Worm School
Worm School is an artist collective and reading group. Worms currently writhing in the compost pile are Ako Castuera, Ako Ibekwe, Iso Marcus, Rosie Brand, and Zena Segre.
Our project began in 2021 by holding conversations, composting media that reflected an interest in craft practices, alternate futures, and reimagined pasts. Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble was a formative text for worm school, helping shape our practice as ‘earthworm symbionts’.
Our process is relational, iterative, and cyclical as we turn and crawl through the hot compost of this thick present. In our public offerings, we hope to provide space for the small and crafty worms, those who have been muddling away in the dark, wondering how to fertilize the future. Embracing Donna Haraway’s claim ‘thinking is a materialist practice with other thinkers’. We facilitate reading discussions alongside material exercises for thinking hands.
Research texts we have worked with include: Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Anna Tsing’s Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, Byung Chul Han’s Disappearance of Rituals, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and more.
The Infinite Worm
The Infinite Worm: Worm School in collaboration with The Infinite School.
Julia Haft Candell invited Worm School to present our discussion framework at ‘The Infinite Library’ at Pitzer College Art Galleries in Fall 2023. ‘The Infinite Worm’ was the resulting collaborative happening, a spacious, lively enactment that brought first year students into process and play with artists from Los Angeles’ diverse clay community.
The Infinite Worm project appeared again at The Infinite School in Los Angeles during spring and summer 2024. Worm School facilitated a multi-part series of online and in person reading discussions with material excercises, including string figure games, net-bag knotting and clay node making.
Still Possible
Group Exhibition at Prism Art Space, Sacremento, April 2026, Curated by Iso Marcus.
The group exhibition Still Possible centered on the question: As things fall apart, what can we repair? What do we let disintegrate and re-compost? The idea of repair here is not about returning to an idealized past, but about partial-recuperation (Donna Haraway). How do we tend to what remains and imagine what could still emerge?
Worm School’s contribution ‘String Figure: Noded’ was a collaborative sculpture depicting a transitional point in the popular ‘Cat’s Cradle’ string figure game.
String figures represent a model of collective thinking and storytelling that is in a constant state of transformation and change.
Worm School’s noded network traced the conversations and exchanges between members of the collective, drawing from Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble, a formative text shaping their practice as ‘earthworm symbionts’
Past discussion participants contributed small sculptural nodes which add points of complication, connection, and 'trouble' along our shared fibrous loop.
The reading nook featured research texts from worm school’s library, and a compost-dyed worm, the viewer was invited to sit and digest with worm school.