This is the 1st event in a two-day programming series of short, interdisciplinary research talks and participatory workshops at Exposed Arts Projects, entitled 'ONE FOLD, TWO FOLD, TEN FOLD, MANIFOLD.'

Artist Gina DeCagna initiates a pop-up series of lectures and workshops centred around notions of the ‘manifold’ through conversations with researchers around her. She will open with a talk on her own recent artistic explorations exposing the most ubiquitous discarded material around us — cardboard — through arrangements into installations. She creates these assemblages as symbolic means to arouse social questions around empowerment and inequality. She will lead attendees through a variety of creative prompts and hands-on activities, contemplating the roles of subjectivity within larger societal systems. Free and open to all!

About the artist:

Gina DeCagna is a MFA candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her public-facing interventionist installations have shown in solo and group exhibitions in London, New York, Philadelphia, and forthcoming Venice. She has been a Venice Fellow under the British Council (2019), Arts Engagement Fellow of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) and Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania (2017–2018), and a Steering Committee Member of the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium (PASC) (2017–2018). She earned her BA in English, Creative Writing and Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was founder and editor of Symbiosis (2012–2016), a project and publication of collaborating contemporary artists and writers.

About the programming series:

'ONE FOLD, TWO FOLD, TEN FOLD, MANIFOLD' is a series of interdisciplinary research talks and participatory workshops instigated by American artist Gina DeCagna.

To paraphrase the late-nineteenth-century British writer John Huntley Skrine, one way to define a ‘manifold’ is as a chosen abstraction that gathers into focus qualities of human duty, experience, and hope. However, the term has varied meanings across context and research discipline. An artist convenes with a mathematician, a poet, and the public to consider varied meanings of the ‘manifold’ and to understand how our internal values and external objectivities intertwine.

Through her interventionist installations of discarded cardboard, American artist Gina DeCagna employs a material and symbolic sensibility of ‘manifolds’ in building improvised organic architectures that resemble geographical strata, tree rings, and plant foliage from discarded cardboard to speculate on the forms and structures of globalised society. While in Baroque times, fabric folds were depicted to speak to a spiritual understanding of the soul, DeCagna seeks to represent the folding collapse of late capitalism, mixing indeterminacy with strength.

She brings into her orbit the topologist Dr Mehdi Yazdi, who finds similar visual inspiration to propel his mathematical intuition around questions of manifolds and foliations — research questions that ultimately could lead us to mathematically understand more structures and systems that underpin the world, including, potentially, that of the Internet and even DNA. Poet and scholar Dr Orchid Tierney brings the metaphorical world of language into researching the representations of waste and its management, most recently completing a poetic work on ocean plastic. Finally, we will critically convene these different disciplinary approaches through philosophy, starting with Kant’s ‘manifold of sense’, that of bringing particularities together through a synthetic process of understanding.

To learn more, visit www.exposedartsprojects.com.