March 10th, 2024: Crip’d Ecologies: Convening

Join us for our weekend Convening, an exciting gathering of Disability art, performances, films, experimental sound, workshops, time to connect and more! Crip’d Ecologies Convening is our closing event for the exhibition. It’s a free event with hybrid programming, in the gallery and online, and it’s open to disabled and non-disabled communities of all ages. 

RSVP below to receive links to all online programming.

Sunday, March 10th 2-6pm

2:00 pm to 3:00 pm  “crafting + casting a songspell for our resonant bodies” workshop with Alexa Dexa (ASL, online and in person) 

Approaching Crip experiences as a symphony unfolding with our mobility aids, bedscapes, companions, and environments, Alexa Dexa will gently guide us through crafting + casting a songspell contextualizing our Disabled day to day as valuable, gorgeous sound worlds. No formal musical experience needed to participate!

3:30 pm “Love, Simeon, an Imagined Cinema Workshop”  with Anuj Larvaidya (ASL, online and in person). 

In this workshop performance, audience members will become projector/sprocket and together enact “Love, Simeon”, a cinematic séance which examines the fraught entanglements of human-simian sexual politics. This slow motion-picture unfolds at the rate of three images a minute, while the soundtrack is performed live. As an ecosexual living with HIV, workshop leader Anuj Larvaidya shares the entry point into this dense knot, beginning with the story of those simians who have been laboring to find a prevention/cure for this deadly virus.

*contains references to living with HIV and animal testing.

4:30 pm Film Screening (Online and in person)

Stephanie Heit and Charli Brissey, "Mad Flora and Fauna" (4 min, 2022) 

*contains references to shock treatment and memory loss.

Petra Kuppers, "Becoming Fossil" (11 min, 2023)

Cynthia Ling Lee, “moss time, crip time” (12 min, 2024)

5:30 pm Closing Statement by Cata Gomes of Ramaytush descent and founder of The Muchia Te’ Indigenous Land Trust. The link is HERE.

First floor gallery: 

Crip’d Ecologies: Unfurling Expanded Environments, co-curated by moira williams and Jeremiah Barber

Mezzanine Gallery/ Frank-Ratchye Studio Artist Project Space: Anisa Esmail

Come and celebrate with us!

Accessibility Notes: Free events, step free entrance, and an ADA accessible first floor and bathrooms that are also gender neutral. Free water, light snacks and masks are available as are multiple kinds of seating. The mezzanine gallery is accessible via a freight elevator and stairs. The gallery is a low scent space without air filters. The exhibition offers tactile elements and works, participatory works, an Invoking Aqueous Ancestors Chill ‘n’ Stim Tent, Braille booklets, and wall text. All events are soft performances. Please arrive scent free.

* Please note: For the safety of our extended communities, masks are required for this Root Division event.

Crip’d Ecologies: Unfurling Expanded Environments is presented in Root Division's first floor gallery from February 1 - March 10, 2024. Gallery hours are Wednesday-Saturday, 2-6 pm and by appointment.

More about Crip’d Ecologies: Unfurling Expanded Environments:
In our current moment with no shortage of grief and resistance, Crip’d Ecologies centers disabled artists across race, gender, class and disability, who are expanding ideas of environmentalism toward a more complex reflection of our feelings of trauma, fear, anger and desire. Crip strategies are dynamic, interdependent, and brilliant. These strategies are expressed throughout the exhibition and Convening, offering new perspectives on landscapes that are personal, shared, participatory, hacked, and imagined. Each of these relational ways of being and thinking include our body-mind-spirits. The works here break away from colonial ableisms of the land and our bodies. They challenge where the idea of “invasive” species comes from, and find joy and ancestral connections by treating the entirety of our surroundings as part of our nature. Multispecies relationships abound, and are echoed in Crip queer and tactile ecologies, imprinting on leaves, bodies filled with flowering branches, memory, sacredness, sorrow, and abundantly colorful depictions of plants, animals and the atmosphere and planets. The environment, increasingly synonymous with “the built world”, is playfully and spaciously reimagined and challenged throughout the exhibition to unfurl Crip’d ecological intimacies.