Submergence is an act of surrender.
To consider submergence is to acknowledge how little is known of the deep, vulnerable interlocking and inter-unlocking entanglements of living beings on this planet, and how heart-wrenchingly crucial these hidden stories are. We work to educate ourselves on the symbiosis that dictates our very small, very optimistic, existence here on planet Earth. We want to give into the positive prowess of the underworld(s) that course below and through our animal bodies, make us multi-layered, multi-faceted, and indelibly tied to the material realities of the land we live in.
Usually defined as the “act of descending below the surface of water,” we expand this notion to both the sensorial and intellectual experience of climbing underneath the crust of what can be seen and learned about ecocultures. We love fungi and water. We ask questions to trees, and try to read soil. We make rituals with rocks and we sit quietly with seedlings. We hope to make work that listens to beings and entities that might “do” body differently-from other species and our own.
We work to offer our communities, students, children, friends, more-than-human relations, and colleagues, a space to create, contest, and spin webs of understanding that is non-negotiable in its collectivity and is dependent on togetherness to make performances, writing, education, and visual art. We do not wish to expose all that lives below the surface of our mother and our consciousness, but rather tease these things out slowly, and carefully, as we provide space for others to commute and subsequently commune to a state of submergence with us. Mostly, we desire to create methods of sharing the ecological stories we feel privy to that still love, breathe, and recreate networks despite their unseen connectivity and relative invisibility.