Workshop 2 (Room 220: In Person Only)
Title: Transtemporal Joywork: Echoing into the Future
Abstract: Set in a not-so distant abolitionist future, participants will engage in collaborative storytelling and experiential performance focused on the joywork of futuring together. This workshop centers reworlding and the expansive practices of prefigurative abolition work, drawing on speculative fiction and oral storytelling as a way to profoundly reorient ourselves towards intergenerational justice. During the workshop participants will craft stories of abolitionist futures and, by sharing their stories through each other, experience an uncanny circumstance where the separation between self and other, as well as our interdependent futures, is collapsed and confused. Through this transtemporal joywork we may untether from conventions and practice hope in the abundance of each other…echoing possibilities that could benefit future generations.
Bio:
Jen Rae is an award-winning artist and researcher of Canadian Scottish-Métis (Indigenous) descent living on unceded Djaara Country (Castlemaine) Australia. She is recognized for her practice and expertise situated at the intersections of art, speculative futures and climate emergency disaster adaptation + resilience – predominantly articulated through transdisciplinary collaborations, multi-platform projects, community alliances and public pedagogies. She is the Co-founder and Creative Research Lead at the Centre for Reworlding, Co-founder(with American artist Dawn Weleski of Conflict Kitchen) and Director of Fair Share Fare, a member of the National Task Force for Creative Recovery, and was awarded a prestigious 2023 Creative Australia Fellowship for Emerging and Experimental Art.
Rae creates and contributes to experimental multi-platform collaborative projects balanced with professional mentoring of other artists, public talks, workshops and deep socially-engaged projects with diverse partners and communities. Most relevant is her role as a core artist of Arts House’s prescient REFUGE project (2016-2022) – where artists, emergency service providers and communities worked together to rehearse climate-related emergencies exploring the impact of creativity in disaster preparedness. Relevant projects during REFUGE include the speculative fiction short film REFUGIUM (co-written with Claire G. Coleman); PORTAGE: SHELTER2CAMP in collaboration with 4 First Nations master weavers to co-build 6 life-size disaster shelters with over 120 community participants and partners; the FIRST ASSEMBLY OF THE CENTRE FOR REWORLDING event; and, the art exhibition RESURGENCE. All are grounded in First Nations knowledge systems and protocols, exploring themes climate, colonisation, disaster preparedness and intergenerational justice. Please check out Jen Rae’s website: https://www.jenraeis.com/
Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator, and educator. Syrus is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Arts, McMaster University. Using drawing, installation, and performance, Syrus works with and explores social justice frameworks and Black activist culture. His work has been shown widely, including solo shows at Tangled Art + Disability in 2022 (Random Access Memory), Grunt Gallery in 2018 (2068:Touch Change) and Wil Aballe Art Projects in 2021 (Irresistible Revolutions). His work has been featured as part of the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art in both 2019 and 2022 in conjunction with the Ryerson Image Centre (Antarctica and Ancestors, Do You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future and MBL:Freedom)), as well as for the Bentway’s Safety in Public Spaces Initiative in 2020 (Radical Love).
He is part of the PDA (Performance Disability Art) Collective and co-programmed Crip Your World: An Intergalactic Queer/POC Sick and Disabled Extravaganza as part of Mayworks 2014. Syrus‘ recent curatorial projects include That’s So Gay (Gladstone Hotel, 2016-2019), Re:Purpose (Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2014) and The Church Street Mural Project (Church-Wellesley Village, 2013). Syrus is also co-curator of The Cycle, a two-year disability arts performance initiative of the National Arts Centre.
Syrus is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter- Canada and the Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism. Syrus is a past co-curator of Blackness Yes!/Blockorama and the Wildseed Black Arts Fellowship. Syrus has won several awards, including the TD Diversity Award in 2017. Syrus was voted “Best Queer Activist” by NOW Magazine (2005) and was awarded the Steinert and Ferreiro Award (2012). Syrus holds a doctorate from York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. He is the co-editor of the best-selling Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada (URP, 2020), and Marvellous Grounds: Queen of Colour Formations (BTL, 2018) and Queering Urban Justice (UTP, 2018). Please check out Syrus Marcus Ware’s website: https://www.syrusmarcusware.com/
Dawn Weleski co-founded and co-directed Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant that served cuisine from countries with which the US government is in conflict. Their art practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by repurposing underground brawls, revolutionary protests, and political offices as transformative social stages. Previous work includes City Council Wrestling, a series of public wrestling matches where citizens, pro-am wrestlers, and city council members personified their political passions into wrestling characters, and their most recent work, Refuse Refuse: Radio, is a speculative fiction radio series that dramatizes current and impending climate catastrophe throughout rural New York State. Broadcast from a mutual aid ambulance, Refuse Refuse will record and transmit survival skill share workshops and participatory climate collapse drama and is supported by a 2023 Anonymous was a Woman Environmental Art Grant, a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts Grant, and the Harpo Foundation.
Weleski has worked in hospitality and food service for over twenty-five years, and their current wage work as bartender/baker/line cook, house cleaner, landscaper, adjunct professor, and Emergency Medical Technician, among other gigs, informs their collective stewardship of emergentCNY, a Central New York mutual aid network that exchanges goods and services during times of ever-present crisis through reciprocal care, rest, repair and regeneration. emergentCNY links people across geography, time and systematized difference through its repurposed ambulance that archives and transmits stories of historical and contemporary mutual aid in CNY and around the world. Weleski is currently is University of Michigan Student Life Sustainability Artist in Residence where they co-initiated Noon at Night, a global solidarity network of transgressive learners during this crisis and the next that acknowledge interdependence across difference, utilizing food as a binder. A collaboration of University of Michigan students, Southeast Michigan cultural organizers and educators, and experiential learning hubs around the world, Noon at Night will ultimately take the form of a mobile classroom and pay-what-you-can cafe connected to other transgressive educators and learners around the world, opening when it is noon in the partner location each weekend.
They have exhibited at The Mercosul Biennial; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Hammer Museum; San Jose Museum of Art; Anyang Public Art Project; The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art; Project Row Houses; Townhouse Gallery (Cairo); Festival Belluard Bollwerk International; Contemporary Calgary; The Mattress Factory Museum; Arts House (Melbourne); and 91mQ (Berlin); have been a resident at The Headlands Center for the Arts, SOMA Mexico City, and The Atlantic Center for the Arts; was a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow and a 2019 to 2020 NEH Visiting Assistant Professor of Art & Art History at Colgate University and Upstate Institute Fellow; was a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow nominee, a 2023 New York State Traditional and Rural Artist Fellow, and a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist Finalist; and holds a BFA in Visual Art with a concentration in Contextual Practice from Carnegie Mellon University and a MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University.