***Unfortunately, Vivien will be absent from her own ceremony due to concerns related to the increasingly repressive climate of the United States right now. The Tea Ceremony will still be held in the same spirit by Melina Roise, program coordinator of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, and will include a screening of Vivien's most recent film People of Soil, "Ahl Al Thara".

As part of the ongoing exhibition Limbs, Vivien Sansour hosts a tea ceremony at Indexical. Through hot tea and tender spaces, this workshop will take us through a short but profound trip into our own spirits, the spirits of other people, and the seeds that help us weave stories to navigate a world that is in a state of hospice.

This event is free to attend with donations accepted. All ticket sales for this event will go towards The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund.

Vivien Sansour is an artist, researcher, and writer. She uses installations, images, sketches, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to advocate for seed conservation and the protection of agrobiodiversity as a cultural/political act. Vivien founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library in 2014, where she works with farmers in Palestine and around the world to preserve ancestral seeds and biocultural knowledge. Her work as an artist, scholar, and writer has been showcased internationally. Vivien was most recently the Distinguished Artistic Fellow in Experimental Humanities at Bard College.

Melina Roise is the Program Coordinator for the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. Melina currently manages the growing seed library in the United States and the growing network of Seed Protector Project farmers, along with managing production for the Traveling Kitchen and other PHSL events. Coming to PHSL via the Bard Center for Indigenous Studies, Melina has a background in cultural production, environmental and anticolonial education, bioregional herbal medicine, and small-scale organic agriculture.

"Limbs” is a series of gatherings where we can co-create our rituals of regeneration. As destruction of lands, shelter, peoples, hopes and ideals continues under the hands of out of control, self-righteous, weaponized humans, we can grow the ability and imagination to create & perform our rites of healing, instead of entrapping our wounds with trauma and despair.

In the first art making ritual, we invited people from many paths to create clay limbs in honor of the countless bodies we have witnessed in pieces over the last year. The second, “Blastema” fired the clay in the earth through a collective ceremony of poetry, song and story. Staged at Indexical, the third invites you to experience and connect to the charred limbs as portals to parallel realities that are inexorably intertwined with our own, with the burning possibilities in our hearts. The exhibition includes workshops, performances and an installation of the Limbs sculptures. 

For the duration of this exhibition, all related artwork sales and ticket sales will pass through Indexical toward supporting reconstructive limb surgery and grass roots relief initiatives responding to the humanitarian and shelter disaster in Gaza and Lebanon via the The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund. Use the link here if you’d like to support this initiative directly.