I had the pleasure of creating four fanzines for The Little Workshop project for Spore Initiative conducted in July 2024. The process involved going through beautiful image and text materials from the participants, with a lot of room for me to play with typography, illustrations, colours, scanning plants found in our surroundings, and motifs. The Little Schools’ invitation was to create a space for practical learning and exchange on topics such as environmental justice, health, and food sovereignty. A focus was put on those practice-based forms of knowledges, that enable different relationships to the land, forests, water, biodiversity and the plants that feed and heal us, while often being marginalised or not recognized as "valuable knowledge". Over the course of one week, participants took part in a variety of workshops for creative new methodologies and knowledge sharing. The contributions were:
Decolonial Plant Knowledge, with Abeni Asante
Empowerment and power sharing in nature education, with Anthony Owosekun
Singing and community. Workshop exploring the voice as an instrument for collective expression, with Carolina Riaño
Food and Body. Memories that inhabit us, with Chepita
The decolonial tomato. Picture stories about seeds, migration and the healing self, Sarnath Banerjee, and Mikhail Lylov
Plant allies for tending transformation, by Siegmar Zacharias and Shelley Etkin (SocialBodyApothecary).
Food by Jasmine Al-Qaisi, Fatma Savun, Aline Winchester
You can peruse through the zines at Spore Initiative.
This Voice, Singing & Community zine is one out of five workshops and zine contributions that formed part of the Little School, a summer school program that took place in July 2024 at Spore Initiative, in Berlin Neukölln. Carolina Riaño Gómez (the host of this workshop) is a Colombian singer, born in Bogotá, Colombia, began her studies in Classical Singing at the "Pontificia Universidad Javeriana" in Bogotá and then moved to Germany to continue her opera studies at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, where she completed her Masters in Opera Singing. She has been part of several Latin American music projects among others the women's vocal quartet Chocolate com Laranja and the Afro-Colombian fusion jazz band Ambrodavi with whom she has released two albums "Cuentero" (2020), "Coraza" (2022). In 2022, during her residency at Cordillera Space for Bodies and Utopias, she developed her solo performance Canto Crudo about field songs. Since the fall of 2022 she has been the director of the Female Latin Choir "Canto Diáspora".
For my research and art direction - collectivity, free floating singing words, musicality, and Argentinian motifs and musical intruments became the primary inspiration for creating this zine.
Memories that Inhabit Us zine is one out of five workshops and zine contributions that formed part of the Little School, a summer school program that took place in July 2024 at Spore Initiative, in Berlin Neukölln. The workshop facilitator Chepita; is a person from Abya Yala who has been learning about plants and food since early childhood as part of life and family interactions. Likes being around nature and enjoys sharing spaces with people getting involved in topics around food and collective knowledges. Also interested in community care, health, climate and social justice and the interconnectedness of these topics in the network of life. Working in playful ways on recovering health sovereignity through small actions in our daily lives. Chepita is part of the health collective Casa Kuà in Berlin.
The provided texts and materials felt like a beautiful poem painting very visually the steps and instructions to make sounds with your body as collective exercises, using ritualistic and playful aspects. For this zine, drawing out these very visceral exercises and movements and capturing body parts and sounds as a narrative became my playground to experiment with.