Wall Associate, Catalyst Program Climate and Nature Emergency at UBC’s Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies

Alongside 12 artists, we moved with the Facing Human Wrongs course with members of the Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures (GDTF) Collective. Throughout 2022 and 2023, we collaboratively reflected on how art can help us to “stay with the trouble” and face the complexities of our current times: to not turn our back to the turmoil of difficult things, while remaining grounded and attentive to what it means to be human within a wider web of relations.

Led and facilitated by artists Dani d’Emilia and Azul.

In January 2023, I co-hosted an artistic immersion session for nurturing intellectual and relational stamina in the context of the Climate and Nature Emergency alongside fellow Catalyst artist Reed Jackson called DE-COMPOSE: Embodied Image (Un)making With Our Cellular Devices.

In May 2023, the cohort hosted an immersive inquiry session called Metabolizing Human Wrongs. This session asked: What might it take to un-numb to the pains and pleasures of our entanglement with non-human beings and the systems by which they are subjected to extraction and extinction?  In what ways can artistic practices be an enzyme that supports our digestion of difficult and complex emotions which arise as we increasingly face Climate and Nature Emergency? What are practices that might help us tend to, metabolize and compost the affects of this wit(h)nessing?

Cohort members included: Andréa Monteiro, Cadence Planthara, Carolina Duque, Clifford Berrien, Kimberly Skye Richards, Reed Jackson, Melanie Kloetzel, Naser Al Sughaiyer, Willow Cioppa, Sidi Chen, and myself.