Aaniya Asrani and Annie Canto collaborated on their residency at Mount Pleasant Elementary School for the 2020/2021 school year.
As students learned together in the context of the pandemic, we wanted to understand the physical and emotional spaces that they were inhabiting, together and apart. What object reminded them of home? What did they see outside their window? What stories did they tell? If they could connect two places through a magical pathway, what would they connect? These were some of the prompts that accompanied our material explorations. Each week we delved into a diverse visual language such as textile, sculpture, painting, drawing, paper marbling and stained glass painting to name a few, in order to explore these themes.
And as we re-imagined our sense of community and how we might belong together in a new way, we placed emphasis on the medium of storytelling. Listening and sharing the unique lens with which we each see the world allowed us to feel connected to each other even through a computer screen. We felt viscerally the push and pull between the intimate and the distant. And as we understood this in-between space we were inhabiting, we began to use this point of tension to ask deeper questions.
How could we create moments of connection and joy?
How might we create space for care, generosity and reciprocity?
How might we explore and create a new world, curiously, together?
