Meets twice! Sunday Jan 31 + Feb 14 — 10am PST / 1pm EST / 7pm CET
Hosted by Nire (Erin Cuana) & Hannah Tardie with virtual care lab

Object-Poetry + Rituals explores communal writing and object-transformations. Our stories are undulating, ephemeral entities living between multiple bodies, human and nonhuman.

Guided by animism, theories of the fetish + talismans, and CAConrad’s work on (soma)tics, we will practice individual and collaborative freewriting, inspired by rituals, short readings, guided meditations, breathing exercises and sounding. We will explore writing in its non-verbal, embodied, and enigmatic forms; often through sculptural and other object-based prompts.

Exercises will explore themes of shapeshifting, meditation, destruction, repetition, and metamorphosis. Using household materials, participants will share objects and expand, change, or otherwise radically transform them into entirely new objects, as part of a group writing process. Our collective will also imagine and define new ritual ideas and practice them together.

About the hosts:
Nire, or Erin Cuana, is an interdisciplinary artist from Queens, NY, working in music/sound, performance, video and new media. She is a recent graduate of NYU Tisch’s ITP masters program where she explored human and nonhuman (organic and machinic) relationality via an animist and mystical lense. She’s interested in blurring artistic practice, knowledge-sharing spaces and performance, with an underlying navigation based in shadow work. Nire is a recipient of the Red Burns Scholarship, SUNY Purchase Art+Design scholarship and a participant of the Red Bull Music Academy. Her work can be seen in: Dazed Magazine, NPR, Fader, Conde Nast, Interview Magazine and XLR8R and has had contributing work in MoMA PS1 and National Sawdust.

Hannah Tardie is a sculptor, performer, and scholar who was born in Orange, California. She recently completed a graduate degree in electronic arts from New York University, where she was awarded the Red Burns Scholarship and a Tisch School of the Arts scholarship. Her work has been shown locally and internationally at La Gaite Lyrique (Paris), 316 Canal St (New York), SPACE Gallery (Maine), New York University, and online via websites like Artsy.net and maps-dna-and-spam. She has been accepted to residencies like ChaNorth, Vermont Studio Center, and Crit NYC. Tardie’s work uses ritual to examine intimacy and gender. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Suggested donation for this gathering is $20-60 ($10-30 per session). All are welcome regardless.

virtual care lab is a series of experiments in remote connection, powered by NAVEL.