It was a real pleasure to share this two-year research with @ssanfordart ’s Special Topics class—exploring photographic printing through earth and natural pigments. The work moves through processes of mixing, grinding, pyrolysis, and oxidation of rock, metal, and wood—materials that carry their own histories and transformations.
Grateful to @fernandarappa for capturing these moments.
✨ Save the date! Next Thursday, April 23, 5-6:30pm. ✨ Join the artists for conversation and reflection surrounding their exhibition Picking Up Shells Amid a Tsunami, what storms they find their artistic practice situated within, and what shells have revealed themselves.
We find ourselves here again, witnessing the horrors expand, the insatiable desire for destruction, the deafening normalization of mass slaughter. We are reaching out again to make clay limbs in honor of all those who continue to lose lives, homes, pieces of bodies. The limbs will be sold to raise funds for the Ghassan Abu Sitta Children's fund for reconstructive limb surgery. Let us not wilt in hopelessness but find power in each other's touch.
In this iteration of Limbs, we will be using our bodies to produce clay tiles, indexes of our thighs, arms, knees, and other body parts. We will then fire them in the earth in ceremony and explore how these pieces can build structures and sculptures made up of our collective parts, to be sold to collect funds. Please pm me to RSVP and I will send you more information on what to bring and expect.
Ground Circles Gathering
Saturday, February 21, 2-5pm / 306 Koshland Way, Santa Cruz, 95064
***Limited to 10 spaces, pm me to sign up**
We play with rhythms, stories, textures, building structures, upwards, processing stone, soil, pigments, listening to the transformation of matter and what such actions evoke in our personal and collective memories.
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This is one of a series of gatherings, experiments, musings, "I am Breathing My own home". The title is a phrase borrowed from a Forensic architecture video “Cloud Studies”, where a man in Gaza witnesses the bombardment of his home. All his memories pulverized into thick air. To breathe one's home makes home at once nowhere and everywhere.
Last year, after Israel's intensified bombardment of Lebanon, leaving 25 million tons of homes in fragments, my father, Mounir Mabsout, and his colleagues in the engineering lab at the American University of Beirut, began a research project proposing the rubble as material to rebuild homes with. It involves crushing the rubble back to elemental matter: sand, stone and dust that in the right proportion can make new building blocks.
Oceans away, I ask myself: how do we piece together home in a world under constant destruction, movement and threat? How do we build safety in each other's bodies? What can earth remind us about collectivity? What can we learn from elemental processes of transformation?
I ask these questions as a speck of dust in the diaspora-- But I believe that is what we all are, were or will be. We must continue to find new ways of being and becoming together.
Immersive Landscapes - Cactupuncture
Immersion comes from the Latin word ‘merger’, to plunge in, sink into. As in a body of water, the medium surrounding touches you palpably, engulfs you, the whole periphery of your body. Every movement is a wave of your resonance, rippling.
At night the cactus visited our dreams. Alberto told me how he was born to a Chicano lineage in a military base, one hour away from where we stood. Twenty nine palms naval hospital. We were surrounded by cactus and the ghosts of displacement and ancestral trauma. We perform this ritual of embrace, of correspondence and protection.
We are excited to host our first artist fellow, Dima Mabsout, at the Greenhouse Project. This fellowship was made possible by @landingevents
Here are a few field notes // from @dmbsut ’s fellowship at the greenhouse project
1. To care for, to be cared for: my roots touch the roots of this land, we exchange water.
2. At the dye garden, Marigolds and Yarrows generously keep giving.
3. A Belladonna Lily resurrects in glory after a good spring’s sleep.
4. Feverfew is an unexpected visitor to the dye garden. We welcomed them in for the green shades carried within.
5. This mighty White Sage has been a pollinators’ dream, the buzziest, busiest spot of the garden over the last month. Now it’s calmed down- here, the wasps and bees are drinking the last of its nectar.
6. New little oak trees are popping up here and there!
7. A runaway Kale made its way from the seed exchange event months back and planted itself in the middle of the social space, careful where you step ;)
8. New paths are opening up… more soon
Dima Mabsout is a Lebanese artist who moved to Santa Cruz in September 2023. She is currently listening to this new landscape. What stories live on its surface? What memories are buried in the soil? What seeds are waiting to sprout?
Through site-specific performance, film, printmaking and collaboration, she is observing the colonial wounds embedded in land, tracing patterns of erasure across space and time, and drawing lines of solidarity.
Before joining the MFA program in Environmental Arts and Social Practice, she was living and working in Lebanon, co-creating street performances and interventions with Zayraqoun collective, leading community art programs with Catalytic Action design Studio, teaching at Horshna forest school, and beginning her land based research with the Museum for the Displaced .
Dima holds a BA in Fine arts from Central saint martins, London and an MA in arts in education from Harvard Graduate school of education.
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“Lines are both created by being followed and followed by being created” - Sara Ahmed Queer Phenomenology
#Reorientations is artist residency project in Rural Sweden by @aghili.karlsson
Responding to the context: 3 different communities between urban and rural Sweden, who live in close physical proximity, yet distances felt apart.
We walked cross 25km distance from the urban to the rural, with intention - as a meditation, a pilgrimage, a performative practice - with several pauses to engage with different sites, landscapes and in between spaces as they revisit our relationship to home.
ramielzein Thank you for the inspiration :)
The City’s Hidden Excrements
(Video, 2022)
This footage, is of raw sewage on our waters in Ouzai, and of a hidden illegal sand extraction site, destroying ecosystems and putting the shoreline at risk. In an endless defiance of people’s right to public space, this sight degraded from one of the most popular beaches in the 70s to another inaccessible site of corruption.
