ANTI FEAR ASSEMBLY: deceleration ritual: re-imagining new metrics

deceleration ritual: re-imagining new metrics is a workshop led by artists and collaborators Ánima Correa and Sahar Sepahdari-Dalai. They invite us to join a mediated discussion surrounding alternatives to capitalist notions of time and economy. We aim to tap into the process of making while reconnecting to the natural world as a technological space in line with what we will introduce as dream logic as a guiding praxis. We are inviting participants to gather materials from around their home and environment that they can use in the process of creating a personalized time keeping device, or embodied, imbued object or gesture. With a focus on resisting extractive machines, participants will make time keeping metrics in the process of holding this conversation.

Workshop guidelines:

These are some questions we may ask along the way:

How is time intimacy? How can an economy be ritualistic? How does fear remove us from the historical equation through cultural amnesia? How can we tap into deep time to access intergenerational and ancestral memory as a tool to resist extraction? How can we use this as a tool for cultural preservation and to fight white supremacist terrorism? 

Concepts to consider: 

Dream logic: A culturally informed practice in abstraction and communication which centers the body politic. It reimagines Surrealism within the context of time-based digital methodologies, through an anti-colonial lens in which the non-linear is the framework for a logical criticality. Dream logic uses our intuition and dreamworld alongside our knowledge base to bring us back to an earth without borders, at the end of extraction, and within our place in nature and history alongside our ancestors.

Submerged perspectives: Are transitional and intangible spaces as geographies that cannot be fully contained by the ethno-centrism of speciesism, scientific objectification, or by extractive technocracies. *The things that cannot be seen, what is obscured, and can’t be bound by colonial frameworks. (Term developed by Macarena Gomez-Barris) 

Extractivism: The removal, transmutation, purification, and commodification of organic material. In a contemporary context by corporate interests and neoliberal governments. Extending to labor and identity, it is the foundation for current exploitative right-wing oligarchical ideologies. Specific to the colonial framework and the roots of slavery, which is at the core of capitalism, the extraction of Black and Indigenous labor fueled the rise of white supremacy, and white supremacy was created to enforce continued extraction. We invite you to gather materials from your home and environment that you would use in the process of creating your metric machine, or embodied, imbued object.  Some examples of materials could be: pencil and paper, needle/thread, spoon, bottlecaps, food, paint, a digital software like photoshop.

You could read these texts outside of the workshop as a way to reconnect to ideas explored within the workshop: 

*A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Yusoff

*Poetics of Relation, Glissant (All chapters are relevant, concepts of opacity can be focused in on)

*Extractive Zone, Gomez-Barris*Whereas, Layli Long Soldier (poetry)

*Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, Derrida

ABOUT HOSTS

Ánima Correa is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Her work mines the institution of extractivism through the lens of South American geopolitics, culture, and mythology. She has exhibited with Court Space, Los Angeles; Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York, NY; 67 Ludlow, New York, NY; Kimberly Klark, Queens, NY; Callao Monumental, Lima, PE, among others, as well as through several off-site and site-specific exhibitions in Colorado, New York, and Mexico City. She has participated in panels and lectures at El Museo de la Nación, Lima, PE, and MoMA PS1, Queens, NY. Correa received her BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design and a BA in Urban Studies from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. She is a co-founder of project space AMO Studios, which operated from 2011-2014 in New York, NY. 

Sahar Sepahdari-Dalai is an Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based video/performance artist, sheescaped the Iran-Iraq war with her mother in 1985 as a small child. Over the last decade she’s practiced the digital arts, transforming her experience of homelessness as a disabled youth. Sepahdari-Dalai works within the axis of healing to multiply meaning through translation and embodiment. Thinking through object-oriented ontologies and time-based art, she decodes social norms and cultural intersections through radical humor. Poetics of place and writing are essential to Sepahdari-Dalai’s practice. She curates Digital Diaspora, a show featuring Islamic- Diaspora artists centering Black Muslim Artists. She has shown at New Museum, Abrons Arts, Eyebeam, U10 Art Space (Belgrade), and Judson Memorial Church. She recently performed an experimental lecture at The Haskell Opera House on the U.S./Canada border as a contemporary Emma Goldman, with Dadaist-style musicians and her collaborator Adam Kinner. Collaborations with HEKLER:  (Belgrade, Serbia) November 14 - December 14, 2019 - HEKLER RESIDENCY with Liza Grobler and Sahar Sepahdari organized in conjunction with the exhibition hybrid narratives, hybrid histories curated by Nadežda Kirćanski at U10 Art Space and Savremena galerija Zrenjanin in Serbia. (Brooklyn, NY) October 13, 2018 - HEKLER Medium: War, Memory, Protest, a roundtable conversation organized in collaboration with Farideh Sakhaeifar and Sadra Shabab focused on exhibited artworks that examine the relationships between the economy of war and the visual culture.

ABOUT HEKLER ASSEMBLY

HEKLER ASSEMBLY is a transnational space for art and cultural workers to share, discuss and collectively imagine new ways of instituting based on the principles of self-organizing, community care, critical thinking, political education, distribution of resources, and healing. With alternating hosts, we share practical, historical, and theoretical knowledge about collaborative, pedagogical, and governing models established in response to shifting regimes, colonial and neoliberal violence. We question and learn about radical hospitality and conviviality, eco-centered community organizing, instituting, and art practices that showcase the symptoms we need to transform. Most importantly we continue asking what can be the role of arts now and in the future. Assembly is envisioned as an open collaborative process that includes reading groups, conversations with practitioners, and the ANTI FEAR series. 

ANTI FEAR series are initiated in collaboration with New York-based artist and neurologist Sonja Blum. It is an evolving collective practice aiming in this time of crisis and change for a space decidedly between cultural/theoretical dialogue and therapeutic discourse. It is envisioned as a space in which we bring privately held fears into community with others' fears to embrace vulnerability and open collective experiments in community-building, trust, reciprocal care, and re-imagining the commons. This work is explored through poetry, movement/body work, breathing exercises and meditations, readings, lectures and other practices that untie repressive knots and make us feel empowered, imaginative and hopeful.