Fall 2024 Collaborative Artist in Residence at Montgomery College, Rockville during which I worked with students to create an ode to the Venn Diagram within the gallery 

As part of this, I taped out a five set overlapping diagram within the gallery that we could enter and walk around in. This Living Diagram was a  living sculpture of found overlaps between objects, text and images. 

Project Statement: 

The Venn diagram is poetic. The two set, two circle version is beautiful in its simplicity, representing that two things can be in relationship without being identical. The Venn diagram is radical. During Argentina’s military dictatorship of 1976–83, Venn diagrams were banned from being taught in primary schools. It is a visual tool for thinking through common ground and difference that suggests holding, touch, commonality and connection while resisting homogeneity.

I am particularly interested in the region of overlap. If you start with two seemingly unrelated elements assigned to each circle, the prompt is to fill in that shared region, to see the unobvious connections. When the set of elements gets bigger the proposition gets more complex and the commonalities become more subtle and precise.

The Venn diagram is beautiful. It is a visual representation of complex ideas and their multi-set visual manifestation is still being grappled with in mathematics today.

The Venn diagram as a form and the Venn diagram as a tool will be the anchor point for my residency, using it to generate projects of multiple scales. Through workshops and class visits, I worked with the students of Montgomery College to fill the gallery with diagrams, working with the question What is shared?

A collaborative world-building and world-falling apart game. 

Players are greeted with the banner: 

Notice the space between you and the body across from you.

Between is a map of intermingling shapes that represent an alternate reality; an imaginary space.

Together, you inhabit this imaginary space.
This space and the events that take place inside will be devised and described through your game play.

A sigh can cause a hurricane.
A patch of moss can devour the whole space. The sun can deflate into a balloon you rest your head on. A tear can become a flood and suddenly you are an island.

Begin in Phase I.

They pass through four phases: Build, Arrive, Alive, Impermanent and decide collectively when the game has ended. 

in collaboration with Chloë Engel

Created in conjunction with The Space is a Body and You Are In It. Three risograph printed, spiral bound booklets of interviews and conversations about the process and relationships that went into developing the game.
 

In The Room is an essay by Nora Raine Thompson on the experience of playing one of our game campaigns. As a performance studies scholar, dancer, and dear friend, Nora weaves personal reflection, theory and quotations. A version of this essay is was also publishes at The Brooklyn Rail. 

Chloë Interviews Anna / Anna Interviews Chloë. Chloë Engel interviews me and I interview Chloë Engel as a way to capture our personal and collective histories and better understand how they contribute to our work together. Essays are bound together in separate orientations, physically representing the co-authorship inherent to our collaborative relationship. 

Anna, Sam, Chloë is a collectively edited conversation between Chloë, Sam Burhoe and I in which we grapple with power, consent, and harm in improvisational and imagined spaces. In the middle is a fold out of the paper we used to highlight and track the conversation as it happened.  

You dial the number provided on the date that you’re supposed to.
You close your eyes and listen.
You enter a room.
There are other people in the room. We are in the room with you.
We tell you how the room is built,
What the room contains
What contains the room
What happens in the room
and how it will eventually all be destroyed.
You listen.

Every call is a new room.
 

I Want to Be is an improvised spoken dance performed via conference call. Audience members enter the conference call space and listen as an imaginary space is conjured through verbal description.

Created in collaboration with Chloë Engel.

Collaborative Imagining is a practice in which two or more people collectively devise an imaginary shared experience. Interacting with and within an imaginative landscape creates opportunities for understanding ourselves and others outside of conventional logic. When relating through collaborative imagining time is malleable, sensation is magnified, and cause & effect hold poetic meaning. A sigh can cause a hurricane. A tear can become a flood and suddenly you are an island. 

We have taught through Deep Play Institute, School of Making Thinking and independently.

Online, we practice with cameras turned off and an internal focus. Using structured improvisational play, we guide the group through a series of verbal scores. Once these scores become familiar, they are combined to generate an improvisational field of creation and existence.

Through imaginary play, we can both experience and witness ourselves navigating the relationship between autonomy and consensus. Together, in virtual space, we will explore questions of shared reality: How do I imagine you? How do you imagine me? Can we ever really imagine the same thing?