American Anthropology Association Annual Meeting 2025

I’ll be sharing new work - an immersive film-lecture utilizing 360-degree footage and virtual, historical reconstruction of Collect Pond in Lower Manhattan - at the American Anthropology Association Annual Meeting 2025, New Orleans as part of the American Waters Roundtable. Come find our panel on Saturday if you’ll be attending.

2024 UCLA Climate Justice Forum

I’m honored to be joining the 2024 Climate Justice Forum, for an evening reception and speaker panel.

Tickets are available here

The night will start off with an opening reception filled with live music, food from Bé Ù, and mocktails. After grabbing some bites, the event will feature a panel between Aishah Abdala, Ayasha Guerin, Royal Ramey, and Emiliano Lopez.

Abolition ecology is a framework that seeks to challenge and transform the existing social and ecological systems that perpetuate exploitation, oppression, and environmental degradation. It combines principles of environmental justice, social justice, and decolonization with an explicit focus on dismantling systems of power and control that perpetuate ecological harm. The ultimate goal of abolition ecology is to liberate people and the places where they live, work, learn, pray and play. The term "abolition" in abolition ecology refers to the notion of abolitionist movements that have historically sought to dismantle oppressive systems, such as slavery and the prison-industrial complex. In the context of ecology, it calls for the abolition of ecologically destructive practices, such as industrial agriculture, extractive industries, and the exploitation of natural resources for profit. It also calls for the abolition of oppressive social structures and hierarchies that perpetuate environmental injustices.

The Climate Change, Decolonization and Global Blackness Lab at Duke University

Durham, N.C. — Please join me on Nov 9th at at the Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Lab (CCDGB) at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute (Duke University) for a new research presentation, “Shoreline Lessons for Relational Repair.”

This presentation will bring together research from Dr. Guerin's socio-ecological, curatorial, and artistic practices to share the theoretical interventions they are making around questions of cultural memory, value, the future of environmental change and relational repair. It is part of the CCDGB 2023-24 speaker series. CCDGB is part of The Entanglement Project, an FHI initiative focused on the intersections of race, health, and climate. Most talks are hybrid: - In-person registration (w/ COVID safety info): https://duke.is/yc4gm - Zoom registration: https://duke.is/c/tjhj

Liberated Planet Studio is Spreading Seeds

This first edition of 6, “Remembrane: Seed Scores for Collective Growing” zines are printed and bound, ready to share with others.

The text was written by Liberated Planet Studio artists (Hannah Holtzclaw, Reed Jackson, Azul Duque, Ayasha Guerin) this Spring, in collaboration with Christina Battle’s seeds with design + layout by Ulrike Zoellner. The first edition zines are spread, but the second edition will print this summer. So, if you’d like to be a part of this beautiful experiment, begin a zine, add your own words and pass it on, DM @liberatedplanetstudio or email liberatedplanetstudio@gmail.com.

Earth Day: An Evening with Kayah George, Ayasha Guerin, Sandra Semchuk and Gudrun Lock

Vancouver - Xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Səl̓ilwətaɁɬ, and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh unceded territory - Friday, 21 April at 5 pm

Join artist/scholars Kayah George, Ayasha Guerin, Sandra Semchuk and Gudrun Lock for a program designed to bring participants into relationship to the wider than human.

As an Indigenous environmental leader, activist and filmmaker, Kayah George has been on the frontlines fighting against the Trans Mountain pipeline for more than half of her life.  She will speak about the meaning of her new film project which explores the intrinsic connection the Tsleil-Waututh people have to the “Burrard” Inlet, and the impact campaign to come.  Artist, curator and assistant professor of Black Diaspora studies, Ayasha Guerin, will share work from Liberated Planet Studio, her recent workshop series for artists and activists interested in ecological and movement research at the intersections of social and environmental justice. LPS fosters dialogue about colonialism and climate change while facilitating a local need for artists’ access to affordable studio space in Vancouver. Through her photographic, text and video works, Sandra Semchuk asks the question: what leads towards deeper recognitions across generations, cultures and species? Her work focuses on relationships between herself, her family and her community; her collaborations with the late Rock Cree writer and orator, James Nicholas, aimed to disrupt myths that shaped settler relations to First Nations. Gudrun Lock works with performance, sculpture, video, painting and collaborative, socially engaged art practices, and knows that trees, rocks and rivers are part of a living metabolism whose transformative powers endure even amidst ongoing extraction, colonialisms and unsatiated consumption.

Artists in the Anthropocene is a partnership between the Belkin and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. Listening to Lhq’a:lets / Vancouver is part of a week-long artist residency organized with The Score: Performing, Listening and Decolonization UBC Research Excellence Cluster, in partnership with the UBC School of Music and Evergreen.

Liberated Planet Studio Program Online, offering free workshops every Saturday

Vancouver - Xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Səl̓ilwətaɁɬ, and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh unceded territory - Ayasha has launched a studio project, LIBERATED PLANET STUDIO (LPS) Where they are curating and facilitating 14 weeks of programming. Thirteen local and visiting artists, activists and academics will lead workshops and a closing party from 4:15 - 6pm on Saturdays from Jan 21- April 15, 2023. The project’s many collaborators will come together to experiment with socio-ecological concepts and collective movement practices. The LIBERATED PLANET STUDIO seeks to mobilize discourse about the intersections of environmental and social exploitation, human and animal experience and intercultural planetary struggles for liberation from the extractive logics of colonial capitalism.

Registration is possible on LiberatedPlanetStudio.com

DanceLab Artist-in-residence 2022-2023

Vancouver - Xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Səl̓ilwətaɁɬ, and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh unceded territory - Ayasha Guerin will be a DanceLab artist for the Dance Centre’s 2022-2023 season. DanceLab provides up to 40 hours of fully-subsidized studio space at Scotiabank Dance Centre to enable artists to research how cross-art form collaboration can enhance their artistic growth and the development of new work.

Unmoored, Adrift, Ashore Symposium

May 19 – May 21, 2022

Vancouver - Xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Səl̓ilwətaɁɬ, and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh unceded territory

Registration here: https://orgallery.org/events/unmoored-adrift-ashore/

Convened by: Denise Ryner (Or Gallery), Jamie Hilder (ECU), Jordan Wilson (NYU) and Anselm Franke (HKW)

Participants: Charmaine Chua, Ayasha Guerin, Morgan Guerin, Ayesha Hameed, Georgina Hill, Jane Jin Kaisen, Laiwan, Geoff Mann, Renisa Mawani, Katherine McKittrick, Karamia Müller, Marianne Nicolson, M. NourbeSe Philip, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Quito Swan, Thea Quiray Tagle, Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson, Lilian Yamamoto

Unmoored, Adrift, Ashore

The warming climate brings an increasing sea-level rise that will redraw the interface between land and sea, the city and its shore. What is now known as the Greater Vancouver area, located on the Salish Sea, is one of the multitude of global coastal cities threatened by large areas of submersion when False Creek and the Fraser River break their banks. The City of Vancouver began a study of the impacts of this imminent event on the city’s coastline after the Provincial government advised municipalities to plan for a 2 metre sea level rise by 2200. Even by 2100, the City’s projections will see parts of Emily Carr University of Art and Design, the site of this symposium, be reclaimed as a floodplain and susceptible to partial submergence. Unmoored, Adrift, Ashore aims to prepare us for the kinds of visioning we will require to increasingly adapt to a new and intensified relationship with water, and to think about how we can use the transformation of the ocean’s reach to reconsider our relationships to property, futures, economies, and each other.

This reclamation through water opens many possibilities for unsettling and shifting much of the legacy of Vancouver and the Northwest Coast region as a settler-colonial space, founded on unceded Indigenous territories. It allows for the possibility of expanding outside of the present time and local context, to think of the future sea-level rise beyond catastrophic terms and to imagine the potential of the rising water as revealing and restoring the presences and relations lost, or almost lost, to colonial forms of dispossession.

The symposium will include a series of examinations emerging from Indigenous and post-colonial thought that offer conceptions of water as a central component for decolonizing and disrupting conventional understandings of identity, borders, ownership and other forms of relations that stretch beyond territorial and commodity logics. These investigations include artistic and poetic imaginaries in the focus on Pacific regions, building on   the renewed emphasis on transregional Oceanic studies to address the urgencies of our shifting ecological context.

Panel #3: The Decentering Machine

How do expanses of water, floods and reclaimed shorelines un-make fixed identities, challenge or redefine sovereignty and decolonize the map? A discussion of the oceanic as a decentering force represented in contemporary and community art practice.