Constitution
Full Film - 17.25 min
2017

Summer Workshop VI 

“In moments of existential crisis, time has a tendency to collapse, whole chains of events that may usually require years and decades to unfold, suddenly happen overnight.”- Farid Moslehi

The demands of our time are urgent: our present and emerging challenges, and the very real possibilities for a better world, call for new modes of comprehension and action, new questions, and new forms of knowledge.

 The Constitution workshop was held at the Mill, from July 8th – Aug 6th, 2017, and with it Arts Letters & Numbers proposed a dynamic crucible of free thought: a space where the widest spectrum of who we are could ask questions of our time and create works to bring us forward. A space where many elements could come together to create the alchemy of transforming how we experience today into how we will experience tomorrow.

Throughout the four-week workshop participants from a wide range of disciplines developed a shared language between the elements of the Mill, its context and inhabitants. Out of these interactions, many forms of conversation emerged – between the works and spaces, bodies and words, gesture and stillness– moving towards new models/structures/frameworks of constitution.

As we moved further into conversations and questions of Constitution we searched for a largeness of being that repels our current accelerating violence: that embraces life and articulates a poetic, spatial and material imagination of the social contract. Perhaps the greatest source of this largeness of being is found in the fragility of being, for in the act of embracing our fragility we enact a social-poetic imagination. This workshop was directed by David Gersten, and cotaught with Arts Letters & Numbers Fellows and Visiting Artists.