Roots Salon

Roots Salon is a monthly in-person invitational facilitated gathering of artists, scholars and art lovers sharing time and space discussing the artists who inspire them, in response to a provocation. The prompts are listed below. All the works are indexed and available to Salon attendees under each password-protected page.

Roots Salon #1: Collaboration - February 2025

Collaboration, co-creation, or making together can be rich and messy, complicated and generative. Anyone who ever shared a kitchen or cooked a meal with someone else knows that it can be effortless or hectic, intense or swift. Artists, authors, thinkers are often imagined to work in solitude, surrounded by the aura (and burden) of individual genius. When two artists, thinkers, authors or collectives come together, they still make something of their own. However, this work doesn't belong to any one of them. At specific junctures of time and space, idiosyncratic personalities join forces to create new material that breaks the boundaries of their previous creative or research practice. This often involves stepping outside comfort zones, taking risks, destabilizing or realigning modes of making to create something that otherwise would not exist. To imagine an alternative reality. One where the power of two can be greater than the sum of 1+1.

Roots Salon #2: Astro Noise - March 2025

“For those who listen, the stars are singing. From the overbearing Sun to those that on the clearest night appear as only distant darkness, each has a voice. And their song can protect our secrets” — writes Edward Snowden in a brief contribution for a collection of texts published with ASTRO NOISE: A Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance, the debut solo show celebrating the work of documentary filmmaker and visual artist Laura Poitras, hosted at the Whitney Museum (2016). We encourage you to read the short essay and watch Laura Poitras’ short pieces O’Say Can You See and Project X. Poitras is the director of The Oath; My Country, My Country; Citizenfour; Risk and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. 
Astro Noise is the name of the first encrypted file containing evidence of mass surveillance that former CIA employee and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden shared with Poitras in 2013. Astro Noise also refers to the muffled disturbance of leftover thermal radiation believed to have dispersed in the universe in the form of aimless microwaves after the Big Bang. It is also the title and mantra of a Media History class that we have designed and been teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder, since 2018.
Trevor Paglen, a geographer, writer, artist and contributor to Astro Noise, writes “What I want from art is to help see the historical moment we live in.” Eyal Weizmann, founder of the Forensic Architecture collective, and another collaborator of Poitras’, writes: “Achieving a heightened aesthetic state of material sensitivity, tuned to weak signals, must be enhanced by a sensitivity to the materiality of politics: this entails an appreciation that whether you are a building, a territory, a pixel, or a person, to detect is to transform, and to be transformed is to feel pain.”
Thinkers and artists like Snowden, Paglen, Weizmann, and Poitras provoke us to question our reliance on machines and allegiance to technological progress. On the contact line between (post-)humans, environment and artificial intelligence, we are living at the crossroads of a new paradigm. These borderlands can provide a generative vantage point on a bundled moment of co-temporal technologies and modes of making. 

Roots Salon #3: From Afar: Human Archipelago - April 2025

"The current political moment suggests a number of responses: combat, collective action, resistance, refusal. The work that artists do may engage with any or all of these." In the introduction to their book Human Archipelago,  writer (and photographer) Teju Cole and photographer (and researcher) Fazal Sheikh describe the concept for a collection that reunites photographs taken by Sheikh over the span of 2 decades, all around the world, with "indirect responses" - short form writing by Cole, inspired by these images. 
In an age of sensitive echo chamber conversations, partly inspired by heightened awareness of cultural or creative appropriation, what is the point of combining various cultural or historical traditions into a single work?  "For both of us, the question of hospitality is paramount. How might we be able to move from a conversation about rights to one about the mutual responsibilities that people bear towards each other, regardless of their race, religion, gender or nationality?" 
Sheikh and Cole conceive their book as an autonomous ecosystem that emerges out of a concern for "the mutual dependence that we believe underpins all human arrangements." The authors boldly combine images and words connecting dots across a vast expanse of cultural, geographical and historical references. "As human beings", Cole and Sheikh write, "we might be temporarily bounded by our circumstances. But we are not contained by them." 
What do art and thought look, sound or feel like when they emerge at the intersection of different cultural strands? How are the aesthetic and existential tactics that come into the world from points of origin that are distinct, and not similar; heterogeneous, and not homogenous; different from those that arise from a single tradition, language or place of origin? What kinds of rhizomatic new specificities appear from the convergence of distinct, rooted strands of inquiry? What are the responsibilities of hosting, being hospitable to other people, species and modes of existence in an age of reactionary individualism? What does "multicultural", a term reverberating from the post-Cold War idealism of the 1990s, even mean in the year 2025?
This provocation is inspired by the multicultural, polyvocal, syncretic ethos of "the Yugoslav art space" defined by art theorist and historian Ješa Denegri (b. 1936). From the 1950s to the 1980s, Yugoslav modernist art scenes in Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Novi Sad were infused with cultural, historical, linguistic and aesthetic variety that nurtured burgeoning cosmopolitan constellations of artists, art lovers and scholars. 

Roots Salon #4: Field Trip Diary / Letter - May 2025

What is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided, and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless, and errant? Could it be that time is too narrow for all events? Could it happen that all the seats within time might have been sold? (...) Have you ever heard of parallel streams of time within a two-track time? Yes, there are such branch lines of time, somewhat illegal and suspect.. (...) Let us try to find at some point of history such a branch line, a blind track onto which to shunt these illegal events.  - writes Bruno Schulz, born in 1892 in Drohobych, near Lviv. The Age of Genius, a collection of oddball childhood reminiscences and vignettes published in 1937 Warsaw, recuperates moments of grace inspired by the faith that life could be shaped anew in one's imagination with the passion, love, and the irreverent fantasy of an age before cynicism and nihilism.
Ocean Vuong, a queer Vietnamese-American author, sometimes writes poems, stories, letters addressed to a fictional mother - standing in for his real mother, who couldn't read. His best known book so far, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, came out in New York, in 2019. It is a tale of love, abuse, growing up, discovering oneself among differences and commonalities with unlikely bedfellows. “In a previous draft of this letter, one I’ve since deleted, I told you how I came to be a writer. How I, the first in our family to go to college, squandered it on a degree in English. (...) But none of that matters now. What matters is that all of it, even if I didn’t know it then, brought me here, to this page, to tell you everything you’ll never know”
Roots Salon #4 is a field trip devoted to works of art, writing or creative thought that take a confessional tone. Shunned memories, mumbled confessions, things that are easier done than said. Speaking, singing, dancing to themselves about events that escaped the logical chronology of their lives - like Schulz - or to fictional interlocutors inspired by real-life people who have shaped them in complex ways - like Vuong, the authors and artists we will bring along on our field trip will reveal something of their own personal experience of a world, a place, a feeling in direct language. These artists defy the conventions of chronology, and the orthodoxies of narrative discourse in favor of a speculative search for a better, more meaningful way to connect and relate to the world. In an age of verbosity, posturing and self-assured fake expertise, we rediscover the meaning of confession and direct address, and the possibilities to write, sing, paint, remix our lives and lay our hearts on a table, in first and second person. Personal memories, stories, anecdotes, artifacts, motions, gestures, tokens are welcome.