En Esta Casa (trans. In This House), 2022

En Esta Casa is a communal dreaming and weaving project that culminated in a 7ft x 8ft woven house. Over the course of a month, my friends and I conducted three communal dreaming workshops for families in Hyde Park, Kenwood, and South Shore. In these workshops, we asked participants to identify aspects of their community that they loved and use that as a stepping stone to dream of better conditions, resources, or spaces for themselves. Participants then drew and wrote on canvas strips which were woven to form the walls of the installation. Through these workshops, we provided individuals with a toolset they could apply to generate change in their communities that encouraged them to center their advocacy in joy.

The installation remakes the image of the house into something soft and malleable, a safe space for all. The main goal of our project was for the woven house to act as a centerpiece for conversations about communal dreaming for a better future. We aimed for our workshop to function as a launching pad for individuals to ponder and develop their own communal dreaming processes. While our team’s communal dreaming process manifested as building a creative site of possibility, where we gathered to create and share art, other processes may involve feeding loved ones, exchanging knowledge, and so on. 

This project was generously supported by the Logan Center for the Arts’ Co-Creation Grant.