Beneath Our Feet: Grounded Space, Place, and Worldmaking
“Beneath Our Feet: Grounded Space, Place, and Worldmaking”
Interseminars - Improvise & Intervene Culminating Events
Over the past eighteen months of working together, the second Interseminars cohort, “Improvise & Intervene,” came to a recurring theme: the land and how it connects us. In this culminating event series, we activate improvisation and intervention to explore multimodal connections to land. This event is a call to action, an invitation to understand how liberation and land share intimacies, and an opportunity to remember that our bodies are powerful, the land possesses profound knowledge, and freedom is a place. Feel, sit, and stand on it. It quakes and shakes beneath our feet. Join us!
Friday, September 27
Panel: Improvise & Intervene Reflections and Acknowledgements
Where: Levis Faculty Center, Room 300
When: 4 p.m.
For this cohort of Interseminars fellows and conveners, circle-keeping and reflection have been a methodological commitment. In this talkback, we invite you to learn and hear about the joys, challenges, and lessons of forming an interdisciplinary collective. Refreshments will be served.
Improvise & Intervene Collective:
- Jackie Abing [Anthropology, Fellow, Audio & Text Coordinator & Event Logistics Coordinator]
- Joe Bowie [Dance, Fellow, Welcome & Embracing Lead]
- Etienne Fields [Recreation, Sport and Tourism, Fellow]
- Gabriel Gonzalez [Dance, Performance Director, Fellow]
- Maryam Kashani [Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies, Convener]
- Nathalie Martinez [Anthropology, Fellow, Audioscape Lead & Event Logistics Coordinator]
- Marina Moscoso [Geography, Fellow]
- Joseph Obanubi [Art & Design, Fellow, Art and Spatial Direction and Curation Lead]
- Junaid Rana [Asian American Studies, Convener]
- Sayak Roy [Geography, Fellow]
- Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada [Latina/o Studies, Convener]
- Dora Watkins [Social Work, Fellow, Curation Lead]
Saturday, September 28
All Saturday and Sunday activities take place at the Independent Media Center (IMC), 202 S Broadway, Suite 100, Urbana.
Doors Open - 11 a.m.
Body Mapping Family Workshop
Where: IMC, Sun Room
When: 11 a.m.
We are maps of embodied memories—metaphorical hills, valleys, and mountains. In this workshop, we trace our borders and reflect on whether our embodied memories are localized to specific regions or spread throughout our body’s terrain.
Welcoming & Orientation - 12 p.m.
Performance & Panel: Culminating Reenactment I
Where: IMC, Sun Room
When: 12:30 p.m.
A collection of spontaneous choreographies will simultaneously construct and deconstruct spaces, places, and worlds. They ask: What does building space, a place, or a world mean? What materials are needed, and who controls them?
Core Samples and Glacier Erratics: Workshop with Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Where: IMC, Sun Room
When: 3 p.m.
In this workshop, participants will explore geological events and phenomena as an attempt to language our relationship to change, collaboration, and coalition building. With invited speaker Kameelah Janan Rasheed.
About Rasheed: A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores writing practices across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. With an interest in the poetics and possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the reading and writing process, Rasheed is interested in Black knowledge production and fugitivity. You can learn more about her practice in the Aga Khan Museum - This Being Human Podcast (2023), Art 21 documentary (2021), a recent interview in Art in America (2021).
Tour & Reception - 5 p.m.
Performance & Panel: Culminating Reenactment II
Where: IMC, Sun Room
When: 6 p.m.
A collection of spontaneous choreographies will simultaneously construct and deconstruct spaces, places, and worlds. They ask: What does building space, a place, or a world mean? What materials are needed, and who controls them?
Sunday, September 29
Doors Open - 1 p.m.
Tour - 1 p.m.
Closing Collage & Movement
Where: IMC, Sun Room Exhibition Walls
When: 3 p.m.
After three days of creating, improvising, and intervening, this will be a space to bring those pieces together and create a collage collaboratively as a community. We invite participants to close the space with some gentle movement as we mark the page in our book of collective worldmaking.
Community Dinner Reception - 4 p.m.
The Interseminars Initiative is supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Research Institute, the Graduate College, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the College of Fine and Applied Arts, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation.