Consumption Book Club: Annihilation
A hands-on paper-making and creative writing workshop, exploring regeneration and symbiosis through edible art, a cook-book zine, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.
Celebrate Earth Day and all the new things growing in spring through Jeff VanderMeer’s surreal story, Annihilation.
In this book, we follow a biologist keeping a diary to record her experience while investigating a strange ecological phenomenon called Area X, located within an ever expanding boundary known as “The Shimmer”, threatening to take over the world, where chaotic and rapid mutations unfold. The few who have successfully entered and returned have come back changed, with limited ability to explain anything that went on while in the boundaries. Our unnamed narrator goes in blind with six other scientists and attempts to gain some understanding on the page.
The theme is “Re-Generation,” looking at evolution of thought and materials, symbiosis, and our intrinsic link to our world and one another.
Explore a vegan tasting garden of verdant, springy meals and cocktails, creating our own responses and observations to their textures, flavors, appearance, and more in a guided, generative writing & creative workshop. Our diaries will be written, drawn, or sculpted on paper made from the waste of the very same food we are responding to.
This event features a hands on paper-making workshop with artist Lily Massee, physically connecting us to our materials. After an initial round of writing responses, we will share our work with one another and respond to fellow participants' work, creating an “exquisite corpse” that links us to our food, our waste, our community, and our creative practices.
This event is for artists, creatives, scientists, and tasters of all kinds of experience levels. Come one, come all!
And as always, come hungry. We promise you will leave full of good food, new connections, and the first sprouts of budding projects to rejuvenate your creative practices.
Participants will also take home a commemorative “cook book” zine with recipes, illustrations, and writings around the book and theme—as well as your own, hand-made paper!
Program
Introduction + Exploration: The Grazing Garden
Paper Making
Writing Workshop
First Prompt: Observations
Second Prompt: Evolutions and Mutations
Third Prompt: Final Form
Regather and share
Facilitators
Colette Estelle is a writer, chef, and baker living in Queens.
Kyle Barnes is an artist and designer based in Brooklyn, NY.
Lily Massee is a mixed-media artist based in the Berkshire Hills of Northwest CT and Western MA.