Living Things
Writing About Active Matter
How might we look at the objects of our everyday lives with a deeper understanding, even empathy? What are our responsibilities as interpreters? What tools can we use to make objects come alive with the written word?
Bard Graduate Center’s 2022 Lab for Teen Thinkers invites you to see objects as active matter, to consider how objects move, speak, and wield power. This Teen Thinkers exhibition places a personal object in conversation with an object from BGC’s Study Collection. Both objects have been at the center of lively discussions that have fed the Teen Thinkers’ writing. Their activations prompt us to perceive each object with greater clarity–and to embrace, challenge, and question our relationships with objects from multiple points of view.
The Bard Graduate Center’s Summer 2022 Lab for Teen Thinkers program treated writing and research as a practice unto itself. Program participants conducted object based writing that culminated in oral presentations and an exhibition at BGC. Teen Thinkers were encouraged to experiment, iterate, rethink, and present their ideas via various methods and communication strategies. They wrote about objects as “active matter” through different modes, including description, analysis, and creative writing. An important aspect of the program, as with the writing process itself, was individual and collective editing and revision. Teen Thinkers shared their research and writing with the larger academic community at BGC, influencing how others might approach, learn, and think about decorative arts, design history and material culture.
The 2022 Teen Thinkers
April Carlioz
Skyler Chouloute
Aisha Gueye
Lisandra Laundry
Arjun Prasse
Led by Rachael Schwabe
Special thanks to Shae Campbell, Hadley Jensen, Aaron Glass, Kate Sekules, Helen Polson, Laia, Andrew Kircher, Laura Minsky, Barb Elam, Nadia Rivers, Jen Ha, Soon Kai Poh, Kamau Ware, mary adeogun, Drew Thompson, Anna Helgeson, and Chandler Small.