From Survival to Sanctuary | YEAR ONE: MEANING-MAKING for the COMMONS

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | This first roundtable in the From Survival to Sanctuary series brings together culture workers actively exploring the radical intersection of creative practice, public action, and pedagogy for an open conversation on radical interdisciplinary commons strategies.

In this conversation we’ll be thinking together about what Speculative Solidarities look like as an approach to personal and collective transformative being-in-the-world, and invite the public to dialogue with three creative practitioners working with commons tools and strategies.

For this event, Public Action Fellow and artist-researcher Elæ Moss is joined by research-driven-designer-and-media-maker Marcelo López Dinardi and interdisciplinary artist-performer-corporeal-experience-designer Clarinda Mac Low—all of whom are actively working across fields in their quest for system-shifting meaning-making and tool building.

We’re asking:

How are thinkers and makers across disciplines approaching the commons? How is this social practice sometimes invisible, operating in the margins or in liminal spaces between fields and systems of power?
What does meaning-making for a range of publics look like in art, design, pedagogy and practice -- in, beyond, and perhaps despite institutions?

Who is building tools, strategies, and resources for future publics? How do we recognize, locate, share, and build on these blueprints?

We hope you’ll join us for this evening, as well as the whole series, where we consider together what will it take to get us from a survival state to one where we believe sanctuary can truly be found – and built. Learn more about the series on Instagram @thetroublewithbartleby.

Collaborator Bios:

ELÆ MOSS (host, they/them) is a cell-cluster learning to person. They are comforted by nonlinear time. They always think of “Borges and I” when writing bios. Their ministry is to be a webmaster and system administrator, but not in the ways you might think: this is to say, a collector and spinner of story, a recorder, a mapper, and a builder of infrastructures and tools for future possibility. Elæ’s preferred medium is questions, and depending on these two (“who is it for?” and “what is it for?”) they work across text, image, sound, performance, institution, system, code, body, and whatever else might be necessary. In the more official language you may be looking for, Elæ is a queer nonbinary multimodal artist-researcher, curator, information worker, and producer committed to radical pedagogy and practice. They lead Autonomous Mechanics Studio and are the founder and creative director of The Operating System and Liminal Lab. Elæ is a Professor at Pratt Institute where they are the coordinator of the hybrid Architectural Humanities and Media Studies first year program. They are completing two years as a Public Action Fellow at Bennington College in the Spring of 2024. Elæ publishes, performs, and produces media and programming widely, and is currently dedicated to research on retrofitting radical faith institutions and other third spaces for liberatory future building.

MARCELO LÓPEZ-DINARDI (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Texas A&M University. He is interested in the scales of design, the role of the public and commons, and in architecture as an expanded media. He is the editor of Architecture from Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023) and Degrowth (ARQ, 2022). He is working on the project Cemented Dreams: Material and Ecological Stories in Puerto Rico. The project examines the role of cement, architecture, the environment, and politics in the context of colonial Puerto Rico to the present day as a fellow of the Mellon-funded initiative Bridging the Divides: Post Disaster Futures Study Group of CENTRO’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico and an MS in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices for Architecture from the GSAPP at Columbia University.

CLARINDA MAC LOW (she/her) started out working in dance and molecular biology and now creates participatory events investigating social constructs and corporeal experience, and new institutional forms. She is also a design and technology professor and a former HIV/AIDS researcher and medical journalist. Mac Low is co-founder and Executive Director of Culture Push, an organization linking artistic practice, social justice, and civic engagement, and co-founder of Works on Water, supporting art working with waterways. Recent work includes: “Sunk Shore,” participatory tours of the future rooted in climate change data, in collaboration with dancer/historical marine ecologist Carolyn Hall; “The Year of Dance”, a self-ethnography of how unconventional kinship structures form in the NYC dance world; and “Free the Orphans,” investigating the spiritual and cultural implications of intellectual property in a digital age. Residencies include Back Apartment Resident (CEC) (2019) Yaddo and Mount Tremper Arts (2012), MacDowell (2000, 2016). She received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, 2007 and a 2010 Franklin Furnace grant. BA, double major in Dance and Molecular Biology, from Wesleyan University and MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Arts Practice from CCNY-CUNY. She has taught at NYU, CCNY-CUNY, Parsons School of Design, and elsewhere. Through the CRNY Artist Employment Program, she is an artist in residence at Genspace, a community biology laboratory in Brooklyn.

Instagram handles and hashtags: @thetroublewithbartleby, @the_operating_system, @marcelolopezdinardi, @adniralc1

#FromSurvivalToSanctuary, #SpeculativeSolidarities, #YearOne, #AutonomousMechanics