Planet Greenhouse — AFTER HOPE

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PLANET GREENHOUSE:
A virtual "seed-making" workshop

If you could have any seeds with you at the end of the world, what would they be? What about at the beginning of a new world? Planet Greenhouse is an invitation to co-create a virtual world populated by an ecosystem of speculative seeds, with as little or as much bearing on reality as you'd like. Will you fill your seed garden with corn and apple seeds? Beer seeds and money seeds? Seeds for racial justice and heart-shaped seeds for building community?

Originally conceived of as a physical workshop involving clay, this workshop has been adapted for a virtual experience, with an experimental blend of physical at-home "seed-making" drawing and sculpting activities, a short presentation containing some of the artist's research into seed histories and visual cultures around seeds, and a facilitated 'seed-planting' session, during which the artist will guide participants in uploading their creations into a virtual 'greenhouse'. Following the workshop, with permission, the artist will include participants' new 'seeds' into an updated edition of her ongoing seed catalogue project, for reprint later this year.

Past: March 9, 2021, 12 pm

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer and filmmaker currently based out of Oakland, CA. Her work examines diverse articulations of hope amidst ongoing ecological catastrophe, possibilities for expanding the language of climate apocalypse, and the racialization of contamination narratives, as told through visual and text-based forms. A 2019-2020 Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts, she has also been awarded fellowships and residencies from Ragdale, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and ACRE, and was recently a Collection Fellow at KADIST. She will be publishing a chapter in the upcoming Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (forthcoming Spring 2021) and has exhibited and screened her work in the Netherlands and throughout the US. She received B.A.s in Economics in English and Economics from Brown University, her MFA from the University of California — Berkeley, and is currently a PhD student at the University of California — Santa Cruz.