylong play and writing workshop aims to collectively explore extant possibilities and thus tensions latent in our individual being together. For focus and research, the workshop will utilize collaborative games to bring focus to internal and external relations- it should be fun. 

Of course, social and cultural criticality will go hand in hand in play, and the time together will be inflected by games and talk. Critically here means focused attention to ongoing conflicts related to racial and class disparities as well as the general patriarchal/ hyper-individualistic social landscape of Southern California. We want to explore the tensions between shared eco-social horizons and the actual order, structure and quality of our current eco-social and socio-political realities. 

We will then write and share.

“Towards a culture of becoming” is a new research strand of The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, weirdo archive and publishing house co-founded in LA in 2001 by Marc Herbst and others. Perhaps some of the writing generated in this workshop may come to constitute elements of the eventual issue generated from this topic. “Towards a culture of becoming” looks at the common place of being and doing across and through difference in our rapidly changing environments, and the sustainable but radical desire to live through collapse differently- beyond the unfortunately common violence that established these terms in the first place.

For Marc, this is an interesting opportunity to do some playful participatory research. 

Marc Herbst is co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. He is an interdisciplinary researcher/editor/artist that appreciates the idea of arts-based research. He favors collaborations and situated projects. He is a member of the nGbK SALT. CLAY. ROCK. curatorial collective looking at nuclear pasts and energy futures, and works with The Ghost Host foundation. He is currently a Castille Fellow for Anthropology at Whitman College. Recent writing and editing work include Transversality: Towards Common Becoming in March Journal, and the foreword to We are Nature Defending Itself by Isa Fremeaux and Jay Jordan (Pluto Press/Joaap Press 2021).

For more information, please contact info@artintheparkla.org