Join the Meshwork artist collective for a participatory movement workshop. We will learn together with cultural traditions and embodied practices related to fire, heat, and ritual.

All materials provided; please dress for the weather, this is an outdoor event.

At Hidden Harvest Farm,
1825 N Calvert St, Baltimore
Enter through the alley on Hunter St.

Supported by the Grit Fund Project Grant and the Andy Warhol Foundation

About Deepa:
Dr. Deepa Mahadevan is an artist scholar. She is a Bharatanatyam practitioner, researcher, teacher, choreographer, and curator. Her doctoral research in Performance studies the history of aesthetics in Bharatanatyam, through the vectors of caste, class, sexuality, gender and religion, between the 1930s till 2020.

About Adhirai:
Adhirai traces her traditional roots to the hereditary Guru, K N Dandayudapani Pillai. Her aesthetic heritage is a fusion of the artistic flair and aesthetic sensibilities of her immediate mentor, Deepa Mahadevan, as well as Deepa's Gurus, the late Usha Srinivasan and Madurai R Muralidharan.

About Meshwork Collective:
Meshwork is a metamorphizing group of interdisciplinary artists, scholars, and activists based in Baltimore. Since 2013, we have collaborated in many formats, from curating and performing, to writing and scholarship, to mutual aid and support. We are interested in embodied knowledge-making and mediumship. That is, how do we understand what is true, and build a shared world that holds a plurality of truths? In our varied practices, we focus on using the body, intuition, ritual, and intersubjectivity to connect with sources of knowledge beyond what is codified in dominant knowledge systems. This is inherently a collective, occult practice, grounded in communion with the living and the dead, and with histories that reside in materials and places.

Our Conocimientos project is a yearlong program of research, co-devising, and public events in Baltimore. Conocimiento is a term coined by Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldua. Translated as “knowing” in Spanish, in Anzaldua’s language of spiritual-activism conocimiento is an embodied practice that links inner vision, social action, and lived experience to challenge oppressive systems. Our investigation centers differing ways of knowing and is organized around the four elements (air/water/earth/fire) common to the spiritual rituals and traditions observed by collective members. Conocimientos then is “knowings” literally but theoretically it is more difficult to describe in words, it’s embodied. The elements offer an archetypal pathway to embodied non-hierarchical dialogue with our participant-audiences.

Collective members: Adhirai Karthik, Alicia Puglionesi, Deepa Mahadevan, Isa Leal, and Orlando Johnson