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MAKING GROUND:

DIALOGUES
October + November


A creative, collective learning series

A.P.E.'s Making Ground: Dialogues is a series of engagements centered around collective study and reparative relationships to place. The Autumn 2025 series will focus on ecologies less often attended to with three gatherings led by artists whose creative practices intersect with grief and hope, embodied attention to the nonhuman world, interspecies investigations, and delveing into the ferment of the dark. Embedded in the varied offerings are invitations to consider interconnection with the more than human world, land remediation in relationship to colonial trauma, and how historical and land-based studies might lead us to embodied, creative, grounded, and imaginative responses in the present toward more liberated futures.


UP FIRSTOCTOBER 19 @ 1-4pm • Bramble Hill Farm
Hilary Clark + Nicole Daunic
MAT(T)ER
................

NOVEMBER 2, 1-4pm • Bramble Hill Farm 
Heather Geoffrey
The Cafe of the Living

NOVEMBER 9, 4-7pm
Charmaine Sutton, JuPong Lin, Efadul Huq, Meredith Degyansky, Piyush Labhsetwar, Amy Gilburg 
Fermenting in the Dark






OFFERING 1:
MAT(T)ER with Hilary Clark + Nicole Daunic  
October 19, 1-4pm 
Bramble Hill Farm
REGISTER HERE
“Indeed it seemed strange that a script written almost entirely in wings, neck, and air should prove the key to the poetry of short-necked, flipper-winged water-writers.” -Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Author of the Acacia Seeds. And Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics”

Following Ursula K. LeGuin’s proposal of “therolinquistics,” a fictitious association devoted to the interpretation of nonhuman modes of inscription such as ant markings on acacia seeds, the kinetic literature of penguins and the poetry of rocks, this workshop will guide participants in attending to the signs, traces, and imprints of more-than-human choreographies embedded in the landscape of Bramble Hill Farm as sites of meaningful, embodied expression. We will share simple practices of listening, attention, and speculative movement exploration from MAT(T)ER–our ongoing creative process–and activities of noticing, documenting and engaging with traces of more-than-human etchings, scores, and traces. Our explorations will not be oriented towards interpretation or understanding, but rather an unsettling of anthropocentric assumptions around meaning, creativity and value. Together we will become conduits intermixing with animate landscapes and multi-dimensional matrixes of heterogeneous human and nonhuman signs, emissions, tensions and desires.

HILARY CLARK and NICOLE DAUNIC have worked collaboratively in various capacities for the last 15 years. Our approach to dance is oriented through the embodied intelligence, critical capacity and immaterial labor of dancers, foregrounding the particular modes through which dancers create and move in relation. In doing so, we situate our process in the middle of ambiguous atmospheres and zones of indeterminacy in order to foreground the excess, multiplicity, and over-abundance harnessed through the moving body. In this sense, we don’t make dance, the dance makes us.

In 2020, we initiated MAT(T)ER, an ongoing exploration of value and the ways in which it is given and withheld. Oriented through the etymological entwinement of mater (mother), matter (material substance) and to matter (to be of importance), the process is designed as a framework through which to examine the load of the systematic concealment of/dependence on human and nonhuman forms of immaterial labor. In past iterations we have developed speculative practices in collaboration with tree stumps, deforested lands, processes of decay, and mycorrhizal networks to examine human/nonhuman practices of mutuality beyond tropes of inexhaustible care-giving.

In addition, we have worked collaboratively to develop Another Audience, a performance collective and dance residency at Black Hole Hollow in Arlington, VT. Another Audience is offered as a container to support, engage and connect artists whose performance research and practice takes place within an intra-active, multi-species, multi-agential arena animated by expanded, post-anthropocentric notions of audience and performance.




OFFERING 2: THE CAFE OF THE LIVING
with Heather Geoffrey 
November 2, 1-4pm 
Bramble Hill Farm


Step into a space between worlds — between the Shrine of the Dead and the Shrine of the Future — where memory, grief, beauty, and hope converge. The Cafe of the Living is a participatory ritual gathering that invites reflection on our personal lives and collective moment through the intertwined lenses of land, lineage, and legacy. Guided through a threshold walk, meditative practice, and into shared space, participants are invited to honor the kinship of ancestors — human, animal, plant, and elemental — speak to the unborn, and offer acts of care for the world yet to be. 

HEATHER GEOFFREY is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans painting, photography, collage, mixed media, writing, and performance. Rooted in deep inquiry and spiritual exploration, her creative practice engages the seen and unseen worlds as an ongoing dialogue — a conversation between memory, imagination, emotion, and spirit. Heather holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College, where her studies focused on Borderland Theory, the medicine of art, and the artist as a vessel of lineage and transformation. Her works serve as portals — invitations into realms where wonder, ancestry, and the invisible converge.






OFFERING 3:
FERMENTING IN THE DARKwith Charmaine Sutton, JuPong Lin, Efadul Huq, Meredith Degyansky, Piyush Labhsetwar, Amy Gilburg  
November 9, 4-7pm (special time) 
Bramble Hill Farm
In the northern hemisphere, we are about to enter our darkest days of the seasonal cycle. This is the time of year when we hunker down, hide under blankets, and for many, start feeling the blues. Indeed, with violent systems having now fermented on our lands, waters, and bodies for over 500 years, the darkness is bubbling over, encompassing us all. Yet, in the dark, many regenerating and life-making processes occur - seeds germinate in the darkness of the soils, babies grow in the darkness of the womb, deciduous trees shed their leaves entering a state of dormancy in the darkness of the winters; while bears, bats, bumblebees, snakes and more settle into the darkness of hibernation. The word ferment means not only to slowly transform, but also to stir up, to agitate. In the dark, life takes care of itself, resting, regenerating, nourishing, building, making room for what is to come, a quiet presence without witness. In this workshop, we will gather as ritualists, storytellers, and land lovers. We will delve into the darkness - not only as a place to wallow and mourn, but also as a place to dwell, to go into the dark to find out what life generating practices and processes we may be missing out on when we turn the lights on too fast or too soon. More details about the workshop will be provided to registered participants. 

CHARMAINE WILMA SUTTON is a Two-Spirit teacher, healer, and guide. Born in Trinidad, she carries the lineage of her great-grandmother Brunette Lami, a Kalinago woman from  the island of Dominica. Guided by ancestral connection and Creator’s Spirit, she cultivates pathways of remembrance, healing, and self-understanding.

JUPONG LIN is an independent artist, practice-led researcher, writer, and cultural worker whose socially engaged art and poetics hospice the colonized world while cultivating futures of joyful interspecies co-becoming. Formerly a longtime faculty member in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, she recently completed her doctorate in Environmental Studies at Antioch University New England, with current projects weaving ceremony, poetry, and community to honor beloved heartplaces and pluriversal worlds.

EFADUL HUQ is a scholar-practitioner of planning for southern urban natures, centering community-led restoration, agroecology, and land justice. Through research, teaching, and organizing, they engage insurgent and decolonial planning practices that confront authoritarianism and reimagine just social-ecological futures.

MEREDITH DEGYANSKY is a member of a worker-owned cooperative farm rooted in the rift valley of Pangea, where she tends both the land and the community. Her care extends from composting toilets and food forests to blueberries, maíz, and the hearts and souls that sustain collective life.

PIYUSH LABHSETWAR is a steward at Grow Food Northampton whose work centers on participatory agroecology. Trained as a biophysicist and formerly a researcher at The Land Institute, he is currently engaged in advancing sustainable and equitable food and land relations.  

AMY GILBURG is an intuitive counselor, artist, and healer who creates sacred spaces for meaningful connection and deep transformation. She facilitates conversations that inspire clarity, vision, and soul-centered action.



PAST OFFERINGS



COMMUNIONwith Meg Foley  
July 6, 2025 at 8pm (civil twilight) 
Bramble Hill Farm
Communion is an experiment done in community. Using our relation to geology and exploring language as a formative force, Communion unpacks how we are formed—how we are shaped by and through language, place and time. An intentional and spiraling journey through the creation story of the land we are on, the family Meg is a part of, and the sensory materials of the immediate moment of the performance, Communion asks the audience to reflect on all that has accumulated into this moment and the significance of our sensing, feeling selves in this moment, now.

Communion is one part of a larger project called Blood Baby, which includes site-responsive dance performance and Queer Parent Convenings, in addition to Touch Library, an interactive, sensory archive of the project, and Primordial, a visual installation exploring deep time and queer formation, on view in early July at A.P.E. on Main Street. Blood Baby uses multiple mediums to explore the interconnected experiences of queer and gender non-conforming parenting and family-building, highlighting gender, sexuality, community, and Earthly lineage.

Meg Foley (she/he/they) makes performance projects in pursuit of radical self-determination, crafting body-based explorations of identity, belonging, and time from a queer perspective. Drawing on choreographic formalism but continually questioning what constitutes dance performance, her research asks how identity is occupied: an all-the-time, ever-shifting self, a sacred site, a portal, a prism. She often invites audiences to engage with concepts through their own bodily experiences, using movement, design, and choreographic thinking to create containers for bodily engagement and reflection on a somatic present, on the power and location of the body itself as participant. Since 2019, she has been working with fabric, foam, and textile materials to extend performer embodiment through interactive objects and installations, affording somatic life to objects and “feeling back” on and through the body, reflecting on one’s FORM and the body’s collective interiority, shape and architecture. She lives on traditional Lenape land, in southern Lenapehoking and what is commonly known as Philadelphia, where she co-runs The Whole Shebang, a home for experiment performance in Philly, with her partner, visual artist Carmichael Jones, and is a queerdo homeschooling mama in a trans family with two kids and an elderly pit bull. Raised by a single mom in the DC area, she was a creative movement kid who found her choreographic identity on the club dance floor, in phenomenological texts, and in experiential visual art. www.megfoley.org



WHERE WE GO, WE WILL HAVE BEEN with Sara Smith  
May 18, 2025; 12-3pm 
33 Hawley
How is our felt experience of a place informed by knowledge of or assumptions about its history? How do layered past, present, and future moments live in, with, and around us? How might we understand ourselves as grounded in a wide expanse of space and time, and make art from that grounding?

Interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, and librarian Sara Smith will share their experiences and creative practices developed from making speculative artworks and performances from archival research. In guided experiments, we will attend to sensory experience of place, discuss the human anatomies that shape this experience, and engage with, reimagine, and remix “historical” materials connected to APE spaces. Activities will include an artist presentation, group discussion, individual writing and/or drawing, and adaptable guided exercises.

Sara Smith is a transdisciplinary choreographer and librarian. Their projects consider concepts of interconnection, practices of micro-attention, and the poetics and politics of embodied and archival research. Sara’s recent exhibition at APE, Sugar Maple Glacial Lake Station, presented works from their ongoing futurist project Inside the Breath (In Network Time). Sara has been a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship award in Choreography among other awards and honors, and lives
in Greenfield (Pocumtuck land). sarasmithprojects.com



LAY DOWN AND LISTEN: COMMUNIAL PRACTICES FOR SURRENDER AND BELONGINGwith javiera benavente  
May 4, 2025; 12-3pm 
Bramble Hill Farm
What are we losing or have we lost that we want to attend to together?
What dreams and visions do we want to nourish for future generations?

We are living in times of unprecedented brokenness, loss and uncertainty.  While our losses are deeply interconnected, many of us experience them in isolation making it difficult to imagine more generative futures into being.  

Lay Down and Listen is an invitation into a communal and creative exploration in 3 parts: one part art-making, one part ritual, and one part reflection and dialogue.  The purpose is to create a slow, intimate, and sacred space that allows us to attune and attend to our losses (both personal and collective), while nourishing our capacity to dream for future generations.

javiera benavente will share a series of communal practices that invite deep, whole bodied listening and making. This is an invitation into ceremony.  It is a call to turn towards ourselves, each other, the land, and our more than human relatives for connection, guidance, and sustenance as we navigate these turbulent and troubling times.

javiera benavente is an artist, cultural organizer, facilitator, and educator dedicated to collective practice and co-creating new futures of care. Born in Santiago, Chile (Wallmapu) just months before the Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup, she has been deeply impacted by the legacy and failure of this utopian political project and its aftermath throughout her life. 

javiera’s current work explores collective grief, loss, and memory; cultivating right and reciprocal relations with land and more than human relatives; and communal, embodied practices of surrender and belonging.  She is the co-curator of Chile Nunca Más: making memory, making future, an exhibit and memory making project that marks 50 years since el golpe (the military coup) in Chile and the subsequent 17 years long dictatorship.

She serves as Assistant Dean of Collaborative and Community Engaged Learning at Hampshire College where she co-chairs the Decolonization & Reciprocity Working Group. javiera lives on the ancestral homelands of the Pocomtuc, Nonotuck, and Nipmuc Peoples with her partner, daughter, and dog.


WHAT IS YOUR FIRST MEMORY OF DIRT?: COMMUNIAL MEAL AND ART ACTIVATIONwith Yanira Castro  
November 1, 2024; 6pm 
The Workroom



Please join us for a communal meal prepared by artist Yanira Castro. At this gathering, we will collectively experience the project audio score 'What is your first memory of dirt?', share food prepared with ingredients from Nuestras Raices La Finca, and be in conversation that centers land and remembrance as a collective tool toward liberation.

YANIRA CASTRO (she/ella) is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY) working at the intersection of communal practices, performance, installation, and interactive technology. She forms iterative, multimodal projects that center collective action in works activated and performed by the public. Since 2009, she’s created and performed with a team of collaborators as a canary torsi and has developed over fifteen projects that have been recognized with national awards, commissions and residency support.


TREE WITHNESS
with Gina Siepel  
October 27, 2024; 1-4pm 
Bramble Hill Farm
“Witness trees” are living trees which have been recognized for their living presence at significant events in human history. The National Park Service maintains a “Witness Tree Protection Program,” which distinguishes trees which have survived battles, lived alongside historic figures, or witnessed the signing of important agreements. While the contemplation of these trees invites us to enter into history on a more generous arboreal clock, the overall concept is decidedly human-centered and nationalistic. What if we become tree-centered instead, and focus on witnessing the long-lasting lives of trees, so much more enduring than our own, centering these venerable plant relatives in our communities? 

​The event will begin in the barn at Bramble Hill Farm, with a presentation about witness trees, and then segue into experimentation with playful ways of turning the direction of our attention tree-ward. We’ll meet the trees of Bramble Hill Farm, learning more about who they are and what they are doing, learning about the history of the land at the farm, and imagining into the past, present, and possible futures of these trees and their environment. We will cultivate an attitude of “tree withness,” an experiment in interspecies empathy. Activities will include walking, writing, visual exercises, and short discussions. Wear good walking shoes, warm clothes, and bring something to write and/or draw on and with.

GINA SIEPEL (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and woodworker, based in Greenfield MA (Pocumtuc land). Their artistic practice reflects an engagement with place, history, queer experience, and ecology, and their work integrates conceptual concerns and craftsmanship with a focus on wood as a natural and a cultural material. Gina’s works have been shown in museums and galleries nationally, including the Museum for Art in Wood, the Colby Museum, the DeCordova Museum, Vox Populi Gallery, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and Amherst College. Gina has been a fellow or artist-in-residence at Skowhegan, Hewnoaks, the Winterthur Museum, the Vermont Studio Center, Sculpture Space, and Mildred’s Lane. Gina holds a BFA from the School of Art + Design at SUNY Purchase and an MFA from the Maine College of Art, and has taught at Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Gina is currently a MacLeish Field Station Artist-in-Residence at Smith College, and a 2023 recipient of a Teaching Artist Cohort Grant from the Center for Craft. www.ginasiepel.com




TOWARD A MULTISENSORY DEEP MAP
with Christa Donner 
October 13, 2024; 1-4pm 
33 Hawley

Artist Christa Donner introduces the concept of Deep Mapping as a form of creative research. Through a series of ecological and sensory exercises, we will begin a multi-layered representation of place from shared noticing and knowledge.

We will begin and end at 33 Hawley for a presentation of underlying ideas and synthesis of collected forms. From there we will walk together to the nearby Terrace Trails to begin our study of the landscape.

Please wear comfortable shoes and dress for the weather: we will spend half of our time together outdoors. This workshop will involve walking, listening, and drawing. If mobility, vision, or hearing are a concern, please let us know your needs in advance so that we can find creative ways to accommodate all participants.




CHRISTA DONNER is an artist who investigates the multispecies body as a site for conflict and adaptation, using drawing, sound, and small-press publications to create projects that are both immersive and community-centered. Her work is exhibited widely, including projects for the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (Singapore), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin); the Museum Bellerive (Zurich); BankArt NYK (Yokohama) and at galleries, museums, and nature preserves throughout the United States. For more information on her studio practice visit www.christadonner.com.






PLANTS, PAPER, PLACE: CONVERSATIONS
with JuPong Lin 
September 29, 2024; 1-4pm 
Bramble Hill Farm
In this workshop, we connect with the land and deepen relationships with plantcestral knowledge through hand papermaking. JuPong will share her contemplative papermaking practice, beginning with a deep listening plant walk and ethical harvest of plant friends, listening for who gives us permission to use their leaves or stems for making paper pulp. We will couch the wet paper on windows and/or glass, and people can come to A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton in subsequent days to pick up the paper you made (or requests can be made to mail the paper as needed). 

The embodied experiences of hand papermaking—preparing the pulp, pulling sheets and couching sheets to dry—invokes a mindbodyspirit connection with these plants and their gifts. Making paper by hand slows down our experience of time and cultivates resistance to colonial urgency and the fixation on “solving problems.” Hand papermaking is a wonderful method of inquiry for exploring our relationship with plants, land, place, the life cycle of seeds and the plants that arise from them, the relationship between the creatures that disperse the seeds, human interventions into these life cycles and relationships, relationships of care and relationships that cause harm. We can explore memory: what the plants remember, how land remembers, how our memories intertwine with the memory of paper. We can inquire into the transformation of plant (life) to paper (a useful object); what is lost and what is gained in the process of transformation—is the paper alive? Did the plant “give up its life” in becoming a “useful object”? Does paper retain the medicine of the plant? How can we decenter the human narrative of loss and gain? What questions entice you in conversing with plants, people and place?

JUPONG LIN dances with horseshoe crabs and collaborates with cranes, ctenophores, cedar, and two-legged artists to co-create art and ceremony that honors our beloved heartplaces. Born in Taiwan, she lives and works in diaspora within Nipmuc, Nonotuck and Pocumtuc ancestral homelands (Amherst, Massachusetts), where Taiwanese ancestors haunt her to conjure medicine for the repair and transformation of the intergenerational wounds of our people and the lands we belong to. She is a poet of the Writing the Land project and wrote her first play, “Phoenix in the Holy Land,” with the support of The LAVA Center Playwrights’ Circle. JuPong makes paper with plant friends, connecting plant allyship with advocacy for food and land sovereignty. As a faculty member of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program for 20 years, JuPong developed an academic program in decolonial arts. www.juponglin.net/home

The overall shape of this program was developed with insight from Trenda Loftin, Tyler Rai, Alex Ripp, and Lailye Weidman, and continues the inquiries of Making Ground, a public art project initiated in February 2023 on the floor of the Workroom at 33 Hawley that invited the public into personal and interconnected creative engagement with our relationships to land, community, space, imagination, and stewardship.

Making Ground: Dialogues is made possible through funding from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in Northampton.


A.P.E.'s programming is made possible in part by sustained support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and The Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts.