Songs of Redemption, Transformation, Dissolution
4-6 pm, Sunday, January 8
1851 S. Westmoreland Ave.
6 spots available, RSVP at serena.caffrey@gmail.com
Free
Join Serena Caffrey and Armand Paul for an informal song workshop to explore group singing as one of many collectivist practices that return us to wholeness in times of personal and community rupture. Bring a song you wrote or love that explores these themes (of becoming smithereens, “falling all the way out,"* reforming out of ashes, or losing oneself to a new becoming) to share or teach. We’ll play together with these pieces to improvise and draft a circle song of our own that we’ll sing together in the space. No formal music training or singing experience necessary!
This workshop is a program of an ongoing performance and installation entitled The Wrecking of Something.
The workshop building is wheelchair accessible. Please wear clothes you don't mind getting messy and bring snacks to share if you're able.
*À la Maggie Nelson, reflecting on her fears of what her body will do upon giving birth (The Argonauts)
Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience
4 pm Friday, January 20
1851 S. Westmoreland Ave.
Email serena.caffrey@gmail.com to RSVP or just show up
Free
Join Daniel Tovar, Chris Warr, and Serena Caffrey to discuss Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience. “Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience” by Janet Biehl and Peter Stadenmeier, published in 1996. This is a heavy text that discusses a troubling and violent history of European ecological movements frequently obscured from mainstream contemporary environmentalism and its offshoots. Please note that this text includes extensive discussion of racialized violence, anti-Semitism, imperialism, misogyny, and ableism—please take care of yourself and move at the pace of trust when engaging with this invitation and resource.
It’s not necessary to have read the entire text to join the discussion.
The full text can be accessed on The Anarchist Library at the below link:
https://tinyurl.com/59d8sa6k
Corpus Luteum: Attending the Seeding Body
10 am - 1 pm Saturday, January 21
1851 S. Westmoreland Ave.
Six spots available, RSVP here: https://forms.gle/4VF9STz1XmF4KZmn6
$25, no one turned away for lack of funds
Corpus Luteum: Attending the Seeding Body is a life drawing/sculpting workshop, an exploration of the aesthetic details and forms expressed by seed pods. By attuning to our plant relatives through careful observation exercises, we hope to expand the ways we perceive and experience our own human bodies.
During this process-oriented workshop, we'll study a collection of seed pods foraged locally by artist and co-facilitator Rosie Brand. Through drawing and sculpting in clay, we’ll engage in multi-sensory observation to explore the tactility of these more-than-human architectures. In the second half of our session, we’ll build our own sculptural clay pods embedded with wildflower seeds to gift back to the land.
The name corpus luteum (yellow body) refers to the erupted ovarian sac that remains after the release of an egg during ovulation. Fundamentally transformed by its opening, the corpus luteum is a key actor in the continuation of the fertility cycle toward menses or pregnancy, becoming the primary hormone center for the duration of the luteal phase. In Corpus Luteum: Attending the Seeding Body, we’ll look to our plant relatives here in Tovaangar (the LA basin) to meditate further on the form and function of yellow bodies across species. How do seed pods support new life, and what do we learn from these temporary vessels after their seeds are cast?
This workshop is a program of an ongoing performance and installation begun by artist Serena Caffrey entitled The Wrecking of Something, which explores themes of dissolution, transformation, and reclamation through clay, performance, and community dialogue.
The workshop will be taking place within the installation on a low-to-the-floor table, but accommodations can be made for participants who would rather sit in a chair. The building is wheelchair accessible. RSVP here (https://forms.gle/4VF9STz1XmF4KZmn6) and, for additional access questions and accommodations, please email serena.caffrey@gmail.com. Please wear clothes you don’t mind getting messy, and bring along your preferred drawing materials/sketchbooks if you like. A selection of drawing materials and clay will be provided.
Facilitator Bios
Rosie Brand (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and naturalist living on Tongva Land. Her field studies in urban ecology inform her interdisciplinary practice. She intertwines ceramics, drawing and speculative fiction in sculptural worlds, spiraling toward the magical. Brand takes refuge in this work, a personal therapeutic process which transforms her grief through play. As a facilitator, her workshops propose plant-human collaborations, in order to better understand ourselves as in symbiotic relationship with the living world.
Serena Caffrey (they/she) is a visual and performance artist, arts worker, writer, educator, and consultant currently based in Los Angeles (Tovaangar). Their artistic practice aims to cultivate personal and community divestment from capitalistic logics of linear time-space, body coloniality, and extractive attitudes toward land through a radical assessment of personal limits within a performative context.
Wrecking Wrecking of Something
5-9 pm, Friday, January 27
1851 S. Westmoreland Ave.
Drop in
$5 suggested donation
A durational experiment combining live performance and musical improvisation in an immersive installation, Wrecking Wrecking of Something explores the sonic landscape of cast plaster, dried and wet clay, and various tools. Performers include M. A. Tiesenga, Dylan Marx, Chris Hadley, Patrick Shiroishi, and Serena Caffrey.
This performance is a program of an ongoing performance and installation begun by artist Serena Caffrey entitled The Wrecking of Something, which explores themes of dissolution, transformation, and reclamation through clay, performance, and community dialogue.
Artist Bios
M.A. Tiesenga is an LA-based interdisciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and animator.
Dylan Marx is a composer, musician and artist based in Los Angeles.
Chris Hadley is a performer, composer, and instrument designer working with percussion and electronics. His work explores musical improvisation as a deeply embodied and ecological practice, with rich opportunities for exploring the necessarily distributed nature of creative cognition between people, environments, and tools.
Patrick Shiroishi is a Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Los Angeles who is perhaps best known for his extensive and incredibly intense work with the saxophone. Over the last decade he has established himself as one of the premier improvising musicians in Los Angeles, playing solo and in numerous collaborative projects. Shiroishi may well be considered a foundational player in the city’s vast musical expanse.
Working across durational performance, installation, printmaking, text, and film, Serena Caffrey creates havens of time and space that invite observation of beyond-human kin and disrupt capitalist production logics to allow for personal dissolution, transformation, and rest. Their interdisciplinary approach is collaborative, embodied, and emergent.
The Artist’s Body: Movement-based Strategies to Strengthen, Soothe, and Prevent Injury for Hands-on Makers
6-7 pm Monday, January 30
1851 S. Westmoreland Ave.
RSVP to serena.caffrey@gmail.com
$15 suggested donation
Artists and arts-workers frequently manage a variety of responsibilities and thus movements--sometimes sitting for hours, sometimes engaging in repetitive gestures, sometimes embodying certain movements intensively for short-term projects. This class is designed to offer participants daily body-based practices to alleviate common aches and pains associated with arts work, informed by my first-hand experience recovering from work-related injuries and managing chronic pain. We’ll focus in particular on the upper back, neck, forearms, and pelvic region. We’ll also discuss the Yes-to-No Spectrum, a resource designed by Mia Schachter of Consent Wizardry, as a tool to assess one’s own capacity when producing physically-demanding projects, since it’s often tempting to move past one’s personal limits when motivated creatively or by deadlines.
This is a one-time offering that might develop into a regular class if there’s group interest.
A Walk Under the Moon, Planting for the Future: Wildflowers
4-6 pm, Sunday, February 5
Greayers Oak Mini Walk, Intersection of Pasadena and Figueroa
Just show up!
Free
Join horticulturist and urban forester José Gama Vargas for a walk into Mt. Washington to plant native wildflowers and learn about DIY native plant revitalization. We’ll wind our way up the hill from Pasadena and Figueroa to observe and discuss existing organizing efforts in partnership with the black walnut tree, best propagation practices for native seeds, and acting in good relationship to the earth. The workshop will culminate at the top of the hill along the white fence (“Kite Hill”), where we’ll plant balls of clay embedded with wildflower seeds and watch the full moon rise. As an act of reciprocity to the land, participants will be asked to carry a gallon of water with them on our journey to water in the seeds and make an offering back to the earth. You’re welcome to bring a backpack to make this load easier, and anyone who would struggle to carry water this distance can request help from other attendees (so, if you’re able, be prepared to carry two!). Additionally, please bring a kitchen spoon or small spade, scissors, and additional water for yourself to drink. After our planting session, we’ll walk back down the hill guided by the light of the full moon. For anyone with mobility limitations or for folks arriving late, you can plan to meet the group by car on Ave. 37 at 5:15 p.m.
Schedule
4 p.m. meet at Pasadena and Figueroa for snacks, tabling from Coyotl + Macehualli and other orgs
4:30 p.m. walk begins
5:15 p.m. arrive at Kite Hill, folks unable to walk can meet here by car
5:30 p.m. moonrise
5:45 p.m. descend by moonlight back to meeting location