Laboratory for Other Worlds: Designs for Living Beyond Damage

Laboratory for Other Worlds is an ongoing collaborative project, presented at Yale ISM as an art exhibition and symposium that responds to damaged landscapes by constructing spaces of refuge—incomplete yet insistent acts of preservation, witnessing, and re-enchantment within worn-out worlds. Conceived by Patte Loper, an interdisciplinary artist who works across painting, sculpture, and installation, the Laboratory began as a way to reflect and communicate research on variable sea level rise in the Northeastern United States; as environmental scientist and collaborator Andrew Kemp points out, sea level rise is a problem for coastal communities that requires scientists to approach the land itself as an archive that records both damage and repair. Here, the language of the laboratory is both concrete and metaphorical: it suggests that an engagement with artwork is itself a kind of experimentation that can teach us how to feel our way into a different kind of world-making—engagements with Earth that are grounded in the land’s memory, rather than an extractive drilling-down. Kemp and Loper are also collaborating with Erin Genia (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), a multidisciplinary artist, educator and community organizer. At Genia’s prompting, they have come to ask: what if the salt marsh, site of scientific research, were considered sacred? What if the agency and sentience of the marsh itself, and all beings located here, even the microscopic ones, were able to be known?

The diverse artistic, poetic, and scientific voices in this symposium contribute to a larger pedagogical project, seeking to make climate science accessible through creative work - an integral part of imagining worlds otherwise. Through encounters with Indigenous knowledges and European pre-modern mythology in Laboratory for Other Worlds, Western ontological frameworks are broken, but still present, creating generative tension – an ontological rupture that exposes “naturalized” default settings, assumptions about the nature of reality (linear time, the irreducibility of the centralized human individual, nature as resource, the division between human and the more-than-human and between sentient and non-sentient) that are taken for granted, and rarely questioned.[1] The goal is to sit with this tension, to begin the work of sorting out threads of thriving from those that entail what Deborah Bird Rose calls “double death”: death across species including humans and nonhumans, of not just individuals, but of entire communities, populations, and cultures due to modern practices, and to support a much-needed re-weaving of ontologies.

This symposium is held in association with the ISM's current art exhibition(Link is external), Laboratory for Other Worlds, which will be on view at Miller Hall at 406 Prospect Street, New Haven from March 26 - May 7. Exhibit is free and open to the public and features an opening night reception on March 25. Sponsored by the Institute of Sacred Music’s Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture Initiative.

Speakers include Cassie Aimetti, Tanya Crane, Erin Genia, Karen Holmberg, Eugenia Kisin, Andrew Kemp, Patte Loper, and Juliana Spahr.

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Host or Publisher Yale Institute of Sacred Music