This workshop is titled Interspecies Collaboration and led by artist Mantis Harper-Blanco.
Here is a description of Mantis’ workshop, from her proposal. “The workshop aims to host a collaborative imagination of other species’ inner worlds using storytelling tools. The goal of the workshop is to address an essential unknowability to the world around us, and at the same time offer and foster a lens of storytelling to bridge into the unknown. We will discuss the implications of imagination in the making of worlds, and look to co-explore ways in which storytelling can help us connect with the world around us and to each other. An essential tenet of this workshop is to leave participants empowered through tools of storytelling and collective imagination. Speculative design and storytelling tools are directly actionable. It is extremely difficult to feel any sense of presence and direct influence within a system that erases and actively minimizes community, and resistance. Our morale and courage can be invigorated through sharing stories, creating them and engaging with our uncertainties. What if we turned our uncertainties into potential speculative worlds? What if we could see the power of our own imagination through activating potential utopias? We are all individuals bringing something to the table, but together, we can make something happen.”
This workshop is held in conjunction with the exhibition, “Pitted: Home at the Heart of an empire.” Grounded in the shared experience of growing up under rapid synchronized development of the internet and the climate crisis, participating artists consider the impermanence that has dictated our lives. Pitted features the work of 21 current or former Baltimore residents and members of PULP Collective, a group of artists dedicated to maintaining a space to support each other’s continued practices. The exhibition will take place at AREA 405, on display from October 10 to November 21, 2025. Through fiber, sculpture, painting, and digital media, the artists in this exhibition ground themselves in acts of care, remembering, and collective imagining — asking what it means to root ourselves in unstable ground.