Slow Living Workshop facilitated by Evelyn Austin and Meech Boakye

Friday, April 8th @ 1 – 3 PM

Free // On Zoom

RSVP: https://bit.ly/3KJMWcJ

Join Evelyn Austin and Meech Boakye for a bioplastics workshop and a slow working drop-in. The workshop will demo both agar and gelatin biopolymers to watch or follow along. In the second hour, participants will share virtual space and engage in Slow Work—this could mean cooking beans, beginning a ferment, experimenting with more bioplastics, processing vegetables, journaling, asking questions, or sharing hyperlinks. Participants are encouraged to bring their own activities to engage in in this shared space. Recorded audio from the work session will contribute to an assemblage of work sounds documented in an asynchronous, interactive performance written into the cookbook’s code.

FACILITATOR BIOS

Evelyn Austin’s art practice explores the politics of extractivism, problems of infinite (economic and material) growth, expansionism and ecological. Influenced by her work as a fossil fuel divestment organizer, criticisms of innovation absolutes, romanticized western `progress”, and cleantech solutions to consequences of growth, are embedded in her art practice. Much of her work is rooted in criticisms of digital and tech infrastructures as “final frontiers”of capitalist expansion. She has recently begun to pose questions about Arcadia and all of its consequences, and the fixation on “unobtainable utopias” that permeates western literature. Austin frequently draws on literary tropes, particularly tropes of the postmodern genre, theater of the absurd, and sci-fi. Wordplay and poetics are pivotal as her often work hinges on the collapse between the obvious and the nonsensical, and the analogies that exist between them.

Meech Boakye (B.A. Visual Studies, University of Toronto) is a Canadian artist based in Portland, Oregon. Their practice is rooted in relationships with floral, fungal and microbial kin as armatures for learning how to be in community. Material research functions as a formal conduit for remediation from extractive landscapes—works are suspended in gelatin biopolymers; fed, aged, shared; digested in stomachs or piles of hot compost; and collaboratively written with friends and neural-network artificial-intelligence. Boakye’s practice is produced (and reproduced) in a garden of trans-cyborgian thought; assemblages of preservation, maintenance (care) and decomposition, shape-shifting within the muck.

This workshop accompanies the online curatorial project Slow Living Cookbook which is available for viewing from March 15 – April 23, 2022:

www.slowlivingcookbook.com