BECOMING WITH: Rooted Worlds, Relational Practice, Entangled Futures | with Audax M. Gawler

Brought to you by the SSAF

WHEN: Thursday 17 April, 1-3PM

WHERE: Arts Lab, Level 1 Building 159, Arts and Cultural, Monash Road, University of Melbourne Parkville (MAP)

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Creative practice is always relational—emerging from and making meaning from entanglements with our human peers and the more-than-human worlds we are embedded in. In times of polycrisis, how do we cultivate practices that sustain, nourish, and inspire? How do we root ourselves in entangled ways of making that generate resilience and allow us to co-create just and joyful futures?

This experiential workshop explores embodied and experimental approaches to creative practice, guided by the adaptive intelligence of ecological systems—mycelial networks, root systems, giant kelp, slime mold, and coral. Through a series of interactive exercises, we will attune to the flows and formations of multispecies ecologies, using them as models for creative processes that are interconnected, flexible, and sustaining.

Designed for artists, thinkers, and makers seeking ways to navigate uncertain times this session offers practices and reflections  on staying connected, generating meaning, and co-creating creative worlds that are as relational and dynamic as the ecosystems they are embedded in.

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Audax M. Gawler is a trans* interspecies artist, world builder, scholar and multigenre Symbiopunk working to cultivate the Symbiocene, a compassionate, reverent and care-centered planetary future. Their work is commonly socially engaged and participatory, weaving disciplines to create encounters with diverse earth ecologies in the present and possible futures. Audax is intent on using affective, multisensorial and experiential methods to repopulate the social imaginary with multispecies companions, comrades and co-creators.

Some of this work has included; an interspecies surrogacy clinic (Carrykin 2023), Multispecies engagement audits for art Institutions (MEEP 2022), participatory re-worlding led by viral bodies (Emissary2920, 2020), an immersive insect kinship lab (Flight Path 2019) and a seven-hour participatory eco-grief ritual (Mokita, 2017).

Audax is; Co-creator and convener of the Trans* Ecology Club, Co-curator of the 2021-2024 Forum of Sensory Motion Cuttlefish Residency,founder and facilitator of award winning Community Transmissions Futures Residency, one half of queer-time lab GEOFADE alongside Devika Bilimoria, founding member of ecological live-art collective L&NDLESS and a resident at School House Studios.