PNCA 2025 Symposium: Beyond Boundaries: Visions of Ecological Futures

5 p.m.
Symposium welcome

5–8 p.m.
Beyond Boundaries Exhibition Opening Reception

10:30 a.m.
Symposium welcome

11 a.m.
Panel: Contact Zones, Futures, and Other Worlds: Environmental Imagination in Genre Fiction, with Brighid Schlenz, Renee Hollopeter, and Doron Darnov.
Moderated by Flora Arnold {livestreamed}

1–2 p.m.
Lunch Break

2 p.m.
Panel: Wind, Wool, and Field: Alternative Forms of Ecological Intimacy, with Charli Beck, Ren Frick, and Simone Ciglia.
Moderated by lowen hatano {livestreamed}

4 p.m.
"In my hand it felt like singing": Somatic/creative writing workshop with Stephanie Adams Santos

6 p.m.
Keynote Lecture: Stacy Alaimo
Marvelously Weird: Deep Sea Creaturely Aesthetics and Oceanic Futures
{livestreamed}

10 a.m.
Panel: Secretions, Sediments, and Symbiosis: Embodied Ecologies in Contemporary Practice with Ariah Henderson, Ada Evans, Harper Lethin, and Tahereh Aghdasifar.
Moderated by Mallary Wilson

12 p.m.
Salt + Water as a Medium - A Bioplastic and Fermentation Workshop with Meech Boakye
(RSVP required/limited space available)

2 p.m.
how color is place: a natural dye workshop with sugar todd
(RSVP required/limited space available)

4 p.m.
Beyond Boundaries Exhibition walkthrough with curator Lauren Hough

5 p.m.
Dorothy Lemelson Artist Lecture: Meech Boakye
{livestreamed}

6 p.m.
Community Gathering

Moderated by Flora Arnold

Presentations:

Brighid Schlenz, MFA in Creative Writing Student, PNCA, “On the Innate Horniness of Being Assimilated: The Queer Ecopoetics of the Sporror Genre”.

Renee Hollopeter, MA Critical Studies, PNCA 27’, “Expanding the Ecological Imagination: Indigenous Ecologies and Urban Landscapes in Tommy Orange’s There There and Wandering Stars”

Doron Darnov, Curatorial Director of Alienocene: Journal of the First Outernational, PhD in English Literary Studies, University of Wisconsin Madison, “(Non)Reproductive Futurism: The Queer Ecologies of Outer Space”.

Session Description: 

This panel enters and expands genre fiction by grounding into our environmental imagination to collide, merge, and transform contact zones of human and more-than-human worlds. This genre expansive panel will challenge and generate possibilities while also inspiring ecological and queer remembering.

By challenging genre conventions, these presentations enable writers to imagine environmental relationships that move beyond current ecological and social arrangements. From the fungal intimacies of “sporror” to the militarized landscapes of Cold War Arctic fiction, from Indigenous urban ecologies to the possibilities of outer space, these entry points to genre fiction denaturalize dominant assumptions about nature, culture, and imagination.

Moderated by lowen hatano

Presentations:

Charli Beck, MA/MFA Critical Studies and Visual Studies, PNCA 26’, “Thistles and Wool: Seeking Reciprocity with Land in Ranch Management Methods”.

Ren Frick, Independent Scholar, “(Co)Constructing an Asexual Ecology with/through Wind”.

Simone Ciglia, Teaching Professor of History of Art and Architecture, University of Oregon, “Towards a ‘Newer’ Expanded Field: on Contemporary Art, Agriculture, and Ecology”.

Session Description: 

This panel examines the tensions and possibilities that exist in our negotiations and relations with the more-than-human. Focusing, respectively, on the figures of wind, sheep ranching, and depictions of the agricultural in contemporary art, these three presentations explore alternative frameworks of ecological intimacy.

The presentations center around questions like, “How might we cultivate reciprocal relationships with the lands we extract from?”, “How have contemporary artistic representations of agriculture restored visibility to rural areas, and to what end?”, and, “How might wind inform our ontological assumptions about intimacy and desire?”. Taken as a collective, this panel looks toward new sites of innovation in a gesture toward sustainable ecological futures.

Moderated by Mallary Wilson

Presentations:

Ariah Henderson, Performance Studies PhD Student, University of California Berkeley, “This Barbie Can Squirt! Piss, Yeast, Milk, and Other Clandestine Secretions Fermenting in Contemporary Feminist Bio-Art”.

Ada Evans, History of Art and Architecture PhD Student, Boston University, “Tidalectic homme-plantes and Deathly Intimacy in the Intertidal Performances of Annabel Guéredrat and Henri Tauliaut”.

Tahereh Aghdasifar, Assistant Professor of Gender and Feminist Studies, Pitzer College, “Dirt, Death, and Queer Post-Human Forms”.

Harper Lethin multimedia artist and biologist, Harrower Studio/Lab at Reed College, “Enfolding Liveliness: Invoking Bacteriophage Therapy for More than Human Kinships”.

Session Description:

This panel leaks in and out of contemporary practices, mobilizing bodily fluids, organic matter, and interspecies encounters to reimagine the boundaries between the cycles of life, death, and the performances that happen along the way. These papers require intimacy that encourage the transformative qualities of embodied existence as sites of ecological futures.

Together, these papers demonstrate feminist, queer, and posthuman theoretical frameworks while they converge and expand contemporary practices by way of embracing and locating agency of human and non-human matter. How does the fermentation process transform bodily fluids into materiality? In what ways does the tidal rhythms shape interspecies performativity? What forms surface from the decomposition cycle?

(Note: This event will not be livestreamed.)

Limited capacity, Registration required

Registration Link 

Our hands are archives of vast ecological memory and imagination. In this somatic/creative writing workshop, we will attune to the dreaming capacity of our bodies, returning to the trees and waters that shaped us, asking what we might surrender, what we might tend, and how our imaginations can be returned to life itself.

Registration Link Limited capacity ($10 fee to reserve spot)

color has an origin. when you create—with inks, with paints, with dyes—do you know where your color comes from? when we source color with this question in mind, a path to engaging with our environment and our consumption of it opens. natural dye processes offer a way to slow ourselves and tend to a relationship with our materials.

this workshop will focus on where and how color is grown. we invite participants to reflect on color as something that holds time and place, and how cultivating awareness of place expands our sense of self.

within the workshop, participants will be guided through the process of creating resist patterns on a bandana to be naturally dyed. resist dyeing is a technique that uses various materials to create barriers that prevent dye from reaching specific areas of a textile. this workshop will use physical tying and banding techniques to create designs, and bandanas will be dyed with marigold flowers that were grown at empowered flowers farm.

Registration Link  Limited capacity ($10 fee to reserve spot)

From mermaid mythologies to seaweeds, agar bioplastic and sauerkraut brine, this workshop explores saltwater as a medium that holds, grows and transforms life. Participants will have the opportunity to play with foraged salt and seaweed gathered on the Oregon Coast, comparing and contrasting the various shapes, textures, and flavors. Participants will then be shown how to create a translucent, compostable biomaterial using agar, a gelatin-like substance derived from seaweed. The session will end with hands-on play as participants preserve seasonal fruits and vegetables in a salty brine that encourages natural fermentation.

Brighid Schlenz (she/they) is a trans Irish anarchist from Rhode Island, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing. Her short fiction has appeared in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, The Overcast, Hermine Annual, and in the anthology “Terra! Tara! Terror!” Her current writing explores androids, petty and not-so-petty crime, and the fungal intersections of lesbian and anarchist poetics. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Brighid would like to thank the Cracked Spines podcast for inspiring the title of this presentation.

Doron Darnov received his PhD in English Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research explores the environmental humanities, algorithmic media, and critical theory. He is also a curatorial director of Alienocene: Journal of the First Outernational, a philosophy and environmental humanities magazine that publishes experimental text, audio, video, and images from scholars and artists across the world. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Intermédialités, Edge Effects, Alienocene, and edited collections on topics including media obsolescence, multiverse fiction, and representations of nuclear fallout.

Ren Frick (they/them) is a poet, artist, community organizer, and independent scholar. They hold an MA in English with a focus in Public Engagement from the University of Nevada, Reno. Their research explores the intersections of queer ecologies, asexuality studies, and the practice of mutual aid to further conversations on the complexities of care, intimacy, pleasure, and interrelationality. Through such exploration, they play with the conceptual lenses of asexual ecologies and ecologies of care. Their writing on asexual ecologies is forthcoming in the edited collection Practices of Witnessing: Field Notes for Climate Rhetorics, and they are assembling their poetry chapbook, Secret Third Thing (it's still love).

Charli Beck (MA/MFA (2026) Critical Studies/Visual Studies – Pacific Northwest College of Art) is an emerging scholar and artist residing in Oregon. Her work asks questions about human-land relations, ecology, and conceptions of time as well as seeking ways to embody and enact decoloniality while living on stolen land. Recently, she has published arts writing in the Chiaroscuro Literary Journal and illustration work with Trails Magazine. Currently, she is considering glacial ice, harnessing the metaphorical power of the migration of clouds, and interrogating joyful labor through sheep shearing, pulling “weeds,” and digging holes.

Simone Ciglia (Pescara, Italy, 1982) is an art historian, curator, and critic, currently serving as a Teaching Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. His areas of research focus on marginal spaces within contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on its intersections with agriculture, craft, and utopian/dystopian impulses. He has curated exhibitions internationally and writes for a variety of publications. He served as an Assistant Researcher at the MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome. He holds a Ph.D. in the History of Contemporary Art from the Sapienza University of Rome.

Tahereh Aghdasifar is an assistant professor of Gender and Feminist Studies at Pitzer College. Her in-progress book project develops a theory of refraction reading anti-representational aesthetics of dispossession and displacement to build a collective materialist politics. Her scholarship is published in GLQ, Women & Performance, and A Love Letter to "This Bridge Called my Back," among others, and has been supported by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly The Woodrow Wilson) Mellon Fellowship, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and the American Association of University Women.

Ada Evans is a second year PhD student studying modern and contemporary art. Her work centers visual and performance art engaged in shifting ecologies and climate destabilization, especially in the American South and the Caribbean. She received her MA in Art History from Tulane University, where she studied coastal eco art concerned with sea-level rise and wetland ecologies. Ada has previously held positions at the National Museum of Wildlife Art and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and is currently a Junior Editor of SEQUITUR, a scholarly art and architectural history journal at Boston University.

Born and raised in Oakland, CA, Ariah’s research ferments at the intersection of performance, feminist science studies, and food studies. Drawing on her background in casual fine dining and dance studies, she explores fermentation as both methodology and metaphor. Her work dwells in the sensual and the grotesque, asking how acts of feeding, excreting, milking, and fermenting can become forms of resistance, pleasure, and care. Through Black, Indigenous, and queer feminist lenses, she examines how artists in avant-garde performance use food and bodily processes to archive memory, cultivate kinship, and enact hospitality beyond the boundaries of the human body. Ultimately, her work seeks to reimagine community through the unruly, porous, and deliciously impure.

Through experimentation in the lab and studio, Harper Lethin seeks creative collaborations with microorganisms, transforming abjection into visceral re-embodiment: folding us, like gastrulation, into vessels for relation. They use the scale-transcending patterns of molecular biology, the cyborg potential of wearable sculpture, the accessibility of comic art, and the somatic, emergent processes of ceramics as methods of inquiry and communication. For Harper, the holobiont is both a metaphor for emotional experiences and our physiological reality that buds into emotion, fermentation, and biopolitical resistance.

lowen hatano (she/they) is an artist, cultural critic, and facilitator. They hold an MFA in Environmental Art + Social Practice and are currently a Hallie Ford Graduate student in Critical Studies. Their research emerges within the breadth of embodiment and geography. lowen’s social practice blooms from yoga as she holds space to weave together breathwork, meditation, and movement.

Flora Arnold (they/them) is a graduate student in Critical Studies at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Their research broadly examines the politics of epistemology and subjectivity in popular culture from affective, literary, and Marxist-Feminist perspectives. Their writing has appeared in Blind Field Journal and Treble Zine.

Lauren Hough (she/her) is a graduate student in Critical Studies at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and holds a BA in Feminist and Gender Studies from Colorado College. Her research and writing broadly examines notions of self-performance and authenticity in literature, and contemporary online literary cultures. She writes cultural criticism and arts reviews, and recently presented an essay on celebrity book clubs at an international sociology of literature conference, “(Dis)Trusting the Institutions of Literature”,  in Dublin, Ireland. She is currently the Graduate Curatorial Fellow at PNCA, Co-Coordinator of the PNCA Graduate Symposium, and will soon begin work as Accessibility Curator for the MLK Jr Park Art Installation project in Corvallis, OR.

Mallary Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and educator who engages in digital and traditional mediums including communication and environmental design, bookbinding, installation, painting, and material explorations. Her visual work investigates new materialism, perceptions of reality, and artificial machine learning as a reflection of culture and humanity. Her graduate research investigates the interplay between affect theory, technological evolution, and societal transformation.

The Portland, Oregon-based artist received her undergraduate degree in Communication Design at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) where she is also pursuing dual master's degrees—Master of Fine Arts in Visual Studies and Master of Arts in Critical Studies. She currently teaches graphic design at the Schnitzer School of Art, Art History, and Design at Portland State University.