Time/Day Change to Friday: Collectively Crafting Mythology with Shanhuan + Kaitlin

Please join us with “queer ecologies” curator Kaitlin Bryson and LA based filmmaker Shanhuan for a writing and storytelling workshop.

Whether we are conscious of them or not, myths inform the ways we navigate the challenges and unknowns of life. Through the cosmologies that are embedded in systems and institutions, the collective unconscious, and cultural practices, stories shape our understanding and decisions. Are the ones we’ve inherited or been taught adequate to face the challenges of the times?

In this gathering space, we will explore processes for collaboratively crafting myths as a tool for grounding our worldmaking processes in deep time, and navigating into the worlds of our collective desires. We’ll explore nonlinear, intuitive strategies for collectively crafting sensemaking and wayfinding technologies in the form of mythical creatures – embodying elements of our environment, the systems of oppression we seek to dismantle, and our collective might.

About our Instructor: Shanhuan is a filmmaker and systems alchemist, composting established methods of narrative production to make rituals of collective worlding. As a facilitator of experiences across mediums, they work to revitalize a communal sense of interspecies belonging, and catalyze regenerative cultural practices through their work at the Centre for Applied Ecological Remediation, as well as through alternative pedagogical initiatives like Sympoetic Ecofabulatory, F.R.A.C.T.A.L. School, and LIOS Labs School of Ecological Imagination. Their films have shown globally, in festivals including Busan International Short Film Festival, SFIndies, and NFMLA. The stories they weave are informed by their engagement in earth repair field work, mutual aid community organizing, systems change facilitation, and spiritual ecology. You’ll often find them gathering people working on the leading edges and unseen cracks of these fields around a tea table, hosting conversations on how to navigate the troubles of our times.