Culture Mill acknowledges that the land now known as Saxapahaw rests on the village sites of the Sissapahaw, Eno, Shakori and the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation whom, along with other tribes, made their homes along the Haw River in what is now known as Alamance County.
We recognize the Native communities in our region today and extend our deepest gratitude to those who have stewarded this land, and offer our respect to their elders, past, present, and future.
Process with Okwui Okpokwasili - November 2020
Photo by Anna Maynard
Dear Friends and Supporters,
Here's to the light starting to return, and to a new year with new beginnings!
We wanted to write you and let you know a little bit about what's been going on in the Culture Mill Lab recently, as well as to give you the news about Culture Mill co-director Murielle Elizéon's new collaboration with the Dispute Settlement Center. Read on for all the details.
Hoping this finds you well!
with love,
the Culture Mill Team
What's been happening at the CM LAB?
Traditionally, the Culture Mill Lab has served as an important place for gathering in our role as a community-focused Arts Laboratory. In the current season we have had to refrain from holding gatherings in our physical space due to COVID-19. Yet the Culture Mill Lab still serves a vital function. The lab currently operates as an office, a staging ground for our virtual programming, and most recently (as a part of our Open Space Policy) as a location for artists to dream. Starting at the end of 2020 we began inviting artists associated with Culture Mill to occupy the space for solo creative time. Stemming from a firm belief in the necessity of space and time without any demands of productivity, we asked the artists to simply show up and be open to whatever happened.
Leah Wilks joined us in November, Rook Grubbs and CJ Suitt in December, and Anna Maynard at the beginning of January. All of these artists are multi-disciplinary in their approaches, and all of them prioritize embodied research as a part of their practices. We'd love for you to get to know them a little bit better, and to share some of their words with you about what having this kind of open space and time meant to them:
"Inviting in the dance guides - those still present, those in the act of transitioning beyond, and those whose teachings are left as legacies in my body became my main practice in the Lab. My time looked (and sounded) like so many things - rumbling/walking/wailing/collecting/finding the light/loving the dark...
this is always the point in the process where I don’t feel like I’m making anything, and then years later I’ll begin to understand how this is actually where it all started."
- Leah
"I spent my time at the lab improvising on the gorgeous, buttery baby grand piano, playing/recording guitar + vocals, staring, reading poetry, and walking a small square. That last exercise was something I did often as a child to relieve anxiety. Balancing around the four beams of our sandbox and counting to 1,000. I had no agenda as I returned to that practice, but I was struck by how difficult it was. How often I had to adjust my pace, walk differently, or pause for extended periods of time. It felt like a metaphor for quarantine. How have you had to adjust yr movements as yr world shrank?
I was especially thankful to have several days at the lab to spread my heart and wings. I was able to really immerse myself in fragments I had collected over the year. To grieve and release uninterrupted - the river just outside the door cheering me on. "
- Rook
"Having process centered creation space is so liberating as an artist whose work reaches to define what it means to move through. So great to be in community and continue to collaborate with Culture Mill through workshops, screenings and performance events over the past 6 years."
- CJ
"My time at the Lab allowed me a soft re-entering into my big dancing body as well as my own in-studio creative study of light and image. A happy memory from my time is playing the whip sharp words of my late teacher Nancy Stark Smith over the loudspeaker. The recording is full of her little antics, thoughts on focus, patterns and pedagogy, the banging pipes of the ContactQuarterly office and the chime of my dad’s wind up clock in the background. While I listened, I engaged in my own explorations of light, character and the nature of focus. I arranged and rearranged a set of simple lights as I re-introduced myself to myself, my camera, my movement and eventually, my own voice.
After many years of quietly following and cheering Tommy, Mu and the Culture Mill on, it was a true privilege to have access to space to practice my craft in this time of massive global happenings."
- Anna
Murielle begins work with the Dispute Settlement Center!
Culture Mill's co-director Murielle Elizéon has started 2021 with a renewed commitment to share her work around embodiment and somatic practices with the non-arts sectors. She is humbled to collaborate with a stellar team of Restorative Justice specialists on a year-long project orchestrated by the Dispute Settlement Center in Carrboro. More soon around the exciting long term partnerships that Culture Mill is currently developing to weave together artistic process and Restorative Justice practices!
