Renee Rhodes

Renee tells stories about people who perform sensitive rituals or poetic experiments in an attempt to physicalize their relationship with the non-human parts of nature. Once, she collected house dust from 20 long distance friends and handcrafted a pseudo-scientific account of this phenomenon. Another time she gathered many strangers from Craigslist together in an urban park. They played at social choreographies which mimicked the movements and games of huddled penguins, collaborative slime molds and California communalists. Recently, she's been collecting mined sand from the hardware store & concrete chunks from the construction sites in her neighborhood. With these, she makes performative geological companions, dances & souvenir stands to promote a memory of their slow-time mineral lives. By creating rituals of embodiment and mimicry she learns about the complexity of non-human lives and systems, but also can suggest other kinds of stories where humans play at being friendlier neighbors within the specific ecosystems that they inhabit.