Stephanie Carranza

Æther Studio’s first public initiative,

Autumn 2023, Paris, France

Dear friends and family,
We have the pleasure to invite you to celebrate and experience, alongside twenty-something artists and facilitators from diverse practices and backgrounds, the birth of Æther Studio and its first public initiative, INTERVALS, an invitation to co-create!

Part science, part art, part technique, Æther Studio’s intention is to operate as an experimental incubator for rethinking accountability, social justice, and responsivity in depleted ecosystems; to design new ontological frameworks that are empowering, regenerative, and integrative via participatory community praxises—our lived experiences, personal heritage, and historical interactions with nature—through transdisciplinary mediums and postactivist inquiries: an ambitious necessity to map a path towards equity and fugitive futures.

We aim to examine beyond the politics of inclusion / exclusion through a neurodiverse prism to better understand the different colors of reductionism found in today’s civilizational crisis and imagine how we can reconstruct new architectures of safety and action through the rich relationships surrounding us. By creating a gentle and playful environment to work with the knowledge that people and nature inherently retain, we express our refusal of the idea of curation, preferring instead a non-hierarchical model of co-creation. Tuning into the lingering trickster energy as a trope for novelty, our public becomes co-creators and community partners to color way outside the lines.

With our first public initiative, INTERVALS, we wish to disturb the commodification of relationships in every sense and distress our habitual ways of thinking about public order and food security by exploring the notions of radical welcomeness and generosity in a communal act of celebration to open up new places of power and cultivate bewilderment with our physical and virtual environments. We wish to explore the creative and healing potential within and to address the ecological and psychological urgency to slow down to experience wisdom by engaging in collective ritual, ceremony, and nature encounters.

The launch is hosted in a former brothel and later restaurant and imagined as a four-day animist co-creative event, an invitation to take part in the process of thinking, making, and exploring new forms and formats that celebrate a kaleidoscope of cultures, people, and geographies at the margin of fertile ground. For the opening night, we will prepare for you a performative food tasting sourced locally from organic vegetables, centered around native seeds from the Southwest United States.

With the return of the plant embryos to the spirit of the sacred vulva, we’re reminded of the cosmic strings that weave our disparate bodies into the flowing relationships we ultimately are.

We hope to see you there to create and celebrate together!

The time of dawn has come

“We replace the reality of perception with the theoretical abstraction called matter”. — Bernardo Kastrup, Ph.D., Ph.D.

The time of dawn has come explores the reality of perception: what the world is and how we relate to it. It looks at how memory, particularly regressed ones, and extended mind presents itself to us in the form we call the material world. Inspired by transpersonal experiences and the latest understanding coming from neuroscience, analytic philosophy, and even evolutionary theory, Carranza pays reverence to the essence of genealogy through a hybrid process of painting, sculpture, weaving, and meditation. From this nuanced approach, Carranza examines the notion of meta-consciousness through the reportability of inherited gestures and questions how these re-representations influence standalone reality compared to what mainstream physicalism and analytic idealism hypothesize.