25 July 2019 7pm

Due to unforeseen circumstances, our upcoming Session with Natasha Myers is cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank all those who expressed interest in the event.

Jennifer Rose Sciarrino: from root to lip continues until 10 August 2019. We hope to see you at the gallery soon.

For more information about exhibitions and upcoming programs, please visit our website at www.mercerunion.org

Rendering Life Otherwise

Getting out of the Anthropocene, this era marked by colonialism and capitalism’s violent excess, will demand a deep reckoning with all our relations, especially our more-than-human kin. But what about our kin that is vegetal, fungal, or microbial, or perhaps too tiny, too remote or too slow to sense? How can we get to know these creatures well, when much of the knowledge we have about these forms of life is bound up with the mechanistic sciences, with their reductive techniques and constraining stories about life? This hands-on workshop explores movement and imagination in the work of rendering life otherwise.

Natasha Myers is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, convener of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, and co-founder of Toronto’s Technoscience Salon. She is the author of the award-winning book, Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers and Excitable Matter (Duke, 2015). Her current projects speculate on the contours of the Planthroposcene, with investigations spanning the arts and sciences of vegetal sensing and sentience, the politics of gardens, and the enduring colonial violence of restoration ecology. Since 2015 she has been working with dancer and filmmaker Ayelen Liberona on Becoming Sensor, a research creation project to invent protocols for an ungrid-able ecology of the happenings ongoing in the ancient urban lands around Toronto.

SESSION is made possible with Leading Support from TD Bank Group