7000 Marks Workshop, 2019
The Seventh Sudden Oak Death Science and Management Symposium: Healthy Plants in a World with Phytophthora, San Francisco, CA
For SOD7, Amber Ginsburg and I were invited to speak with a group of scientists, foresters and nursery managers who are researching and working to stop the spread of Phytophthora ramorum (SOD) in North America and around the world. Ours was the final presentation of the three-day symposium. We gave a talk and held a discussion with Kerri Frangioso, the keynote speaker for the symposium and the person who made it possible for us to harvest and process a tanoak tree infected with SOD in Big Sur back in 2016. After our talk and discussion, we led a workshop to activate the 7000 pencils. As a response to the constraints of the symposium, we did not work with collaborators to lead the workshop as we have in past workshops, rather we took the symposium participants through a hybrid drawing and writing workshop ourselves.
Workshop prompts:
Imagine yourself as hybrid with an other than human system or being sharing skills and qualities (this can be something really small like a virus, or really big with like the wind, or an animal or plant being).
Describe your experience as this hybrid being in the form of a letter, a journal entry, a journalistic account, any form of first person reflection.
As this entangled entity, you have experienced a minute, a decade for maybe a lifetime. In writing, reflect upon a significant event that you have experienced within the setting/world you have created.
Draw the thing at you are. In this drawing, put emphasis on relationships over bounded edges.
