Gathering #2:
To Weave a Story
group exhibition, workshop,
performance, food intervention
Gathering #2: To Weave a Story was the second edition of The Kinship Cookbook, turning from the home to the stories that furnish it. What are the tales that have shaped us since childhood? Fair maidens and jesters, knights and quests lay out a plentiful landscape for the male Hero to conquer. Conventional stories turn on that protagonist, and everyone else, other forms of life and the environment included, enters only by proving useful to him. The world tends to mirror the convention, leaving diverse stories, the marginalised and the unproductive largely unheard.
To Weave a Story set out to take that standard form apart by writing the environment and its margins back in. A selection of artworks became the ground from which to imagine props and characters, landscapes and backdrops, elements then broken down into building blocks for a small writing workshop, its reading drawn from Ursula K. Le Guin's The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which imagines the story not as the Hero's spear but as a bag that gathers and holds. Woven together in different combinations, these elements let other stories surface, the kind one might call failed, in which other forms of life and other ways of living might take the spotlight.
When the exhibition opened to the public, the works invited each viewer to arrive at their own readings and narratives, while the stories that came out of the workshop became the basis for hourly sessions of oral storytelling, each hour unfolding a fresh narrative from the same deconstructed elements. The hope across the gathering was to diversify not only what a story represents but how it is told, to find a way of telling that does not depend on negating the unseen or the nonsensical, and instead to speculatively fabulate on the role of storytelling as a ritual, one in which stories that turn away from the human, that are queer and that refuse the logic of productivity might unfold.