zoras
How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?
Robin Wall Kimmerer
ZORAS are Rona Kennedy (BE), Silvana Mammone (GE), Inez Louwagie (BE), Sanna Hukkanen (FIN) & Charlotte Peys (BE). ZORAS is a fluctuating collective that met for the first time in this constellation during a one-month residency at Saari Residence (Kone Foundation) in Finland in July 2022.
We have been exploring interconnectedness between practices of individual artists and activists as a catalyst for change. We listened to interviews with artists, activists and scientists we conducted previously to our stay, shared sketches (audio, text, image) to research how all of this can become a method of dialogue. We tried to deeply understand what sharing our practice in proximity to each other means. How can this connect artists and activists in the way they build social and ecological change? What role do listening, openness to vulnerability, sharing unfinished fragments of texts and sound recordings, sketches and thoughts play in envisioning change? How to move beyond the binaries of hope/lessness, in/action to gradually develop a complex, multiple and collective practice? We researched in an embodied, sensuous way, what reciprocity means in the doing. A significant part of our explorations were invitations that emerged during this month and were carefully crafted to invite each other into our practice, into a question or into an experience. All of this was collected in an (im)material archive.
Rona Kennedys Invitation during the residency
words and concepts we wrestled and played with
my own invitation for the group
These are some of the drawings we did together, oftentimes while listening to the interviews we conducted prior to the residency
Charlotte Peys Invitation
this is a poem we created together
In the coming year, we hope to learn and understand more by asking our questions to other people who may have a similar interest in or passion for transformation, movement and change. We will each invite another artist/activist to become a temporary part of the ZORAS organism: an idea of a shared practice, a creative dialogue that is going to culminate in ZORAS curating and publishing a KUTI KUTI Magazine issue in the late summer of 2023.
