MAKING GROUND: DIALOGUES, FALL 2025

Making Ground: Dialogues 

a creative, collective learning series

OCTOBER - NOVEMBER, 2025

Contact: Meredith Bove: meredithbove@apearts.org 

For updates on Making Ground: Dialogues, please visit: 

https://apearts.org/making-ground-1

This Fall, A.P.E. is thrilled to host another iteration of Making Ground: Dialogues, a series of learning 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 delving 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.

Conceived of as an opportunity to repeatedly gather together in creative, collective learning, we encourage participants to consider registering for multiple offerings. 

Join fellow community members as we explore, expand, and reimagine our relationship and responsibilities to this place. 

All offerings are FREE, but registration is required.

In addition to these gatherings, A.P.E. will host collectively-led study groups each Tuesday evening following the events from 6-8pm in various A.P.E. spaces for further discussion of the materials, themes, and practices engaged.

AUTUMN 2025 OFFERINGS

Sunday, October 19, 1-4pm • Bramble Hill Farm

OFFERING 1: Hilary Clark and Nicole Daunic 

MAT(T)ER

“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 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.

Sunday, November 2, 1-4pm • Bramble Hill Farm

OFFERING 2: Heather Geoffrey 

The Cafe of the Living

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. 

Sunday, November 9, 4-7pm •  Bramble Hill Farm

OFFERING 3: Charmaine Sutton, JuPong Lin, Amy Gilburg, Meredith Degyansky, Piyush Labhsetwar, Efadul Huq

Fermenting in the Dark

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. 

The overall shape of this program 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.

Artist Bios:

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.

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.

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.

Available Potential Enterprises, Ltd. (A.P.E.) is an artist-led, artist-centered 501(c)3 non-profit organization supporting contemporary artists working in all disciplines by stewarding the spaces in which they create, perform and exhibit their work. A.P.E is dedicated to fostering relationships, encounters, and exchanges that nourish the capacity for imagination. http://www.apearts.org; 413.586.5553 

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

Thank you to the Massachusetts Cultural Council for organizational support, as well as for programming support through the Cultural Sector Recovery Grant.