The meeting of a human body and a specific body of ground brings together a complex of experiences, histories, orientations, and vulnerabilities.
In a hyper-mediated world, how do haptic, visual, aural, language, and digital experiences combined with geolocation and site/cultural context add to a more complex knowledge of the relationship between the ground and humans?
What is the exchange between these bodies?
How do we explore the limits and possibilities of aesthetics to open up/decolonize/re-center a meeting with the ground?
How do we bring people to the ground and the ground to people through simple, attentive acts?
How do we occupy space within the urban environment/civic consciousness for evidence of connection and amplification of relations with the more than human world?
About the Founders
Artists, curators and activists Susan Main and MJ Neuberger invite participants to look down and attend to the spaces they walk upon. Their collaborative work brings together artists and non-artists through simple prompts that encourage co-creation and re-imagination of shared space. From Project: Soils porch chats, quarterly seasonal gatherings, and participatory acts of intention and attention, Meeting Ground explores the limits and possibilities of aesthetics to open up/decolonize/re-center a meeting with the ground. Through 2021, Meeting Ground projects are featured at Cultivate.
Susan Main's multi-disciplinary work explores individual and social contracts between space, time, and attention, pairing the unmediated event with tools that attempt to measure, define, locate and orient. Using drawing, painting, video, projection, documentation, and collaboration, her work investigates the liminal, transitory qualities of attention and mediation.
MJ Neuberger’s work arises from her ritual attempts to return to a body abandoned in childhood trauma and abuse that she traces in part to colonial history in her mother’s native Philippines. Referencing indigenous ceremonies and elemental processes, Neuberger’s installations, sculptural work and images suggest acknowledging shared vulnerability and reconnecting with an indigenous, nature-based self as a path toward integrating traumatic memory and reoccupying colonized bodies.