**Artists:**
- Bobby Joe Smith III
- Edgar Fabián Frías
- Gerald Clarke
- Moara Tupinambá
- Noara Quintana
- Óldo Erréve
- Tiare Ribeaux
- Qianqian Ye
- Bomi Yook
**Curators:**
- Berfin Ataman
- Isabel Beavers
- Yara Feghali
- Kira Xonorika
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**SUPERCOLLIDER** and **Idyllwild Arts Academy** are delighted to present the collaborative exhibition titled **"The Grammar of Animacy."** Indigenous worldviews have always been rooted in notions of interconnectedness and the recognition of the elements of the land, such as stones and mountains, as ancestors possessing intelligence and wisdom. In her book, "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants," Robin Wall Kimmerer, a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, discusses the concept of the grammar of animacy:
"Plants and animals are animate, but as I learn, I am discovering that the Potawatomi understanding of what it means to be animate diverges from the list of attributes of living beings we all learned in Biology 101. In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate."
Kimmerer reflects on language as a realm for shaping imagination and possibility. She points out that the English language sets up divisions between humans and objects, which are then assigned gender or animacy. These divisions are often hierarchical.
What role does art play as a language, and how can it serve as an instrument to invoke alternative ways of being, thinking, and acting, ultimately leading to a reorientation in the relationships between species, people, and spirits? Can art and artists create a space to initiate conversations on the impulse of meaning and community?
**"The Grammar of Animacy"** brings together the work of eight artists who aim to challenge Western myths and cultivate visions that intertwine multiplicity in embodiment, queer mythologies, indigenous epistemologies, and ethical relationships with ecology and technology.
- Moara Tupinambá explores kinship relations with trees, plants, and animals in Tambaqui.
- Cahuilla artist Gerald Clarke's work, **Punu’ul**, makes visible the Yucca Whipplei, a plant of cultural significance to the Cahuilla people.
- Artists Tiare Ribeaux and Qianqian Ye merge magical realism with elements of Hawaiian and Mandarin cosmology in their project **Kai Hai**, examining social and environmental inequities.
- Artist Edgar Fabián Frias is interested in alchemizing relations between earth and humans. Their artwork, **'3 of Cups (Tatéi Neixa)**,' is an altar created with the intention of reaffirming and reestablishing ancestral pacts to bring sustaining rains and healing for the land and its inhabitants.
In addition to convening with more-than-human neighbors, works in the exhibition invite animism as a strategy for challenging colonialism, colonial narratives, and colonial sites of production. Artists Bomi Yook and Bobby Joe Smith III challenge settler cities as sites for utopic worldbuilding, instead highlighting the longstanding presence of indigeneity and speculating on how indigenous people live in futures designed by settler colonizers. The work proposes a vision in which sites of decay are spaces ripe for decolonization for indigenous communities. Noara Quintana is interested in the tangible qualities of everyday items, intersecting with the histories of the Global South to challenge colonial narratives.
In **Orvópera**, artist Óldo Erréve utilizes 3D design and AI-collaborative media to explore the intersection between organic forms and innovative technological tools, projecting physical and virtual bodily expressions. **ORVÓPERA** brings ideas of animacy to the forefront of technological collaborations, prompting us to ask about the life and soul of the machines we work with and how these ideas apply to all bodies.
By proposing alternative notions of animacy, the works in this exhibition encourage us to consider life all around us. How are the machines we use, lands we inhabit, oceans of storms, and sea life also alive? If we can understand these entities as animated, as beings rather than objects or materials, we can engender respect within our relations to them and disassemble the barriers that separate us.
This exhibition is made possible with generous funding from the Native American Arts Center and Arts Enterprise Laboratory at Idyllwild Arts.