Free and open for all, but sign up is required due to limited capacity. The salon will be held in English.

The IN SEASON salon is a discursive event that invites participants to engage in dialogue loosely operated around themes at the intersection of cultural archiving, memory work and diasporic thinking. Participants are encouraged to join in directly with the ritual of open conversation, contributing their personal knowledge and shared histories with one another.

Theme: Other/Worldly Kinkeeping

In the «Other/Wordly Kinkeeping salon» we’ll discuss the realms, spaces and places beyond our current realities, where death lives and how to access utopia. 

The salon dialogue format is developed by Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor based on her salon series “Black in Berlin” (2016-2017). The salon is a moving dialogue changing location, theme and special guest at each event. Each salon will produce a living history memory work, present in the participants and embedded within each physical space. 

Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor is an artist researcher working with text, dialogue, archives and moving images. Her roots are in the Southern United States, born in Mississippi and bred in Florida on former Timucan land. Her work centers on themes of ritual, social politics and identity mythology of Black and Indigenous folks. Taylor is currently researching death and mourning practices across the African diaspora as part of her PhD fellowship at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. 

Cauleen Smith lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. She attended film school at University of California Los Angeles, after beginning her education in music and then transferring to San Francisco State University, where she had formative encounters with black feminism, oppositional filmmaking, and structural film. In the intervening decades, Smith’s prodigious output has concentrated on short filmmaking, resulting in more than 30 short films and videos which have been shown as part of installations in museums and galleries around the globe as well as in film festivals. 

Smith’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, among others. Her work is included in numerous public collections such as The Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum Harlem; Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate, London.

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