SHAPESHIFTERS: 
making a Post-natural Bestiary

The workshop was held on the 22nd of April at RADIUS as part of the exhibition THE MEASURE OF THE WORLD. Participants will undergo a journey of hybridity, which collectively will create a postnatura bestiary that, similarly to the exhibition, redefines notions and gestures of measurement. A bestiary is a compendium of beasts. Birthing in the ancient worlds, bestiaries were popularized in the Middle Ages as illustrated volumes that described, in detail, various animals, hybrids, and even rocks. Beasts are creatures that are more than one thing, more than one body, and therefore reveal nuances and questions about the world. The postnatural is a condition by which there is no divide between nature and culture; a condition through which the natural is redefined and redistributed to fit many worlds.

The workshop will explore the
monstrous, the un-natural, the disrupted subject, the perverse, and the nomadic, and through this, intuitively redefine scientific conditions, and the western systems that navigate the natural worlds. Measurement of time and space provided a situated understanding of the world, however through western science, the primary source of measurement was the human body. The premise of this workshop is: through the creation of alternative bodies, creatures, beasts and hybrids, an alternative form of measuring time and space will be formulated. 

This alternative form of measurement instantaneously births multiple, nonlinear understandings and beings within the world.

Participants will move through being shapeshifters, to playfully creating exquisite corpses, then getting hands-on with notions of dis(organ)ization, and, finally, measuring new worlds and the worlds in-between. This workshop is a non-judgemental space where we encourage play, creativity, exploration and transformation.