worm school

🌀STILL POSSIBLE🌀 Last weekend to visit: thrus/friday 2-6pm, Sat 10-2p Artist Collective spotlight: Worm School ( b. 2021) is an artist collective and reading group. Worms currently writhing in the compost pile are Ako Castuera @akocastuera , Ako Ibekwe @akostaco , Iso Marcus @__isoisoiso__ , Rosie Brand @rosiebrand , and Zena Segre @zsegre Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble was a formative text for worm school, helping shape their practice as ‘earthworm symbionts’. Embracing Donna Haraway’s claim ‘thinking is a materialist practice with other thinkers’. Worm School facilitates reading discussions alongside material exercises for thinking hands. These conversations reflect shared interests in craft practices and their entanglements with local ecologies, material relationships with place, alternate futures, and reimagined pasts. Past discussions have been held online and at community spaces including Pitzer College and The Infinite School. Their piece ( depicted above) 'String Figure, Noded' is a transitional point in the popular ‘Cat’s Cradle’ string figure game. String figures represent a model of collective thinking and storytelling that is in a constant state of transformation and change. Worm school’s noded network casts lines tracing the conversations and exchanges between members of worm school.Past discussion participants contributed small sculptural nodes which add points of complication, connection, and 'trouble' along our shared fibrous loop. The reading nook features research texts from worm school’s library, and a compost-dyed worm, the viewer is invited to sit and digest with worm school.

The soil is rich!!! Calling all Infinite Worm participants!! @theinfinite.school ♾️ We crave your contributions to the hot compost pile! 🍂 Check your email for our zine submission open call! 🪱 sent out a few days ago. 📸 photo of @akocastuera ‘s worm cafe 🍵

Tune in for the final part of this iteration of Infinite Worm! Part 3: Ongoingness ⭐️June 30⭐️ 11 am- 1230 pm PST meeting online on zoom to discuss @adriennemareebrown ‘s Emergent Strategy ♾️🪱🪢 Bring your yarn/string supplies for our material activity- making net bags for ongoingness! In our third session, we gather virtually around ideas of emergence and cultivating responsiveness to these troubled times. Following adrienne maree brown’s writings, we ask; what do we practice at the small scale that sets the patterns for the whole system? To accompany our thinking we will engage in carrier bag making – knotting, weaving and generating a container. In this collective practice we ask, what are you emptying? what will you carry with you? The ‘infinite worm’ event series has been facilitating reading-discussions for thinking hands over the past couple months, inviting artists, thinkers, crafts-people, gardeners and worms to think collectively and make together. You do not need to have attended prior events to come along! More info / sign up in b-I-o 🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱 @theinfinite.school

Thinking is a materialist practice with other thinkers’ - Donna Haraway Part 2 of the The Infinite Worm series is Sunday May 26th 🪱 We’ll be (re)learning String Figure games and making the Infinite Worm collaborative sculpture. In the second session we will meet in person at the Infinite School in Los Angeles. We will work through our reading discussion with hands & bodies. Using a length of fiber as a shared web, we will play within our network— exploring how we may deepen or alter our relationship to Haraway and LeGuin’s ideas, add points of complication, connection, and ‘trouble’ along our shared fibrous loop. *Participants can bring along their nodes from Part I, and there will be a selection of ready-made nodes available, so don’t worry if you didn’t catch the last session. 🪢 More info and sign-up in bio ♾️

‘It matters what stories tell stories.’ - Ursula K. Le Guin Come and make a node - a tactile sculpture to carry our line of thought. Part 1 of The Infinite Worm series is a discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. We will be reflecting on Le Guin’s short essay, exploring re-patterning and re-storying narratives, and together compost imagined pasts. This first session will take place Sunday May 5 on Zoom. During the discussion, participants are encouraged to make individual material nodes*. These tactile, palm sized, bead-like sculptures can be made from clay or any preferred crafting material. (Eg. fiber, yarn, salt-dough, recycled consumer waste) *For local participants who attend part II in person, the nodes will come into play as part of a collaborative sculpture. There will be an option to fire your ceramic node (to cone 06) through The Infinite School. More info on the link in bio!

The Infinite School and Worm School are excited to announce a three-part collaborative reading/sculpture group - together, we become The Infinite Worm! ♾️ 🪱 🌀 Join us for an ongoing conversation composed of three sessions, two online and one in-person at the Infinite School. We offer reading discussions alongside material exercises for thinking hands. Calling all crafty worm-people, those of you who have been muddling away in the dark, wondering how to fertilize the future! Sign-up with the link in bio

We are worm school!!! 🏫 🪱 Our project began in 2021, by holding conversations, composting media that reflected an interest in craft practices, alternate futures, and reimagined pasts. Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble was a formative text for Worm School, helping shape our practice as ‘earthworm symbionts’. Our process is relational, iterative, and cyclical as we turn and crawl through the hot compost of this thick present. 🪱 We are worms. Are you? 🪱 We hope to provide space for the small and crafty worms, those of you who have been muddling away in the dark, wondering how to fertilize the future. Embracing Donna Haraway’s claim ‘thinking is a materialist practice with other thinkers’, we offer reading discussions alongside material exercises for thinking hands. This work has been a long time brewin, underground. Looking forward to wriggling up to the surface, to find the other worms out there. We encourage you to bring your whole selves, all your ‘side-winding, snaky shape’ thoughts, to our compost pile. @akocastuera @__isoisoiso__ @boshyboi @rosiebrand @zsegre