Workshop

Online Reading Group: Braiding Sweetgrass

Thu, 28/01/2021

Artist and participatory educator Jack Young leads a reading group on excerpts from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass.

Robin Wall Kimmerer's seminal text Braiding Sweetgrass is a soaring ode to the living world in all its complexity, and a bitter indictment to current capitalist economic models and Western understandings of the ecological. Kimmerer's insight stems from her position as both a member of the Citizen Potawomi Nation and as a botanist, and she frequently challenges many assumptions held in mainstream Western society around landscape, community, language and ecology.

In this session, we will look at a passage where Kimmer outlines what she calls a "covenant of reciprocity" and the means by which we might begin to change and heal our relationship with the planet.

All participants will be sent the relevant passages to read as a PDF in advance of the event. We encourage you to support your local booksellers by buying a copy of the book online via Bookshop.org

The reading group will begin with an introduction to some of the key themes in the assigned readings before participants split off into break out rooms for a more intimate 10-minute discussion. Everyone will then come back together and each group will feedback ideas for us to discuss as a group.

JACK YOUNG

Jack Young is an artist and participatory educator living in Bristol. He writes experimental fiction and non-fiction and has published works with Entropy; 3:AM; Burning House Press; Caught by the River and epoqué press, amongst others. His forthcoming chapbook, Urth will be published later in 2021. He also co-hosts the literary podcast Tender Buttons. As an educator, Young has worked with institutions in Barcelona and London including MACBA; Institut Broggi; the Royal Academy; Horniman Museum; Gasworks and Tate. He is currently working on a series of texts and participatory events titled “The Body Forest” that will explore ideas around the way we consider our connection to the more-than-human world and investigate ways to de-centre the human while thinking about community, time, desire, and language.