Gathering Earthseed

Event | Gathering Earthseed
Date: 20 July 2024
Time: 13:30-21:30
Location: W139, Warmoesstraat 139, Amsterdam
Organizers: Colin Sterling, Margarita Osipian, Müge Yılmaz, Anna Hoetjes, and Pırıltı Onukar
Registration: pirilti.onukar@student.uva.nl, margarita@w139.nl*
Registration deadline: 17 July 2024
Credits: 1 ECTS
More information here.**

*Upon registration, provide the organizers with your name, preferred e-mail, university and research school! Please also specify whether you are an RMA student or PhD researcher.
** Note that this event is ticketed to the general public, but attendance is free for registered students.

July 20, 2024 marks the beginning of Octavia E. Butler’s trailblazing 1993 feminist science fiction book Parable of the Sower, from the Earthseed trilogy. In light of this meaningful date, artists Müge Yilmaz and Anna Hoetjes, in collaboration with Marly Pierre-Louis and Fiep van Bodegom, are initiating Gathering Earthseed; a full-day gathering at W139 that emerges from the legacy and spirit of Butler’s work and her literary universe.

Gathering Earthseed will mark the symbolic moment in time when Parable of the Sower transitions from being set in the future to being set in the present. This communal gathering approaches this moment as both a ritualistic transition and a practical moment in which to gather in conversation and solidarity with one another—envisioning new possibilities of worldbuilding in our own timelines.

An interdisciplinary group of visual artists, writers, and cultural practitioners—inspired by Butler’s work in their own practices—have been invited to shape the day’s programme. Through workshops, conversations, readings, rituals, and a communal dinner, we’ll investigate the tools and practices that allow us to conceive new social realities, alternative futures, and communal relations to nature. By exploring feminist, decolonial, speculative worldbuilding, we seek to critique the socio-political structures we live in and write ourselves into the future(s) we want to see; creating pathways out of destruction and establishing life-affirming realities instead. Always anchoring back to Parable of the Sower, this gathering centers feminist, queer, Black diasporic, and decolonial practices.

The gathering will be the starting point for the exhibition Taking Root Among the Stars, opening November 2024. This exhibition will feature the work of artists and writers who use feminist science fiction not only as a theme in their work, but also as a tool to foster the exchange of radical speculative strategies.

Credit details

• Required Reading: Parable of the Sower
• Attendance to the event
• Optional Readings & Materials
  ▪ Gregory Jerome Hampton. Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens,
  and Vampires.
  ▪ Gregory Jerome Hampton. Vampires and Utopia: Reading Racial and Gender Politics in the
  Fiction of Octavia Butler.
  ▪ Dangerous Visions: Wild Seed: Reflecting on the work and impact of Octavia Butler.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPlYPjGYyOk