Earthseeding: New Worlds is a rotating art installation, skill share series, and abolitionist planning forum hosted by One Art Community Center. Throughout 2024 we will explore how the speculations of sci-fi legend Octavia E. Butler correspond to social and economic conditions in Philadelphia, across a variety of themes like food, water, governance, and care. We will use those juxtapositions as a staging point for imagining and building an altogether different city.
In Parable of the Sower, written in 1993, Butler anticipated the intersecting crises of 2024: climate catastrophe, economic collapse, and global pandemic.
Philadelphia 2024: we face ongoing crises of displacement, deprivation, labor exploitation, and state violence, while capitalist extraction continues to ravage the planet.
Yet Butler’s Parables were not so much a prediction as an astute projection, based on her understanding of the repetition of history, as the ramifications of neoliberal capitalism came into focus.
“The past is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.”
— Octavia E. Butler
From Earthseed to Earthseeding
The endless pursuit of economic growth has meant an increasing accumulation of wealth and power for an elite few, while simultaneously denying many of us healthy food, clean air and water, affordable housing and energy, wreaking havoc on our bodies and our environment. The dizzying acceleration of the settler colonial project, in both the internal and external theaters of empire, has left most of us scrambling to respond, usually through ad hoc appeals to the state which are often ignored.
Lauren Olamina and her comrades, for whom the state was a more explicit adversary, chose instead to form a religious sect and intentional community — Earthseed — as a matter of survival and resilience. But in Philly, where we are rightfully skeptical of charismatic leaders, even those who tick the right identity checkboxes, what might a materialist, secular — if also spiritual — Earthseed look like?
Where capital and the state remain unreliable mediators in our social and environmental relations, how else might we learn to live, love, and labor together, in right-relationship to each other and the land? Moving from Earthseed as noun to Earthseeding as verb, from a singular community to an active process, we seek possibilities for cultivating self-determination and resilience, for building new worlds in the crumbling shell of the old.
For Collaborators
Such an ambitious undertaking requires a lot of planning and labor, but also must draw from a wealth of perspectives. This project is meant to be one of collective dreaming, planning, and realization. We are looking for fellow visionaries and travelers of alternative pathways — maroons, rebels, pirates, and tricksters — to co-create a space and context where we can collectively design a better future.
For Artists
Do Butler’s speculations inspire, unsettle, or motivate you? Does your own work imagine or aspire toward a better future or offer warnings should we remain on our current path? Each month, we will showcase multiple artists whose work reflects, ruminates on, and responds to the juxtaposition of parallel worlds.
For Skill Sharers
Dystopia is forged in the crucible of state failure and violence, while utopia flourishes outside its gaze, the “no places” illegible to Capital and the State. We are calling upon those individuals and organizations who ask neither for permission nor forgiveness as they work to model the “next system”: builders, growers, designers, artisans willing to share their vision, wisdom, expertise.
For Researchers
Creating new worlds is fundamentally a change in relations, away from the extractive and exploitive means of Capital — also embedded in the Academy — toward one of collective regeneration. We seek community and collaboration with participatory researchers interested in co-constructing knowledge, and collectively mapping the pathways we create at the convergence of theory, freedom dreaming, and practice.
Earthseeding: New Worlds is a rotating art installation, skill share series, and abolitionist planning forum hosted by One Art Community Center. Throughout 2024 we will explore how the speculations of sci-fi legend Octavia E. Butler correspond to social and economic conditions in Philadelphia, across a variety of themes like food, water, governance, and care. We will use those juxtapositions as a staging point for imagining and building an altogether different city.
In Parable of the Sower, written in 1993, Butler anticipated the intersecting crises of 2024: climate catastrophe, economic collapse, and global pandemic.
Philadelphia 2024: we face ongoing crises of displacement, deprivation, labor exploitation, and state violence, while capitalist extraction continues to ravage the planet.
Yet Butler’s Parables were not so much a prediction as an astute projection, based on her understanding of the repetition of history, as the ramifications of neoliberal capitalism came into focus.
“The past is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.”
— Octavia E. Butler
From Earthseed to Earthseeding
The endless pursuit of economic growth has meant an increasing accumulation of wealth and power for an elite few, while simultaneously denying many of us healthy food, clean air and water, affordable housing and energy, wreaking havoc on our bodies and our environment. The dizzying acceleration of the settler colonial project, in both the internal and external theaters of empire, has left most of us scrambling to respond, usually through ad hoc appeals to the state which are often ignored.
Lauren Olamina and her comrades, for whom the state was a more explicit adversary, chose instead to form a religious sect and intentional community — Earthseed — as a matter of survival and resilience. But in Philly, where we are rightfully skeptical of charismatic leaders, even those who tick the right identity checkboxes, what might a materialist, secular — if also spiritual — Earthseed look like?
Where capital and the state remain unreliable mediators in our social and environmental relations, how else might we learn to live, love, and labor together, in right-relationship to each other and the land? Moving from Earthseed as noun to Earthseeding as verb, from a singular community to an active process, we seek possibilities for cultivating self-determination and resilience, for building new worlds in the crumbling shell of the old.
For Collaborators
Such an ambitious undertaking requires a lot of planning and labor, but also must draw from a wealth of perspectives. This project is meant to be one of collective dreaming, planning, and realization. We are looking for fellow visionaries and travelers of alternative pathways — maroons, rebels, pirates, and tricksters — to co-create a space and context where we can collectively design a better future.
For Artists
Do Butler’s speculations inspire, unsettle, or motivate you? Does your own work imagine or aspire toward a better future or offer warnings should we remain on our current path? Each month, we will showcase multiple artists whose work reflects, ruminates on, and responds to the juxtaposition of parallel worlds.
For Skill Sharers
Dystopia is forged in the crucible of state failure and violence, while utopia flourishes outside its gaze, the “no places” illegible to Capital and the State. We are calling upon those individuals and organizations who ask neither for permission nor forgiveness as they work to model the “next system”: builders, growers, designers, artisans willing to share their vision, wisdom, expertise.
For Researchers
Creating new worlds is fundamentally a change in relations, away from the extractive and exploitive means of Capital — also embedded in the Academy — toward one of collective regeneration. We seek community and collaboration with participatory researchers interested in co-constructing knowledge, and collectively mapping the pathways we create at the convergence of theory, freedom dreaming, and practice.