Taking Root Among the Stars

Co-curator and reading group facilitator W139 Amsterdam & Buro Stedelijk | 2024 – 2025

"The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars." — Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

July 20, 2024 is the date Octavia E. Butler's 1993 novel Parable of the Sower begins — a world society has broken down, ravaged by ecological collapse. That date was always fictional. Then suddenly it wasn't.

Taking Root Among the Stars was a two-year collaborative project at W139 Amsterdam initiated by artists Müge Yılmaz and Anna Hoetjes, bringing together artists and writers who use feminist science fiction as a tool for speculative worldbuilding — to critique the present and write themselves into the futures they want to see. I was invited to co-shape the public programme from the very beginning.

Gathering Earthseed — the opening symposium

July 20, 2024

The project launched on the day itself — the day Butler's fictional future became the present. Gathering Earthseed was a full-day symposium at W139: panels, workshops, ritual, and a collective dinner.

I co-curated the afternoon workshop programme, titled Seeds of Survival: Practices of Radical Imagination. Taking Lauren Olamina's survival strategies of interdependence and speculation as the frame, I invited four practitioners to facilitate parallel workshops — each engaging with strategies for collective survival through their own discipline.

James Parnell led a workshop on uncovering personal values through eulogy writing. Camille Sapara Barton held space for grief tending and somatic practice. Chimira Natanna Obiefule ran a writing workshop using personal history as a mirror into the present. Fazle Shairmahomed offered a ritual workshop rooted in ancestral practice, meditation, and decolonizing movement.

I held the container for all of it — centering radical imagination as methodology for Black liberation, knowing we must practice today for the tomorrow we want to see.

→ Full programme

Goddess Change — a year of reading groups

March 2024 – November 2025, Buro Stedelijk

Alongside the exhibition, I co-developed a monthly speculative fiction reading group called Goddess Change, held at Buro Stedelijk. The series ran for over a year, with a rotating cast of artists, writers, and scholars leading each session through Parable of the Sower and other feminist science fiction texts.

I facilitated the first gathering in March 2024 — opening the series, setting its tone, and holding the first room of readers into the questions the year would circle.

I facilitated the last gathering in November 2025 — closing the loop.

The final session was a zine-making workshop. We used speculation and personal archive as raw material, collaging our way toward questions the year had left open.

→ First gathering · Last gathering