Muddy Fields and Pink Possums: field work and color work as an entry point for embodied writing

In this three hour workshop we will use hands-on inquiry and the practice of keeping observational field notes as methods to wrestle with the question, what is color? In the attempt to answer this question, can we perhaps attune ourselves to the many sensorial registers and positions our bodies occupy at any given time?

Together with Helena Sanders, we will collectively discuss ways we can write/create with - rather than write out - our own complex experience, anomalies, slippery and shifting territories. Through a study of color, we will explore “stories that resist a single interpretation / the story as a renewable energy.” ¹

During the workshop Helena will present examples from her own artwork and writing which draws on folklore, oral tradition, ethnographic field research, and popular science. We will look at the poetic and practical potential of keeping a note book, and the many different ways of recording and sharing information and communicating the ineffable.




¹ McKenzie Wark, “Freaky Realism: Michael Taussig’s Palma AfricanaI,” The Brooklyn Rail, May 2019

² Nancy N. Chen, “Speaking Nearby: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha,” Visual Anthropology Review, Volume 8 Number 1, Spring 1992