LAWNSHROOMING points to the lack of accessibility in environmental sciences, conservation, National Parks, and their legacies of eugenics and the ways collective access making disrupts these legacies. Including Artificial Intelligence captions that ignores the ways people speak and use language.
The animated videos shown illustrate co-creativity and collective access work, joy, the multiple ways we speak and use language, perceive and describe images, express ourselves, carry memory and knowledges, share our imaginations and move together to support each other across disabilities. Sensorial descriptions and touch descriptions are part of the work as are descriptions that include multiple kinds of memory and knowledges.
The mushrooms pictured in each description are mushrooms I’ve photographed in Lenaphoking wetlands: swamps, bogs and vernal pools as I followed my mother’s and grandfather’s gathering journals. Intimate memories and medicine are noted in their journals. These journals move across time and my ancestral lands - along the waterways, rock and woods in New York, New Jersey and Ohio. Each holds a rhythm erupting with soil, fungi, animal, plant and water. Each overflows with diverse cosmologies and knowledges, languages and intimacies, causing moments to pulsate in multiplicities when I am with the land that my ancestors, my mother and grandfather, sang with me and continue to sing with as I sing to you now.
The first description is by Sean Lee. It’s an audio description with rolling text or captions. Petra Kuppers offers the second mushroom description as captions only. Editing by Jeremiah Barber. Animation and photos by moira williams.
A deeply felt and full bodymind spirit thank you to current contributors:
Muhammd Asfor, Dominic Bradley, Jeremiah Barber, Stephanie Dunning, Alexis Fagen, Finnegan Shannon, Frederick, Rian Ciela Hammond, Stephanie Heit, Lisa Himmer, Petra Kuppers, Sean Lee, Christopher "Unpezverde" Núñez, J. Soto, Elizabeth Valquez.