A Trans-college Research Cluster
Cluster Description: As an interdisciplinary group of scholars, scientists, artists, engineers, community workers and activists (from Theater and Dance, Environmental Design, and the Department of Land, Water, Air Management), we gather around questions of remediation, to deepen our understanding from across our various situated disciplines, and to develop strategies for response that are holistic in their approach. Remediation is not only a practice that relates to soil; it is also an aesthetic and narrative practice in this undertaking. Our goal through this cluster is to examine remediation responses with knowledge gathered through science, but also the embodied knowledge generated from communities that are most impacted by ecological collapse. This collaboration will pay attention to the arts as a powerful site for healing and coalition-building, for the first step in changing our land-based practices is to reinvigorate the stories we tell about them.
2020-21 Activities: Members of the cluster have found inventive ways to keep the conversation around remediation alive through their ongoing practices in 2020, since the start of the pandemic. Margaret Laurena Kemp headed an international collaboration with Granada Artist-in-Residence Sinéad Rushe to co-direct a radical, ground-breaking contemporary response to the classical play, Antigone, in Spring 2020. In Margaret's own words: “When it was clear that COVID-19 would impact our campus, I was moved to consider how we could allow this moment in history to positively impact our learning community and our intended production... as an artist and instructor, my call to action is to model collaboration, research, creativity and community engagement through performance and theatre making practices. For me this is the soul of the value of theatre and dance at an R1 Institution. Our hybrid approach to Antigone, which is now called Antigone NOW, answers the call.”
Cluster participants continued their mushroom cultivation and kombucha leather experiments into the summer, growing two varieties of mushrooms – Reishi and Pink Oysters – which yielded enough harvest to undertake paper-making experiments. The materials generated through these experiments were used to create an original artwork (LaugHeal) that was included as part of the Healing Arts Walking Tour, which is currently on display in store-windows across Davis.
The group plans to undertake a community-sourced building project in Winter/Spring 2021, where we will crowdsource the materials (kombucha leather and mushroom paper) for a mobile public altar to be installed in Davis in May/June 2021. The crowdsourcing project will be accompanied by a series of zoom workshops where we share the knowledge about kombucha and mushroom cultivation, and shepherd participants through the production process. The altar will become the site for public story-telling and performance sessions centering stories of remediation. More details coming in early 2021!
