Calling all wayfarers, wanderers, tramps, train-hoppers, drifters, day-trippers, pilgrims, globetrotters, vagabonds, lost souls, rolling stones and anyone who’s ever felt the urge to go beyond.

As the culmination of our year of Migration-themed exhibits and events, Proteus Gowanus presents Nomad Mixer, an art-packed romp through our labyrinthine halls, alleyway and courtyard with music, food, drink, and exotic experiences around every bend. 

Featured performers and activities:

• Intimate encounters with the literary Gypsies of The Poetry Brothel
• The runaway-train sounds of the Union Street Preservation Society Band
• Theater experiments from the Dzieci Theatre Ensemble
• Holus Bolus transforms our alleyway into a Nomad Spectacle
• The incredible Steampunk Seed Machine
• and a Live Auctionof Extra-OrdinaryExperiences including 900 Years of Russian Art History in One Hour, A Blindfold Walk thru Brooklyn Parks and a Guided Coyote Walk!

                                                                                                                                                                                             

(Image by Atty Gell)

Join anthropologist Thomas R. Miller in a multimedia experience, “People Who Talk With Birds: Siberian Shamans in the Future Past.”

Siberian shamans are time-travellers and shape-shifters, moving across worlds and forms in the course of ceremonial healing and divination rituals. Through sensory mediation, Miller tracks their migrations and transformations between polarities of human-not human, animal-not animal, spirit-nature, living-not living, and past-future. Based on 20 years of Miller’s archival and field research, this multimedia presentation includes descriptions, interviews, oral testimony, images, film, and multichannel sounds from the first ethnographic wax-cylinder recordings to contemporary montage.

Thomas Ross Miller, Ph.D. is an independent curator, scholar, and media installation artist from Brooklyn. He holds degrees in Anthropology from Columbia University and Music from Wesleyan University, and teaches at Berkeley College and NYU Tisch School of the Arts. His specialties include visual anthropology, sound studies, museology, shamanism, and ethnohistory. A former staff member and Guest Curator at the American Museum of Natural History, he has been a visiting professor at Pratt Institute, Rutgers University, and Drew University. He recently completed research and teaching residencies at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany and the Museum Studies graduate program at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík.

On Sunday, join the Multispecies Salon host, anthropologist Eben Kirksey, for the second in our three-part discussion series exploring what happens when the natural and the human-generated meet. This question hovers over the Future Migration exhibition currently on view at Proteus Gowanus and, in this next session, Eben invites consideration of a central question:

“In the aftermath of disasters—in blasted landscapes that have been transformed by multiple catastrophes—what are the possibilities of biocultural hope?”

The Multispecies Salon, a resident project hosted by Eben at Proteus this Spring, has been a site where thinkers and tinkerers—culture workers who are deeply implicated in sweeping political, economic, and ecological transformations—have cautiously explored future horizons in the wake of recent disasters. We will discuss artworks in the exhibit that ground imaginings about elusive futures in actual biocultural becomings.

Printed copies of Eben Kirksey’s freshly written essay, “Hope in Blasted Landscapes”, will be distributed at the event.

This month, the Proteus Migration Film & Video Series will host a unique cinema-performance event which will be enacted throughout our various project spaces. Brooklyn-based filmmaker, Lynne Sachs, will bring us a specially designed evening of film and integrated movement pieces based on her recent work with a group of Chinese and Puerto Rican performers. The Your Day is My Night Collective will explore “shiftbeds” through verité conversations, character-driven fictions, and multi-format film loops. A shift-bed is shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Inspired by theater visionaries Augusto Boal and the Wooster Group, the collective has worked for the last year on a series of performance workshops centered around such a bed – experienced, remembered, and imagined from profoundly different viewpoints. The audience will be encouraged to engage with the characters while walking through the gallery as a “shift-bed” house, witnessing their stories of life before and after immigration to the United States.

Film loops excerpted from the upcoming feature-length film, “Your Day is My Night.”

More information can be found at Facebook.com/yourdayismynightfilm

Performers: Yi Chun Cao, Yueh (Linda) Hwa Chan, Che Chang-Qing, Yun Xiu Huang, Ellen Ho,  Sheut Hing Lee, Veraalba Santa Torres and Pedro Sanchez Tormes

Directed by Lynne Sachs
Images by Sean Hanley and Ethan Mass
Writing by Rojo Robles and Lynne Sachs
Translations by Catherine Ng, Jenifer Lee and Bryan Chan
Co-editing and co-producing by Sean Hanley
Production Assistance by Madeline Youngberg, Amanda Katz & Jeff Sisson

Conversation #1: The Multispecies Salon: Gleanings from a Para-Site 

This event will be the first in a series of three conversations hosted by Eben Kirksey, Proteus Gowanus Anthropologist-In-Residence, of The Multispecies Salon. The conversations will orbit around three interrelated questions:

Which species flourish, and which fail, when natural and cultural worlds intermingle and collide? What happens when the bodies of organisms, and even entire ecosystems, are brought into schemes of biotechnology and dreams of biocapitalism? And finally in the aftermath of disasters—in blasted landscapes that have been transformed by multiple catastrophes—what are the possibilities of biocultural hope?

A series of essays, works in progress by Eben Kirksey, will be precirculated in advance to ground these conversations.

Sunday, April 29th, 5-6:30: ”Multispecies Salon: Gleanings from a Para-Site” (10 pp)
Sunday, May 6, 5-6:30: ”Hope in Blasted Landscapes” (30 pp)
Sunday, May 13, 5-6:30: ”Life in the Age of Biotechnology” (30 pp)

Please RSVP for to secure a spot in the discussion and copies of the
essays.  Space is limited.

Join us at dawn at the Grand Army Plaza entrance of Prospect Park for a silent walk through the woods with urban nature blogger and bird-listener Matthew Wills.

Each spring, tens of millions of birds migrate north along the Atlantic Coast of North America heading for breeding grounds from Florida to Labrador. Amidst the metropolitan sprawl, relatively intact swaths of woodlands like Prospect Park act as magnets for these birds as places to rest and re-fuel. Some of these birds will stay to nest here, some are just passing through. What unites them all is their vocalizations, the “dawn chorus” of hundreds of birds calling and singing.

We will walk in silence with ears open and all electronic devices off. The Listening Tour is a walking meditation, a natural sound concert, and a re-awakening of our often-abused urban ears.

A  reading of a new short play with songs and science by Melissa Cooper. Music by Thomas Cabaniss.

A woman and a coyote come face to face in Central Park. What forces have brought these two beings together for a shared moment in the heart of Manhattan? Where did each come from, and where is she going? Based on a true story, this inter-species dialogue celebrates the mystery of unlikely migrations and meetings.

“You think I’m making this up? I’m not. Everything I’m telling you is true. Everything. One way or another, all of it is true.”

by Atty Gell

Actors Melissa Cooper, Mary Schultz, Nick Hamburger, Alex Viola and Myles Rowland.

You may also wish to visit Melissa’s urban nature website: www.outwalkingthedog.wordpress.com

James Walsh, a longtime friend of Proteus Gowanus as well as a founder/collaborator of Observatory, has just brought out his latest book, There was Something in the Weather, in the Libellulæ series published by Proteotypes, our print arm.

There was Something in the Weather consists of extracts from the early journals of John Ruskin, the most influential art critic of 19^th century Britain. These entries, however, were written when Ruskin was sixteen and making his first journey to Switzerland and Italy, shortly after having been denied the love of Adèle-Clotilde Domecq, daughter of his father’s partner. By using a traced-type calligraphy and reformatting journal entries as lines of verse, James Walsh has moved Ruskin’s text nearer the reader and brought out the suppressed feeling in what might otherwise appear neutral observations of rocks, buildings, glaciers, and skies.

James will read, and there’ll be wine and refreshments. Copies of There was Something in the Weather will be available for purchase and signing.

Geology is the the study of materials contained within the Earth and the processes by which they evolve. The Urban Geological Study will lead participants on a hands-on exploration in the neighborhood to gather materials, identify, classify, and tell a new story of objects found in the local urban environment. How did these objects arrive here? What are their uses? Where will they end up? During the workshop we will create new systems of nomenclature based on historical fact or future fiction to form new connections with our surrounding environment through migratory geological narratives. An informational handout, worksheet, and survey materials will be provided. All ages are welcome.

Studio AND is a collaboration between Audra Wolowiec and Niels Cosman. Their work explores the curious phenomenon of Urban Meteorites, fictional artifacts from an imagined future. More about their project can be found at www.studio-and.com.

Join us for the opening reception of the third exhibition of the Migration year: FUTURE MIGRATION, an exploration of the possibilities and predicaments of life in the anthropocene future.  Proteus Gowanus brings together artists, scientists, and visionaries in an exhibition of art, artifacts, and books, as well as talks, film and other events that consider where we are headed in our continual migrations toward the unknown. What sorts of resources will be preserved or invented to allow life on this planet to continue? Will Earth always be home or will we look out into the galaxy to find new and alternative solutions in the stars? Will we continue to exist as natural beings or will our technologies lead us to a new definition of what it means to be human?

Artist Krista Dragomer is co-curator of the  exhibition.

Bryan M Wilson, Monument to the Future

Participants include: Indrani Ashe, Scott Billings, Kevin Clement, Elizabeth Cope, Donald Daedalus, Eymund Diegel, Krista Dragomer and Rashin Fahandej, Sarah Edkins, David Eustace, Peter Fend, Rebecca Heritage, Rita London,  Beatrice Marovich, Elisabeth Pellathy, Eric Pettiti, Deanna Pindell, Debra Tillinger, Emily Tobey, Barbara Westermann, Bryan Wilson, Sen-I Yu.

Concurrently, for our third residency of the Migration year, we are delighted to welcome, as Anthropologist-In-Residence,  Eben Kirksey and his collaborators with the Multi-Species Salon. They will work in text, conversation and installation, with media ranging from wool fiber to amphibians to moss–questioning human entanglement with plants, microbes, and animals and to develop art/projects intended to help us think about living with and in a multispecies worlds. Their particular concern is finding hope in Blasted Landscapes.

In addition, as part of Future Migration, we welcome THE FOOL’S JOURNEY, a corollary exhibition on our shelves curated by our friends from Curious Matter in Jersey City, NJ. In the Tarot, The Fool symbolizes the beginning of a journey. He sets off to explore without knowing what lies ahead. He isn’t a fool in the sense of a buffoon, rather one who proceeds on an adventure in spite of his lack of experience. To confront the unknown; the accumulation of knowledge; transformation from ignorance to wisdom; moving from one place to another, whether physical or psychical, are aspects of The Fool’s Journey.

Artists participating in The Fool’s Journey at  Proteus include: Fanny Allié, Lasse Antonsen, Louise Barry, Angela S. Beallor, Joseph Cavalieri, Gail Goldsmith, Ian Addison Hall, Joe Lugara, Marianne McCarthy, Anatoli Savov Monov, R. Wayne Parsons, Sarah Gl Sharp, Melissa A. Stern, Claire Watson, Katarina Wong.