PLANTSTOCK, the Philosophical Research Society’s first festival, sprouts to life with an opening night celebration featuring PRS contributing artists, close friends, and collaborators. Co-presented by 2024 contributing performance group Living Earth (that’s us!),
Join us for ecopoetry from Mandy Kahn, an illumination of María Sabina’s sacred mushroom chants from scholar Sandra Del Castillo, a plant based music installation, a native plant pop up from Plant Material and conservation group No Canyon Hills, and an enveloping live score from the Soft Future ensemble set to multidisciplinary artist Lani Trock’s immersive, audio-visual installation earthdance!
Please note: This event is part of PRS’s Plantstock festival, taking place 4/19 – 4/21. You can purchase a festival pass here, which also includes a ticket for this evening.
Lani Trock is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers in harmonious world building. In communion with her site-specific, immersive installations, she facilitates group expressions of improvisational sound and movement techniques. Through these public programs, she invites participants to co-create the new earth – an alternative cultural paradigm that seeks to shift away from a capitalist logic of scarcity, commodification, and competition, towards equitable abundance, collaboration, and mutual benefit.
Mandy Kahn is the author of three poetry collections. She has given readings at Cambridge University, the Getty Museum, MOCA, and the Barrick Museum, has been profiled in the magazines Flaunt, Issue and Malibu, and has been interviewed by The Los Angeles Review of Books. She’s also the subject of Courtney Sell’s feature-length documentary Peace Piece: The Immersive Poems of Mandy Kahn. She is a Contributing Writer at the Philosophical Research Society for 2024.
Sandra del Castillo, PhD is a Jungian scholar and ritual artist. She is of Mexican indigenous descent, and lived in Mexico with her children for 15 years. Specializing in Mesoamerican studies, Sandra lectures and teaches adjunct at Pacifica Graduate Institute and PRS; she facilitates ritual, women's rites of passage, mentors, and leads workshops in ritual art, and imagining a new world into being. She is a Contributing Lecturer at the Philosophical Research Society for 2024.