LOOKING FORWARD:
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| Image | Alpha Centauri in relation to the Sun | NASA/Goddard/Adler/U
TEACHER
Feature:
Sower, Talents, Teacher, Trickster, Chaos, Clay. These are the parables that were meant to make up the six-part Earthseed Series authored by Octavia E. Butler. Only the first two parables were completed before Octavia’s untimely death. Durham Art Gallery’s 2021 exhibition year is programmed under the theme of Earthseed and speculates the possibilities of the four unwritten parables.
Durham Art Gallery is pleased to present the second exhibition in the series, Teacher: All That I Touch I Change with the Odeimin Runners Club. The Odeimin Runners Club has created three films that consider the complexities of human survival, connection to land and rematriation through performative counter-mapping by IBPOC (Indigenous, Black and People of Colour) as a means to thread territories, past-present-futures, and knowledges to help navigate current political and environmental instabilities facing communities, and in particular their own. An interactive webpage situates the three stories of the individual members onto a metaphorical map that shifts between the odeimin or heartberry (strawberry), indicating the teachings that guide the collective and their work around the phytograms, as well as the cartographic representation of the territories they are from.
TRICKSTER
Feature:
Sower, Talents, Teacher, Trickster, Chaos, Clay. These are the parables that were meant to make up the six-part Earthseed Series authored by Octavia E. Butler. Only the first two parables were completed before Octavia’s untimely death. Durham Art Gallery’s 2021 exhibition year is programmed under the theme of Earthseed and speculates the possibilities of the four unwritten parables.
We are pleased to present Trickster: Refining Right Relationship or, All That You Touch You Change, which features the work of Kaya Joan, Laura Joy Pieters, Shamica Ruddock and Whitney French + Lue Boileau produced during the 2020 digital residency supported by Durham Art Gallery, Crate Studio + Project Space and Whippersnapper Gallery. Trickster: Refining Right Relationship, or All That You Touch You Change, is a meditation on the pandemic through the central theme of Octavia E. Butler’s unwritten book Parable of the Trickster in relation to adrienne maree brown’s notion of living in right relationship, and the Earthseed principle of Change.
The Earthseed series begins with the Parable of the Sower. In it author Octavia E. Butler introduces a future world eerily similar to the one we live in today. A young woman named Lauren Oya Olamina endeavours to solve some of the deepest rooted issues of her (our) time through a set of guiding principles that she calls Earthseed and practices them in a community of seekers called Acorn. The second book, Parable of the Talents, documents the growth of Acorn alongside a powerful political religious movement, Lauren’s upturn in fame and the fulfilment of Earthseed’s primary goal: to take root among the stars.
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