Hello to Everyone!

I am happy to invite proposals for PARADISE GLOSSED: The Circular Language of Ownership - Women’s Walking Weekend – Friday, November 17^th to Sunday, 19^th 2017. Please consider the below information and concepts/actions of collaboration when writing a proposal no longer than 1 A4 page. Please also include a brief bio along with your name, contact info, and connections to walking and collaborative works and/or experience. Kindly send proposals to [log in to unmask] no later than Sunday, November 5, 2017. Additionally, if you cannot travel to New York but are interested in participating in PARADISE GLOSSED please submit a score, a gesture, a sound etc. that we may walk.

About: PARADISE GLOSSED: The Circular Language of Ownership

is a roaming assembly of participatory group art walks with people who identify as women* investigating and contesting the aesthetic and social concerns present in the confluence of historical trails and the widely romanticized narratives in New York’s Hudson Valley. PG creates visibility and discourse about timely worldwide matters focusing on women’s* occupation of public space while making a multitude of public feminisms across generations, races and color.

As Harriet Tubman led slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad in Hudson Valley, another movement was underway documenting the region’s landscape. Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of Painting, captured by the scenery promptly set out on sketching trips that lead to an aesthetic celebration of the region’s landscape and people, making the area popular while negating a multiplicity of bodies and narratives.

Hudson Valley remains a region with deep cultural resonance in the United States. Cultural traditions of the Hudson River School of Painting include walking the land and idealized landscape painting which became world significant along with struggles for gender, racial, environmental and economic equality, causing the region to have a strong sense of place and identity, including a legacy of walking connected to exploring, excavating and escaping.

Through ethics of inclusion and feminist methods PG are site-specific walks. Our public group walks are meant to engage a common thread that have an emancipatory dimension: making visible female agency, while drawing out latent histories by walking along and between the overlapping trails of the Underground Railroad, Delaware & Hudson Canal Trail, Wallkill Valley Trail, towpaths and the Hudson River School Painter’s Trail.

PG artists and participants are invited to creatively frame and present walks on gender, race, aesthetics, ethics, and environment as pluralism and democracy to inspire debate and community exchange through walking art. PG will actively involve participants in the creative process and seeks to raise individual and collective consciousness about our bodies and power structures governing our bodies’ and our land. PG sites our bodies’ in/on historical trails as a group usurping expectations that women* give way to rather than make visible history, space and discourse.

Essential to Paradise Glossed: The Circular Language of Ownership are the voices of women* articulating urgent concerns alongside strategies and solutions about inclusive representations of our bodies and histories.

*All women including people who identify as women. PG is a Safe Zone and respects all abilities. 

When: 6pm Friday, November 17 to 4pm Sunday, November 19 2017.

What: A weekend of embodied research along and between historical trails in Hudson Valley, walking traces, desire lines, visible and invisible historical trails. As well as creating walks, movement, traces, sound, talking and sharing with women* All meals except Saturday’s lunch and alcohol are provided. Please BYOB and bring along one lunch that can travel in your own backpack or bag. The weekend is free and open to the public.

Where: CHRCH Projects Space is generously offering us their facility. CHRCH is an art space in a former church circa1889, located on 167 Cottekill Road Cottekill, NY. Our space for the weekend is fitted with a composting toilet, a small sink and a wood-burning stove. Please know that CHRCH has no showering facilities and that we will be camping out in CHRCH Friday and Saturday nights. 

http://www.chrchprojectspace.org/about/location/

http://www.chrchprojectspace.org/apply/photographs-of-chrch/