Making Ground: Dialogues a creative, collective learning series

May-July 2025

For updates on Making Ground: Dialogues, please visit: https://www.apearts.org/making-ground---dialogues.html

This Spring, Making Ground: Dialogues returns, with a series of learning engagements centered around collective study and reparative relationships to place. The Spring 2025 series will focus on local histories and ecologies with three gatherings led by artists whose creative practices intersect with grief and loss, embodied and communal practice, social exchange, and interspecies investigations. Embedded in the varied offerings are invitations to consider interconnection with the more than human world, land remediation in relationship to colonial trauma, and how historical and land-based studies might lead us to embodied, creative, grounded, and imaginative responses in the present toward more liberated futures.

MAY 4 • javiera benavente • Lay Down and Listen

MAY 18 • Sara Smith • Where we go, we will have been

JULY 6 • Meg Foley • Communion

Conceived of as an opportunity to repeatedly gather together in creative, collective learning, we encourage participants to consider registering for multiple offerings. 

Join the cohort of fellow community members as we explore, expand, and reimagine our relationship and responsibilities to this place. 

In addition to these gatherings, A.P.E. will host collectively-led study groups on each Tuesday directly following the offering from 6-8pm. Join us then in the Workroom at 33 Hawley for further discussion of the materials, themes, and practices engaged.

All offerings are FREE, but registration is required.

SPRING/SUMMER 2025 OFFERINGS

SUNDAY, MAY 4, 12-3pm • Bramble Hill Farm

OFFERING 1: javiera benavente

Lay Down and Listen: 

communal practices for surrender and belonging

What are we losing or have we lost that we want to attend to together? 

What dreams and visions do we want to nourish for future generations?

We are living in times of unprecedented brokenness, loss and uncertainty.  While our losses are deeply interconnected, many of us experience them in isolation making it difficult to imagine more generative futures into being.  

Lay Down and Listen is an invitation into a communal and creative exploration in 3 parts: one part art-making, one part ritual, and one part reflection and dialogue.  The purpose is to create a slow, intimate, and sacred space that allows us to attune and attend to our losses (both personal and collective), while nourishing our capacity to dream for future generations.

javiera benavente will share a series of communal practices that invite deep, whole bodied listening and making. This is an invitation into ceremony.  It is a call to turn towards ourselves, each other, the land, and our more than human relatives for connection, guidance, and sustenance as we navigate these turbulent and troubling times.

SUNDAY, MAY 18, 12-3pm • A.P.E. Main St. Gallery

OFFERING 2: Sara Smith

Where we go, we will have been

How is our felt experience of a place informed by knowledge of or assumptions about its history? How do layered past, present, and future moments live in, with, and around us? How might we understand ourselves as grounded in a wide expanse of space and time, and make art from that grounding?

Interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, and librarian Sara Smith will share their experiences and creative practices developed from making speculative artworks and performances from archival research. In guided experiments, we will attend to sensory experience of place, discuss the human anatomies that shape this experience, and engage with, reimagine, and remix “historical” materials connected to APE spaces. Activities will include an artist presentation, group discussion, individual writing and/or drawing, and adaptable guided exercises.

OFFERING 3: SUNDAY, JULY 6, 8pm (civil twilight) • Bramble Hill Farm

OFFERING 3: Meg Foley

Communion

Communion is an experiment done in community. Using our relation to geology and exploring language as a formative force, Communion unpacks how we are formed—how we are shaped by and through language, place and time. An intentional and spiraling journey through the creation story of the land we are on, the family Meg is a part of, and the sensory materials of the immediate moment of the performance, Communion asks the audience to reflect on all that has accumulated into this moment and the significance of our sensing, feeling selves in this moment, now.

Communion is one part of a larger project called Blood Baby, which includes site-responsive dance performance and Queer Parent Convenings, in addition to Touch Library, an interactive, sensory archive of the project, and Primordial, a visual installation exploring deep time and queer formation, on view in early July at A.P.E. on Main Street. Blood Baby uses multiple mediums to explore the interconnected experiences of queer and gender non-conforming parenting and family-building, highlighting gender, sexuality, community, and Earthly lineage.

Artist Bios:

javiera benavente is an artist, cultural organizer, facilitator, and educator dedicated to collective practice and co-creating new futures of care. Born in Santiago, Chile (Wallmapu) just months before the Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup, she has been deeply impacted by the legacy and failure of this utopian political project and its aftermath throughout her life. 

javiera’s current work explores collective grief, loss, and memory; cultivating right and reciprocal relations with land and more than human relatives; and communal, embodied practices of surrender and belonging.  She is the co-curator of Chile Nunca Más: making memory, making future, an exhibit and memory making project that marks 50 years since el golpe (the military coup) in Chile and the subsequent 17 years long dictatorship.

She serves as Assistant Dean of Collaborative and Community Engaged Learning at Hampshire College where she co-chairs the Decolonization & Reciprocity Working Group. javiera lives on the ancestral homelands of the Pocomtuc, Nonotuck, and Nipmuc Peoples with her partner, daughter, and dog.

Meg Foley (she/he/they) makes performance projects in pursuit of radical self-determination, crafting body-based explorations of identity, belonging, and time from a queer perspective. Drawing on choreographic formalism but continually questioning what constitutes dance performance, her research asks how identity is occupied: an all-the-time, ever-shifting self, a sacred site, a portal, a prism. She often invites audiences to engage with concepts through their own bodily experiences, using movement, design, and choreographic thinking to create containers for bodily engagement and reflection on a somatic present, on the power and location of the body itself as participant. Since 2019, she has been working with fabric, foam, and textile materials to extend performer embodiment through interactive objects and installations, affording somatic life to objects and “feeling back” on and through the body, reflecting on one’s FORM and the body’s collective interiority, shape and architecture. She lives on traditional Lenape land, in southern Lenapehoking and what is commonly known as Philadelphia, where she co-runs The Whole Shebang, a home for experiment performance in Philly, with her partner, visual artist Carmichael Jones, and is a queerdo homeschooling mama in a trans family with two kids and an elderly pit bull. Raised by a single mom in the DC area, she was a creative movement kid who found her choreographic identity on the club dance floor, in phenomenological texts, and in experiential visual art. www.megfoley.org

Sara Smith is a transdisciplinary choreographer and librarian. Their projects consider concepts of interconnection, practices of micro-attention, and the poetics and politics of embodied and archival research. Sara’s recent exhibition at APE, Sugar Maple Glacial Lake Station, presented works from their ongoing futurist project Inside the Breath (In Network Time). Sara has been a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship award in Choreography among other awards and honors, and lives in Greenfield (Pocumtuck land). sarasmithprojects.com

Available Potential Enterprises, Ltd. (A.P.E.) is an artist-led, artist-centered 501(c)3 non-profit organization supporting contemporary artists working in all disciplines by stewarding the spaces in which they create, perform and exhibit their work. A.P.E is dedicated to fostering relationships, encounters, and exchanges that nourish the capacity for imagination. http://www.apearts.org; 413.586.5553 

The overall shape of this program was developed with insight from Trenda Loftin, Tyler Rai, Alex Ripp, and Lailye Weidman, and continues the inquiries of Making Ground, a public art project initiated in February 2023 on the floor of the Workroom at 33 Hawley that invited the public into personal and interconnected creative engagement with our relationships to land, community, space, imagination, and stewardship.

Making Ground: Dialogues is made possible through funding from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in Northampton.

Thank you to the Massachusetts Cultural Council for organizational support, as well as for programming support through the Cultural Sector Recovery Grant.

A.P.E. also receives support from The Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts through the Valley Creates Flexible Funding Program.