Schedule
Assembly Schedule 2017
May 19, 2017 in Collaboration with Oregon Food Bank & Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI)
5-10PM Opening night festivities at Oregon Food Bank
by Emma Colburn, Shoshana Gugenheim & Renee Sills in collaboration with Oregon Food Bank Learning Gardens and Community Farm, and Columbia River Correctional Institute Resident Artists
5-6PM Mural Kick-Off and Garden Happy Hour
YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED to the opening reception for Assembly 2017 weekend and summer gardening season! We will celebrate the diverse use-values that the Oregon Food Bank Learning Gardens and Community Farm provide to the region. Gather at 5pm for a ribbon cutting dedication of the collaborative mural designed by Resident Artists at Columbia River Correctional Institution, then relax into the evening with informal tours of the community gardens, green house, and barn. Take a plant start home to grow your own garden out of our time together!
6-8PM Assembly Dinner & Talk
Join us at 6pm for a gardenside potluck dinner followed by a discussion at 7pm about a collaborative mural project between the Columbia River Correctional Institution Resident Artists and Oregon Food Bank.
The dishes we share for dinner will reflect diverse connections to gardening, urban spaces, cultural heritage and the social relationships produced within this intersection. Please RSVP and sign up to bring a dish for 10 people to be shared in a potluck buffet. More details upon registering: shoshana@shoshanagugenheim.com
8-10PM After Food Comes Dance Join us for more merrymaking – stay on for a dance party with food-themed songs like The Supremes’ Buttered Popcorn, Don Mclean’s American Pie and The Chordettes’ Lollipop! Music curated by Renee Sills and Xi Jie Ng (Salty).
All ages, BYOB, some refreshments may be available for purchase.
Saturday, May 20th 9am-5pm & Sunday May 21st 10am-5pm
Experimental Family Project Space
by PLAT | Saturday at NAYA (Room TBD) and Sunday at MLK Jr. School (Room TBD)
This is an ongoing learning space for the duration of Assembly that offers childcare for parents attending the conference and also explores the shifting conference sites through documentation. Drawing from similarities between radical education philosophies of Reggio Emilia and the Social Practice canon, we will use processes of recording our surroundings to deepen our inquiries of, and connections to, the landscapes surrounding us. You are welcome to drop in (and drop off) anytime! All ages are invited to participate. Materials will be provided. Pre-registration encouraged but not required. Ask questions or pre-register by contacting Emma at ecolburn@pdx.edu
Saturday, May 20th Creek Colleges in collaboration with Native American Youth And Family Center (NAYA) and Columbia River Watershed Council (CRWSC)
In 2017, Creek College, in collaboration with NAYA (Native American Youth and Family Center) and the Columbia Slough Watershed Council, is hosting a series of three symposiums on the Columbia Slough in Portland, Oregon.
Our first symposium is Saturday, May 20th, and features opportunities for new classes, a canoe journey, and a series of panel discussions. All events are free and open to the public.
Sign up below for our classes and an opportunity to participate in environmental education and restoration activities through our partnership with Columbia Slough Watershed Council.
9-9:30AM Opening Ceremony with NAYA
9:30-10:30AM Creek Colleges Class 1: Whispering Soil
with Anupam Singh
Documentation can allow an artwork to reach wider audiences and extend beyond its physical time and space. Some artistic processes produce experiential and intangible outcomes where documentation becomes the only way to access it. If we alter the process of documentation into an intangible one, how would it impact the afterlife of an artwork that is ephemeral in nature? Can artworks live through narratives or memories as alternative forms of documentation?
Based on these questions, this workshop explores aspects of ephemerality and permanence in artistic engagement. Participants will create sculptures with found objects collected from the Columbia slough and inspired by the site. After completion the sculptures will be left at the site to decompose and reintegrate into the landscape. Instead of documenting our process or finished pieces through conventional methods, participants will share personal memories and narratives of the process in a story circle the next day at MLK Jr. School.
10:45-11:30AM Morning Barter for Creek College
Creek College partners with local watershed councils to determine restoration activities for each of our projects. Attending our classes means participation in art making, but it’s also a chance to learn about your local watershed and related restoration practices! For more information on restoration and what you can do to help in Portland, visit our partners, the Columbia Slough Watershed Council and the Johnson Creek Watershed Council.
For this session we will be removing invasive species with Portland Parks & Recreation Coordinator Yoko Silk.
11:45-12:45 Creek Colleges Class 2: Writing Together and Alone In Public
with Roz Crews
Walking through landscapes, touching grass, seeing a dog, eating apples near a slough; these are some things that we can (and likely will) do in this class. We will work together to write critically about experiential engagement with public space, and we will practice generating meaning from shared moments. We will also talk about ways to participate in the subconscious by listening, looking and writing. People of all ages and backgrounds are welcome. Materials will be provided.
Pre-registration encouraged but not required. Register by contacting Roz: roz@pdx.edu
12:45-1:45 Cafeteria Staff Exchange Program: Lunch at NAYA
with Spencer Byrne-Seres & Xi Jie Ng (Salty) in collaboration with Laura Booth, Monique Lopez and Irene Prasad from the Native American Youth and Family Center, and Ruby Sims-Suell and Virginia Mulbey from Martin Luther King Jr. School
The Cafeteria Staff Exchange Program is a project envisioned as a creative solution to providing lunches for Assembly. The goal is to bring together cafeteria staff from both NAYA and MLK Jr. School in an effort to develop conversation and reflection on nutrition, how to provide meals, high volume cooking, and our relationship to the food sources that surround us. Who are the staff working tirelessly at NAYA and MLK Jr. School? What is their relationship to food? How would they collaboratively design a menu for Assembly? Where do the recipes they use come from, and what might they cook if they could cook anything at work?
Members of the cafeteria staff from both NAYA and MLK Jr. School participated in a summit to develop a menu for Assembly. The project will culminate as lunches prepared for each day of Assembly, inspired by the recipes and ideas generated during the exchange. The project will be documented through custom paper placemats that we produce with notes, photographs and images from the project.
1:45-2:45 Creek Colleges Class 3: Creek Stories
with Eliot Feenstra & Lauren Moran & Collaborators
What are the stories we tell that connect us, and others, to a specific place? What are the tales or histories we have developed to grow symbiotic relationships between people and the natural world? What are the current and societal stories being debated?
The stories we tell to ourselves and others shape what we can imagine and understand; what we believe has happened; and what we believe is possible – both individually and collectively. In the course of sharing stories, difficulties and truths of community and place can rise to the surface. Building on traditions of story circles and storytelling in many cultures and community arts practices, this workshop invites participants to consider how stories connect us to places through sharing and listening to stories about water (and creeks!) in our lives.
3-3:45 Second Barter for Creek College
For this session we will be removing invasive species with Portland Parks & Recreation Coordinator Yoko Silk.
4:00-5:00 Creek Colleges Class 4: Canoe the Slough (Canoe Trip)
with Anke Schüttler and Shoshana Gugenheim
Canoes provided by Columbia Slough Watershed Council
5-6:00 Panel with NAYA and CRWSC
8-11:00PM Karaoke at Chopsticks III on Columbia River
Join us for some song and dance at Chopsticks III!
May 21, 2017 in collaboration with Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary & Middle School
10-11:00AM Place Based Knowing in a Branded World
with Alissa Hartman & Shoshana Gugenheim
Robin Wall Kimmerer, acclaimed author, professor of biology and member of the Potawatomi Nation, once noted that children growing up in today’s commercial world can identify over 100 logos and fewer than 10 plants! This workshop shifts our attention to the inter-relationship between living beings and away from the commercialism that life in a city often fosters.
In our time together, we will test Kimmerer’s theory, exploring commercial logos and the wild plants growing in and around the King School neighborhood. We will give focused time and attention to identifying edible and other plant species in the neighborhood and, if time allows, our session will end with the generation of our own unique plant logos.
11:15-12:15PM Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling
Helen and Hannah will discuss their long-term project Big Rock Candy Mountain (BRCM), produced in collaboration with students of Queen Alexandra Elementary School in East Vancouver, Canada. As a flavor incubator and taste-making think-tank, the project takes its name from a folk song that reflects a comic utopia, where we hear a “…buzzin’ of the bees in the peppermint trees, ’round the soda water fountains.” BRCM is a post-proportionate world where adults and rationality no longer define the rules and limits of what is possible.
BRCM is comprised of meandering workshops, edible editions, artist invocations, strange conversations, school ground installations and an Instagram conveyor belt of evolving ideas. Rather than investing in a single result, BRCM privileges the school as a kind of (candy) factory, engaged in a wide range of productive capacities and processes. Here, smaller projects intersect with the larger context of economy, labour, taste-as-power and culturally defined objects of desire.
12:30PM-1:30PM Cafeteria Staff Exchange Program: Lunch at MLK Jr. School (See 20 May Creek College lunch description)
with Spencer Byrne-Seres & Xi Jie Ng (Salty) in collaboration with Laura Booth, Monique Lopez and Irene Prasad from the Native American Youth and Family Center, and Ruby Sims-Suell and Virginia Mulbey from Martin Luther King Jr. School
1:45PM-2:45PM KSMoCA Tour & All The Feelings (sculpture garden)
with Anke Schüttler, Michelle Piek, Amanda Evans, Erika Dedini, Shawn Creeden, Eddie Garland, Lisa Jarrett, Audra Appel, James Casey, Ema Corona, Curtis Dunlap, Karoline EauClaire, Hana Gustafson, Nicholas Haase, Jennifer Holloway, Trish Kalidonis, Margaret Lansing, James Liao, Jenna Mackowiak, Andrea Maldonado, Keisha Leigh Mateo, Ting Ying Tiffany Ng, Devin Ruiz, May Walker and Martin Luther King Jr. School students.
What are all the feelings you are feeling? What do you do with all those feelings? If there was a sculpture to receive and help you process your feelings, what would the sculpture look like? The sculpture garden at Martin Luther King Jr. School is a result of working through these questions with King students in grades 3-7. Their ideas were passed along to artists who created the actual structures of the sculptures and finished in collaboration with the students of MLK Jr. School.
3:00PM-4:00PM What We Make Together
with Eliot Feenstra
This is a performance workshop. This is an exploration of the question how do we collaborate? What can we make together? Using tools from collaborative performance techniques and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of The Oppressed, participants will engage in embodied research about collaborative art-making, including creating short performance vignettes. No experience necessary, all ages welcome.
Location: Cafeteria
4:15PM-5:15PM Whispering Soil Story Circle (See description above for Saturday)
with Anupam Singh
On Saturday, sculptures were created during Creek College with found objects collected from the Columbia slough and inspired by the site. After completion the sculptures were left at the site to decompose and reintegrate into the landscape. Instead of documenting our process or finished pieces through conventional methods, participants will share personal memories and narratives of the process in a story circle at MLK Jr. School.
5:30PM-6:30PM The New Jim Crow Experiential Research Workshop
with Anke Schüttler, Emma Colburn, Lauren Moran, Lisa Jarrett & Renee Sills
In this hour we will focus on collectively conducting Experiential Research Strategies to better facilitate communication between communities that can’t be together. We will gather ideas and questions to explore our shared feelings, thoughts, and inclinations about race and mass incarceration in the United States. This session also includes critical engagement with texts and discussion through writing and storytelling. The workshop is the initial phase of a larger project that uses Experiential Research Strategies to connect people and sites by questioning “colorblindness” and its impact on the systems we live within locally and nationally. The conversation is inspired by Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow–Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
7:00–9:00PM Closing Conversation with Ariana Jacob at the Bye and Bye (1011 NE Alberta St, Portland, OR 97211)
As Assembly comes to a close for this year let’s reflect together on what we saw, felt, thought, heard, tasted, reconsidered and realized over the past days. All levels of Assembly participants welcome, whether you attended one or all or the events. This lightly structured conversation invites us to begin synthesizing our Assembly experiences and imagining the ways they might influence what we do next.