Help Cy attend Materia Abierta in Mexico City!

Hello!

My name is Cy X, and I am a black queer non-binary artist, herbalist, and eco-somatic educator based in Brooklyn, NY. I was recently accepted into Materia Abierta’s 2023 Summer School under the title El múcaro a lo lejos in Mexico City (curated by Jorge González) and am seeking support to be able to attend.

I have been dreaming of being a part of Materia Abierta’s cohort since 2019 and it is finally happening. Unfortunately, I did not receive a scholarship, so I am reaching out to my friends, peers, family, community for support in making this happen this summer.

About Materia Abierta:

Materia Abierta is a summer school on theory, art, and technology. Established in Mexico City as a space to reflect on the political, economic, and epistemic forces that condition knowledge production, the program is reshaped every year provoking new contexts for learning.

This year’s program seeks to interweave ritual practices, memory construction, and material cultures, assembling knowledge from different locations in the Caribbean considered essential to resignifying the political potential of aesthetic instruments and ancestral knowledge.

Calling upon the ancient chant of the múcaro, a small bird endemic to Borikén, the program will be a gathering to interiorize and collectivize the act of listening between shared resonance and murmurs. The faculty includes Ochy Curiel, Engel Leonardo, Escuela de Oficios, Alessandra Pomarico, Suely Rolnik, Awilda Sterling-Duprey, and Ber Zabalaga.

The program is developed with the support of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in coordination with Cultura UNAM, Casa del Lago UNAM, Cátedra Extraordinaria Max Aub, Transdisciplina en Arte y Tecnología, and Museo Tamayo.

Funds will go towards:

More about me:

For the past four years, my work has intimately dealt with rituals as I uncovered the intimacies of cyber witchcraft and technomysticism. Throughout the process, I shifted my understanding of what technology is and fell in love with the more-than-human aspects of this world, spirituality and collective care practices, sound practices, performance, and space creation all of which I now weave into my ongoing practices.

Community practices and education are the core foundation of all that I do. I am the co-founder of Synth Library NYC a synthesizer and electronic music library in NYC and founder of Shared Body, a school of embodied technology. I also offer free herbs and low cost ecology and sex education workshops out of a community space in Brooklyn in addition to free and low cost pleasure-centered somatic education workshops and sessions online and in person.

In April 2022, I started an open residency in April that explored this idea of "Water as Technology," where I along with many others around the world connected to the energetics and power of water. I connected water to these containers of grief, astrology, our bodies, the erotic and developed prompts and programming related to that.

Engaging in collective inquiry has made me want to go even deeper with the goal of exploring this question specifically - if we begin to see ourselves as water bodies and water as a holder of memory and information, how then can we further connect to it and enter into an eco-erotic relationship with them? And how can we open ourselves up the fullest potentials of living a sensuous life connected more intimately with Earth and each other?

At the moment, I have been working on a workbook that takes an eco-erotic approach to herbalism and other elemental practices, the goal here being that this is one method of me clearly communicating the specific erotic animistic framework that I hope to be the base theoretics of my work. Already in my studies, which are deeply founded in my own ancestral practices, I have mapped connection between herbalism practices, rituals, and traditions that have deep origins both within the Caribbean and Mexico and now I am excited for the opportunity to move deeper into listenings that vibrate the webs of connection between people and place.

This work means so much to me and to be in a community that is considering the relationships between ecology, rituals, and technology feels like a dream come true. I would appreciate any love and support to help me find my way there.