Sacrificial Cabbage: online workshop series

Christina Battle:
Saturday November 20, 2021; 2:00 – 4:00 PM PST (EventBrite)
S F Ho:
Saturday November 27, 2021; 2:00 – 4:00 PM PST (EventBrite)
Tania Willard:
Saturday December 4, 2021; 12:00 – 2:00 PM PST (EventBrite)
All workshops will take place on Zoom; Register via EventBrite

Taking its name from a garden plant ravaged by slugs, Sacrificial Cabbage is a workshop series that invites three contemporary artists to share their practice with participants who live and work in the Nelson region and surrounding communities.

Artists Christina Battle, S F Ho, and Tania Willard will facilitate individual online workshops on topics including ecology, seed saving, connectivity, medicinal plants, and land-based practices. Each workshop will be two-hours in length consisting of both lecture and participatory workshop.

Through diverse mediums, the Sacrificial Cabbage workshops will engage broader dialogues about climate change, disaster capitalism, land and food sovereignty, and harm reduction through creative and artistic interventions. Christina Battle’s workshop, “Doing Things with Others (across distance): Considering Participatory Practice” draws upon pandemic instigated infrastructural shifts in participatory art regarding their artistic practice with seeds and community gardening. S F Ho’s workshop will explore the idea of medicine and how we come to define what we put in our bodies as healing or toxic. The series will conclude with Tania Willard’s workshop on land-based artistic practice concerning Indigenous knowledges as it relates to the ongoing collaborative project BUSH Gallery.

Interested participants are invited to register for a workshop by visiting the following EventBrite links. A maximum of twelve (12) participants will be invited to attend each workshop. No previous experience necessary. Learn more information about Sacrificial Cabbage by visiting Oxygen’s website.

Sacrificial Cabbage is free to attend. Each workshop seeks sliding scale donations that will be given to non-profit organizations chosen by each artist. Workshops will not be recorded; however, a print and digital publication will be available summarizing the topics, resources, and discussions explored.

Workshop Descriptions:


Christina Battle:
 Saturday November 20, 2021; 2:00 – 4:00 PM PST (EventBrite)

Doing Things with Others (across distance): Considering Participatory Practice

A lot has changed in the arts since the spring of 2020, and one infrastructural shift that I hope continues long after the pandemic subsides is the move to online workshops, events, and talks: now made accessible and available across distance. Much of my research considers distributed networks and how they might offer potentials for the exchange of ideas and the building of community in new ways. Beginning with a lecture and discussion exploring strategies that I’ve been experimenting with as part of participatory practice, together we will perform a number of recent projects and collectively consider what potentials might be gained from Doing Things with Others (across distance).

Christina Battle is an artist based in amiskwacîwâskahikan, (also known as Edmonton, Alberta), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Battle’s work focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: the complexity of disaster and the intricacies that are entwined within it. She looks to disaster as a series of intersecting processes including social, environmental, cultural, political, and economic, which are implicated not only in how disaster is caused but also in how it manifests, is responded to and overcome. Through this research, Battle looks closer to both the internet (especially social media) and plant systems for strategies to learn from, and for ways we might consider disaster anew. [www.cbattle.com]

Image: Exercises in Trust, participatory project and website, Christina Battle, 2020.

S F Ho: Saturday November 27, 2021; 2:00 – 4:00 PM PST (EventBrite)

This workshop will explore the idea of medicine and how we come to define what we put in our bodies as healing or toxic. Considering plant medicine and harm reduction models, I am asking aloud if we can get to a more complex understanding of how our bodies are affected both specifically and holistically by various agents and elements. I wonder how medicine can manifest within different relationships, objects and materials.

S F Ho is an artist, writer, and facilitator. Their parents immigrated to Turtle Island from Hong Kong in the 1970s and they have been living as an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples for the past eleven years. They’re cultivating a practice of wary sociality, never finishing books, and being sort of boring. They’ve published a novella about love and aliens called George the Parasite. [sssfffho.com]

Tania Willard: Saturday December 4, 2021; 12:00 – 2:00 PM PST (EventBrite)

Tania Willard, Secwepemc Nation, works within the shifting ideas of contemporary and traditional as it relates to cultural arts and production. Often working with bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Willard has worked as a curator in residence with grunt gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery. Willard’s curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, a national touring exhibition first presented at Vancouver Art Gallery in 2011. As assistant professor in Creative Studies at UBCO (Kelowna BC) currently her research focuses on Secwepemc aesthetics/language/land and interrelated Indigenous art practices. Willard’s projects include BUSH gallery, a conceptual space for land based art and action led by Indigenous artists. [www.taniawillard.ca]

This program is generously supported by Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.

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