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.