New Ecologies: Sustenance

This free program will be held online via Zoom. Register here.

This interdisciplinary conversation explores the reciprocal ways we nourish and are nourished by both land and community. Bringing together a range of creative practitioners working at the intersections of artistic practice, land stewardship, education, food studies, and activism, this program touches on topics including food justice, ritual, consumption, care, and the ways sustenance builds connections to place and the beings that inhabit them. Participants include farmer Jen Salinetti, herbalist Mandana Boushee, and artists Yoko Inoue and Sarah Rara.

Mandana Boushee is an Iranian-American herbalist, storyteller, earth steward and educator. She weaves her Iranian culture and plant tradition into all facets of her work and is dedicated to re-centering the voices, stories, rituals, and histories of the BIPOC community.

Artist Yoko Inoue’s research-creation includes food issues in the theoretical framework of decolonization, considering the collective act of cooking, critiquing and consuming food as the cornerstone of the social and spiritual bond.

Jen Salinetti is a co-founder, farmer, and Director of Education & Community Engagement at Woven Roots Farm & Education Center, a farm and CSA in present-day Tyringham, MA, that is celebrating 20 years of growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers using traditional, hand-scale farming practices.

Sarah Rara’s multi-disciplinary practice—including performance, writing, and video—explores the position of witness within fragile systems. Her work focuses on states of readiness and attention; actual reality; digging holes; navigation; remote sensing; the diminishing divide between onscreen and offscreen realities; listening; entanglements with and within ecosystems; landlord-tenant relationship and housing justice; and contemplating a feminist objectivity, situated knowledges. Rara is an assistant professor of art at Williams College.

Photo: Jen Salinetti, a co-founder, farmer, and Director of Education & Community Engagement at Woven Roots Farm. Photo: Lisa Metzger

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