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For this year’s Art Licks Weekend, artist collective SSEA will partner with Almanac Projects to host a day-long series of workshops investigating human/non-human relations - part of SSEA’s ongoing investigation into expanded notions of kinship, family and relatedness.

In collaboration with medical anthropologist and artist Lochlann Jain (KCL / Stanford) and artist/researcher Sam Nightingale (Goldsmiths), SSEA will facilitate a participatory exploration of the symbolism and social meanings of blood and biome. These two key biological concepts become entry-points into unseen inter-species allegiances, mergings and cleavages - challenging the reductive binaries of mainstream Western biology, and opening the possibility of radically different relations with non-human others.

Throughout the day SSEA will explore the history of blood groups and virology, sculptural investigations of the thresholds between plant, animal and human life, and meditations on the permeability of human subjectivity. It will interweave informal talks and presentations with practical workshops that bring together Buddhist meditation practice, drawing, writing and sculpture; seeking to find ways of integrating research and practice, making and thinking.

We’d love it if you could come for the whole day. The day is split into parts, but it’s designed to function as a whole, allowing us to build our own creative responses to the day’s themes - and to help us build a temporary community together for thinking through kinship.

 
Schedule

11.00 - 12.30: Interspecies Meditation: (Llew Watkins & Matt Drage (SSEA))

12.30 - 13.30: Workshop Part 1: Zoonosis / Bloodstreams / Animal Agents (Lochlann Jain + SSEA)

13.30 - 14.15: Lunch break

14.15 - 17.30: Workshop Part 2: Blood and biome (Sam Nightingale + SSEA)
 

The event is free and will be held at Almanac Projects, 41 Acre Ln, SW2 5TN, London.

Please sign up here.

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SSEA is a collaboration founded in 2016 between artists, academics in science and technology studies, and spiritual practitioners. SSEA’s long-term aim is to provide free, interdisciplinary education at the intersection of science studies, contemplative practice and the arts, grounded in an exploration of alternative forms of social organisation.