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Join us for the book launch and discussion of The Lichen Museum, with author A. Laurie Palmer.

As a conceptual frame to slow and redirect attention, the Lichen Museum invites you to zero in on inhabitants of slowed, horizontal, colorful and complex worlds while imagining radical possibilities for human being and relating. As an introduction to the Lichen Museum, this walk invites participants to bend down and look closely at inhabitants of the planet who are already doing things differently as part of the process of imagining alternate futures for the rest of us.

This program is the first in a series for the new Eco-Social Salon, Site-Seeing, and Screening Series.

Eco-Social (aka Eco-Social Salon, Site-Seeing & Screening Series) is an event series and learning community that will convene seasonally in Philadelphia throughout 2023 where ecologically-themed artwork is presented and excursions taken. ESSSSSS is a response to an increased interest in infrastructural and bioregional practices that can visualize and embody the territorial scale of both problems and solutions related to the climate crisis.

Learn more here: https://ecosocialseries.wordpress.com/

About the Book:
A radical proposal for how a tiny organism can transform our understanding of human relations
The Lichen Museum explores how the physiological characteristics of lichens provide a valuable template for reimagining human relations in an age of ecological and social precarity. Using this tiny organism as an emblem through which to navigate environmental and social concerns, Palmer implores us to envision alternative ways of living based on interdependence rather than individualism and competition.

About the Author:
A. Laurie Palmer is an artist and writer, and co-director of Graduate Studies for the Environmental Art and Social Practice (EASP) MFA program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her place-based, research-oriented artworks take form as sculpture, public projects, and artist books, and she collaborates on strategic actions in the contexts of social and environmental justice. Her current book, The Lichen Museum, just published by the University of Minnesota Press in February 2023, explores lichen's role as an anti-capitalist companion and climate change survivor.