June 16

Members of the Spaces for Possibility Studio Collective host informal studio hours. Participants are invited to do or not do: talk, drink tea, just exist, create, rest, read, learn, meditate, make work.

The workshop will begin by introducing the difference between learning and studying and the importance for thinking about studious drift for redefining the nature of art education today. Emphasis will be placed on the protocol, or short, experimental prompt, as a particular tactic for inducing studious drift. Subsequently, participants will create their own protocols for setting adrift the infrastructure of the surrounding campus. Through these protocols, participants will “study” infrastructure in an inoperative state in order to activate untapped potentialities that breach everyday use through artistic tinkering and hacking.

NOTE: Participants need cell phones and the Padlet app needs to be downloaded. Download Padlet here

Sphincter Temporality – a thinking through is a participatory project about chronic illness, time, and elasticity. For 45 minutes we will have, hold, and be held by a range of objects, from the desperately mundane (a rubber band) to the obnoxiously fantastical (an Elizabethan ruffle collar), as well as the poetry of Adrienne Rich, the queer world-making prompts to be found in the catalogues housed at Chicago's own Leather Archives & Museum, and the performative footnotes to some body-informed thinking on the potentiality of holes/wholes.

Very much a work in progress (with no desire for an end), Sphincter Temporality- a thinking through uses my own 30 plus years of having a diseased gut as the starting point. Through a slippery and at times inflamed pathway of anecdote, archive, and citation, might we look to this humble hollow organ to complicate our ideas about bodies, interdependence, and care.

We will discuss the history of our land acknowledgment and action committee at NEIU and the history of Chicago land grabs. Our goal is to imagine and implement best practices for future transitions of land. We envision #LandBack as developing intersectional political frameworks that organize towards collective liberation. We are committed to the freedom and liberation of  Black, Indigenous & People of Color as well as queer, undocumented and other marginalized folks across our University Campuses. While our end vision is Indigenous land reclamation and decolonizing our university (and beyond) practices, procedures and frameworks we are working towards understanding and confronting the intersecting issues that are a result of white supremacy, settler colonial, and heteropatriarchal violence endemic within our society as a result of territorial conquest and chattel slavery.