Visiting Artist & Scholar Residency, three weeks

In collaboration with Virginia Tech’s Michael Borowski and the Institute of Creative Art & Technology, my three-week residency Radical Symbiosis

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Incorporating the Trickster through photography, sculpture, and performance: creative/pedagogical/eco-political manifesto work exploring supply-chain consciousness* and radical social justice transformation.

*Supply-chain consciousness: Supply chain, true cost, life-cycle analysis (LCA), cradle-to-grave, embodied energy (local and global cycles of extraction / production / construction of desire / distribution / consumption / disposal)

Supply-chain consciousness includes Infrastructures of storytelling (object intimacies).

QUESTIONS:
How can we live our lives without sacrificing the lives of others?

How can we transition from our petroleum-pharmaceutical-addicted cyber-culture to a bioregional economics rooted in symbiotic relationships?

How can we decolonize our bodies and minds by learning from ancestral teachings and biomimicry (lessons from nature)?

GOALS:
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.
-Václav Havel

plant seeds vs. fabricate solutions
to uproot the interlocking mechanisms of Environmental Racism

through deep noticing/ paying attention–reveal how we are all connected through ordinary things (infrastructures of storytelling, objects as storytellers)
to offer the Cibopath* as a guide for Citizen Action

*ability to consume food and know everything about the food’s history, internalized supply chain; living embodied energy

PROCESS: Each day will begin with a movement-based practice, incorporating movement into our pedagogical practices

1. Outdoor time to create visual work.
2. Indoor studio space with access to a video projector that Alhadeff will use as she photograph herself during improvisational movement/ dance with my Borowski’s images projected across her body. This movement-image dialogue will function as an active meditation where she will conceptualize a detailed framework for her new book with Vernon Press: Unlearning What We Think We Know: Radical Art in Action
3. Meditation/ Reflection time and space to coalesce these mind-body convergences, Fermenting possibilities of theory becoming action through dance/ movement
4. Engage Interdisciplinary knowledge sources

First week, initial exploratory phase:
Cara Judea Alhadeff and Michael Borowski in conversation—studio thought experiments about how to use designed objects and maps to reorient participants and draw attention to the sources and supply chains of familiar personal objects: a cell phone to eyeglasses,
establish outline of action items,
“play dates” with Julia Basso & Embodied Brain Lab

Second week:
Continue to design workshops,
develop interdisciplinary exhibition and improvisational psyche-somatic pedagogical performances ideas,
propose student research projects

Third week: Finish with performance agenda for follow up with
1) Science and Movement Fest,
2) Cube Fest and NewMusicTechFest Oct. 1-4, 2026,
3) possible performance at the Moss Art Center

ELEMENTS:
Evolving from Alhadeff’s artist residency at EARTHDANCE’s SEEDS: Somatic Experiences in Ecology, Dances, and Science (Massachusetts, 2016) and her residency at Penland “Alchemy: Collaborating with the Unknown” about weaving relationships (the word “technology” comes from the root techne, “to fabricate,” “to weave”), Alhadeff and Borowski will challenge techno euphoria as they play with the wavering line between writing and dancing/ word and movement/ thought and action. This will be a process of igniting Psyche-Somatic Incantations: improvisational, infrastructures of storytelling through the fluid, interdependent body.

Project Alhadeff’s video/ cinematic color photographs/ photomontages in the context of nonlinear representation igniting collective embodiment. For example: toxic Bombay Beach, lithium deposits Salton Sea, 2025 and orchards food security 2024…

Borowski would be drawing from a previous body of work “Objects of Interdependence” in which he developed speculative designs for household objects that would prioritize cooperation over individual convenience.

Build an Escape Room (instigate creative teamwork, collective creative risk-taking that is both deeply personal as it is political—bridging the private and the public with an emphasis on interdependency and the Commons)

In addition to an audience comment book (which Alhadeff always includes in her photography exhibitions), offer a space where participants can write both their Gratitudes and their Complicities (Internalized Fascism) –practice from Alhadeff’s Performance & Critical Pedagogy course she taught at UC Santa Cruz

THE CUBE
Simultaneous Realities

Through the multichannels: How to visually, somatically/ kinetically represent the eco-aesthetic, eco-social imperative of nonlinear time, quantum entanglements,  “…spooky action at a distance…” Einstein’s reference to quantum entanglement—how all living things from our microbiome to the macrocosmos are interwoven—to invoke an eco-ethical politics of spiritual intelligence = moving beyond what we think we know.

Dreamworld, Surrealism and the Sacred (See Alhadeff’s Religious Studies Review Volume 49, Issue 4: Surrealism ↔ The Sacred: Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Manifesto of Surrealism – Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD), Improvisation, Spiritual Intelligence (See Alhadeff’s Sacred Attunement: Shmita as Cultural Biomimicry | Tikkun)

The resiliency of home embodies the potential to remap our symbiotic interconnectedness. The Greek for home, or whole house, is oikos—the root of eco-logy and eco-nomics.

Architectures/ infrastructures that implicitly disrupt fences, walls, boundaries, polarizing binaries

Inhabiting the Impossible

Questioning The Cube itself while being physically and psychically confined within its parameters; The Cube as a metaphor for our contemporary paradigm of what we think we know. How to manifest not thinking outside the box, because the taken-for-granted reference point is still the box—like the terms “radical” (still refers to mediocre normalcy, neurotypicality) or “marginal” (still refers to the center)—but decolonized thinking:

Using the Cyclorama—immersive experience to kinetically shift what we think we know eliciting: Paradigm Shifting: Guiding Evolution From the Inside: “We are not individuals stuck in a paradigm trying to get out, we ourselves are the paradigm that we long to shift out of” (51). As Jeff Carreira reminds us: “A shift in paradigm is not just a new set of ideas about the same world. A shift in paradigm is a shift into a new world all together” (41).

Supply-chain consciousness versus the inevitability of modernity, of petrocapitalism, settler colonialism

How do taken-for-granted norms maintain their status quo? The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist, “Benjamin [Lay] wrote his book [All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates—which Benjamin Franklin published in 1738] at a time when slavery seemed to many people around the world as natural and unchangeable as the sun, the moon, and the stars in the heavens…an unchangeable foundation of society” (3, 71). Norms ranging from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to contemporary ubiquitous digital technologies—themselves rooted in modern Trans-African slavery. For example, the mining in the Congo of tungsten used in the vibration mechanisms in cell phones. Conflict minerals such as tungsten, gold, tantalum, and tin are present in almost every single piece of technology so many of us use daily. Profit-driven digital technology today reflects the hypernaturalized cult of individualism: institutional, corporate dependencies that naturalize ecocide, the annihilation of human communities and wildlife habitats.