form & concept is pleased to announce Becoming Symbionts, a webinar event in connection with the Entangled Futurities exhibition. Join Director Jordan Eddy and artists Tigre Mashaal-Lively and Pascal Emmer for a conversation with Beata Tsosie-Peña (Tewa Women United) and Kaitlin Bryson (UCLA Art | Sci Center), who will share about their work with “Many Hands." Join us on Zoom here.
Symbionts are organisms of different species living together in a symbiotic relationship. Fungi offer many provocative examples of interspecies co-adaptation and mutual aid, one of which is mycoremediation: a process resonant with Indigenous ways of knowing for healing damaged ecologies with mushrooms. In a time of global-scale climate catastrophe and social injustice, what can we learn from mycoremediation about becoming symbionts with the human- and more-than-human world?
“Many Hands" is a multifaceted project led by Tewa Women United (Environmental Health and Justice Program), Beata Tsosie-Peña, Kaitlin Bryson and Cheyenne Antonio. What initially started out as a bio/mycoremediation installation and awareness campaign related to NMOCD Incident # NCS1905249442 and on-going environmental injustices in Dinéh Tah stemming from fracking and the oil and gas industry, has evolved into a larger project seeking to bring justice, healing and political advocacy to this land and its peoples. The project has three phases ranging from free educational outreach and hands-on workshops, to bio/mycoremediation installations and policy reform.
If you're interested in volunteering or being a part of the project, please sign up using this form.
Speaker bios:
Beata Tsosie-Peña is from Santa Clara Pueblo, NM. She is a mother, poet, seed keeper, and is certified in Infant Massage Instruction, as a Developmental Specialist, an Educator, an Indigenous Full-Spectrum Doula and Breast/Chestfeeding Support Counselor, and in Indigenous Sustainable Design (permaculture). The realities of living next to a nuclear weapons complex has called her into environmental health and justice work with the non-profit organization, Tewa Women United for over a decade. As part of her work with TWU, she is currently managing the creation of the Española Healing Foods Oasis demonstration garden and Española Healing Foods Seed Library.
Kaitlin Bryson is an ecological artist concerned with environmental and social justice. Her art practice and activism are focused on biological and metaphysical applications of healing, responding to the pervasive persistence of harm in the world. Bryson primarily works with fungi as resource, metaphor and collaborators for her artworks. Bryson received an MFA in Art & Ecology from the University of New Mexico and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA where she is the manager of the UCLA Art | Sci Center and program coordinator and Lead Instructor for UCLA Sci | Art Lab + Studio. In 2019, Bryson co-founded The Submergence Collective an environmental arts collective focused on projects that imagine more collaborative, creative, hopeful and ecologically connected futures for our human species and rest of the living world.
