Artists Unfolding New Futures in Tiny and Hidden Realms

When things feel out of control on a macro scale, how do our artistic gifts meet the needs of the world? MicroCosmos is an inquiry into our ability to affect meaningful change on a small scale: Where are the “microcosmos”? The tiny worlds of possibility? The seeds that sprout new civilizations?

In response to these questions, MicroCosmos co-curators Javiera Benavente, Matthew Glassman, and Nick Slie venture to say that our microcosmos are the inner dimensions of artistic practice. They looked to the ways artists tap into those inner dimensions to be in dialogue and right relation with the outer context in which we live, and they saw no shortage of practitioners whose work at some micro level—a neighborhood, a relationship to a mollusk, an unformed metaphor, an old church—contains within it the power to alter the macro.

The MicroCosmos project is concerned with finely tuned connections to place. It is curious about collective entanglement found in the microcosmos of the local and the natural ecology. For we are entangled in unfathomable macro forces—our media, our mythos, and this moment of terrible vulnerability on such a large scale. Given these big, gnarly entanglements, work that is happening at the micro, the larval, the hyperlocal, and the liminal offers us places of solace, wonder, possibility, and new beginnings.

That’s the purpose of this project: to recognize the power of the micro. The process began by convening pairs of artists who are knee deep in this inquiry. We invited each to reflect, study, and then encounter a fellow practitioner they’ve never met. Each participant in the MicroCosmos project undertook a three-part process of individual work. They were asked to meditate on five questions:

What questions and callings are you living?

What are the places, spaces, and relationships that are undergirding you and your work?

What seeds are you planting and tending?

What are the practices that would help you?

What are the experiments you yearn to conduct?

Then, participants engaged in shared study of excerpts from Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution by Lynn Margulis, “When You Meet the Monster, Anoint its Feet” by Bayo Akomolafe, and "Communication is Sacred” by Nora Bateson. Finally, participants created a short expressive response in any creative medium as a way of sharing what the prompts and shared study activated in them.

In the following conversation, the MicroCosmos co-curators model the artistic encounter that flows from the individual work process. Javiera Benavente is an artist, cultural organizer, facilitator, and educator working at the edges of academia, grassroots community spaces, art and cultural spaces, and land-based spaces. She is originally from the ancestral homelands of the Mapuche people, a place they call Wallmapu and that many people know as Chile. She currently lives on the ancestral homelands of the Pocomtuc, Nonotuck, and Nipmuc peoples in the valley that runs along the tidal river that many know as the Connecticut River in Western Massachusett. Matthew Glassman is an actor, writer, and creator of original theatre. He is the executive and artistic director of the Chocolate Church Art Center in Bath, Maine (2024-present), the founder of the UnNameable Children’s Project (2021-present), and was the co-artistic director and ensemble actor of Double Edge Theatre (2000-2022). Glassman makes connections across disciplines and communities with the purpose of building grassroots movements toward systemic change. Nick Slie is an artist, cultural organizer and producer who lives and loves in Bulbancha; Choctaw for “place of other languages.” He works with the interdisciplinary company Mondo Bizarro Productions, which utilizes long-term physical, vocal, and place-centered research and training in its creative process. One of the deepest lines of that work has been listening to the ecology and the human and more-than-human world in Bulbancha/Louisiana and making work about what's happening to the land there. Their encounter is facilitated by Jamie Gahlon, co-founder and director of HowlRound Theatre Commons.

Over the next two weeks, this series will continue with encounters between Sharon Bridgforth and Sharon Day; kara lynch and Seema Sueko; paris cyan cian and Liza Bileby; Annalisa Dias, Severin Blake, and Rebecca Wright; and Jennie Hahn and Sharon Mansur. Microcosmos intends to be an iterative, ongoing process that happens not only in the virtual sphere, but also through annual gatherings where deep connections are made, seeds are shared, and the power to create is kindled.

Just coming back to these really micro practices of being present with life and death, the land and all of my relations, and being with the questions—What is being asked of me at this moment? What do I have to offer?

Javiera Benavente: I’ve been sitting with the questions and the readings and have revisited them several times over the last month, just mostly in a sitting practice. I've also been living with this calling to “lay down and listen.” I have a strong sense that this is what we need to be doing right now, collectively. We need to gather with all of our grief and all our desire and all that is wrong with the world and all that needs doing and simply lay down and listen to what the land and the waters and the wind and the birds and all of our other relatives have to say to us about how to live in these times and how to show up for this moment.

So, this morning I came into my office with the intention of being in practice around the five questions we posed. I read this post by Rowan White that includes a quote by Tyson Yunkaporta, who wrote a book called Sand Talk. The quote that she offered was: "If you don't move with the land, the land will move you."

And then she goes on to say,

Listen to the land, move towards this new world in all that we do. Our lives become love poems to this true wealth beyond the nightmares and horrors created by soulless, malignant, Wetiko, imperial cultures who stoke the wrath of the ocean and the elements. This new world where we are all free and liberated with enough to eat, free to move across landscapes beyond physical and mental borders, able to love who we please, access to beauty, thriving land and waterways held in good health by the commons.

It just feels like we're in this deep conversation across space and time with so many brilliant artists and culture keepers about what becomes possible when we truly listen to the land and our more than human relatives and about the consequences of not listening.

Last year I had the pleasure of collaborating with kara lynch, who's also a part of this MicroCosmos exchange, on a residency at Hampshire College focused on rematriation, land back, reciprocity and how to heal our relationship with the land and all our relations. Two of the practices we engaged in with the community were natural indigo dying and papermaking using plants and seeds that we gathered from the meadows on and around the land here. We had all these leftover materials gathering dust in the corner of my office, so this morning I spent some time with what was left over and made a living altar. I think I'm going to gather them up after we talk and take them into the woods and give them back to the land to continue the cycle of compost and renewal and of growing ourselves.

I did my first lay down and listen practice yesterday with my partner, Lisa. We went to the edge of a meadow and a woods and did the practice together. We laid down for fifteen minutes or so and listened. It was just wondrous, and so striking how powerful the wind is right now.

This morning, when I came in to work with these seeds, I came upon this little zine that kara made. It's a handmade zine for this practice that she invited us into during her residency, similar to lay down and listen, called “sonic meditations.” It is a walking meditation.

So that's really what I'm sitting with. The level of destruction that we face is just so vast, so deep. I feel so impotent in the face of most of the time. Just coming back to these really micro practices of being present with life and death, the land and all of my relations, and being with the questions—What is being asked of me at this moment? What do I have to offer? What do I need? Where is there possibility? How can I leave things a little bit better than I found them? I'm just trying to show up in this way, with presence and listening for what I’m being invited into.

Nick: Something happens to me when I am amidst the trees or at the end of training when I lay down and listen, where I always feel this sort of cosmic tingle. And I'm always a little shocked that something so simple makes me feel so good each time. I think it's just… I laid down.

Javiera, that was really moving, and quite emotional to just hear you say that. This brought up all kinds of deep feelings that were lurking that I wasn't paying attention to.

I'm thinking about this middling notion that's all over Bayo’s: “The middle I speak of is not halfway between two poles; it is a porousness that mocks the very idea of separation. “I was just thinking, "Wow, my whole life is a middling right now." I've been feeling this deeply and not having words to articulate what I once was so assured of.

If it is true that we are permeable and we hold all things… It made me think about the ruptures, the floods, the dam breaks, the times in my life that it's taken all sorts of pain, destruction, and waves of grief for me to pay attention. I have long watched how people behave before, during and after natural disasters, and I'm so moved that humanity is going to be fine because, over and over, when people are faced with dire circumstances, the level of coordination, love and cooperation that emerges in our communities is amazing. And yet this flowering of community often emerges because of these ruptures, these big things.

Nature is rooting for us, and when you lay down into these places, you're basically hearing the encouragement.

It helps to be guided through these moments. One thing that just shot up to me was, I think I'm in an interesting territory regarding mentorship. I'm really in a middle section without a clearly defined mentor. Not that I have to have such a clearly defined thing. I have a lot of mentorships: landscapes and waterways and artist friends and pathways and a deep relationship and family. But there's something like a lantern that is just not there sometimes when I'm walking through the dark.

In this middling phase, I often let it go and swash around in this river of the unknown for a couple of days. I try not to over-explain it or correct it. But what has surfaced most prominently for me is that I feel best and most comfortable, most guided, when I am floating. I've been doing a lot of floating, just letting things be less hard on the lines and more permeable.

One of our meditations in Mondo Bizarro and the Land Memory Bank’s latest project Invisible Rivers was brought to us by our collaborator Monique Verdin. She posed the question: What do the stars see when they look down at the Mississippi? We’ve been meditating about the porousness of the natural cycles, imagining the Mississippi as a single drop of water falling from the sky. And if you trace that water to its farthest depths, if you go down into the depths of the swamp, you get to a place that it's so dark that you pop out in the stars and the cycle begins again. So we've been trying to continue thinking and pointing to the microcosmos of it all, how it's all the same galaxy.

Matthew: I'm going to start off by sharing these two objects that I have. This is a piece of art that hangs in my office that my seven-year-old did, and I love it. It was on a door between two offices here, and they just went to town on this thing. I saw this and saw three things. One is, “Oh, this might be how I feel.” Two, I keep meditating on this notion of entanglement, and that feels like a really important word right now to me for what we're living through. When I think about not laying down and listening, what I'm needing to and forced to and addicted to participating in, is a different type of entanglement. I would like to be a force that does something different.

It goes back to one of the questions on the prompts, which is about callings and new futures.

And this is a papier mâché boat. It's also a hat. The beginning of this was made by Sita Magnuson, from Dpict, when they did a residency here. It was in response to a prompt about making monsters, and her monster was coming up from the ocean and underneath the boat.

And so that Mardi Gras image of me and my two-year-old, which I think I sent to you of our monster parade here. It's probably the best thing that's happened to me this year.

So these were my objects, and all I can think about is these small spaces that we carve out for one another. I think about the questions and callings. Art and the imagination are just fundamental to how we heal and evolve as a civilization. So in those spaces that we are creating as artists or as organizers or whatever, we're basically trying in one context to tend to our humanity.

And the ship is also important because I've found myself in a boat building, sailing community. This idea of journey and of building things that we travel in is really important in this place.

On Rosh Hashanah I went to this place called Popham Beach, which has been this spiritual center for me. It's this ocean beach reserve. And I took Davi, we ate a pomegranate—it's a fruit of Rosh Hashanah. And then I laid down in a Savasana position and Davi built a world.

So maybe this is what this conversation today is about, which is that nature is rooting for us, and when you lay down into these places, you're basically hearing the encouragement, which is the same as what I learned from Nick at Mardi Gras, which is the dead want us to feel joy. And for me, after coming out of that space of lying down for a minute, it's the source, it's the resourcing.

Jamie Gahlon: Thank you all. Wow! Feeling so many resonances and connections here.

Nick: Another memory just shot into my body. One of the first times I ever met Bob Martin from Clear Creek Creative, he came to the space where we were performing Loup Garou in City Park, and he just walked right on the set and he laid down in the grass and he didn't talk or move for twenty minutes. I'm remembering how nervous it made me feel.

Javiera: What comes to mind, Nick, is that it can feel so audacious to make that move. It is so counterintuitive to the heartbeat of the time we're living in. So much of my day to day is drive, drive, drive. It's like, "What's next? What's the plan?"

Just on the level of parenting in this world, that’s actually not the register my child exists in. There's always this need to push her, but really she's operating at a whole other frequency. She's constantly inviting me to lay down and listen. That is her mode. It is so deeply human to do that, but we live in a world that is operating on a really different frequency, so it can feel really uncomfortable and awkward.

Matthew: The notion of low-grade ruptures and earthquakes, the naming of these stories or these metaphors as what we're going through, helps orient myself to this release of control that needs to happen.

Jamie: I think Nick, your image of the floating down to the bottom and going so deep that when you pop through the other side, you're in the stars, is really sitting with me. It's reminding me of a book I've been reading with my son Asher about the ocean. There is this page where they go down really deep, and you can see just the jellyfish and the manta rays and things that light up the night. We get to that page and he always says, "I don't like this page," but we stay there and then we turn the page.

Nick: He wants to go deeper.

Javiera: That image really struck me, too. And I was sitting with just what courage it takes to go that deep and deep into the darkness and without any clue how deep you have to go before you come out the other side, if you're going to come out the other side.

Nick: I am thinking again about my mother. When my brother and my father died within two years, I think one of the greatest pains and most magical things my mother ever did was she fell into the abyss of grief. I felt so abandoned by that as a young adult. But she's so powerful that she knew, "Either I come out on the other side and I can be present for you as a mother, or I don't, but there's only one shot at it. I got to fully feel this. I have to drop to my knees." Now, on the flip side of it, I benefit so profoundly from her presence, strength and vulnerability because she's a transformed person. It's like the chrysalis phase, a metaphor for all of these extremely scary places that we must middle through, understanding that although there is no guarantee that you come out on the other side, the potential for transformation is worth the risk.