Woolgatherer's Collective 2020-21

Susanne Cockrell, Rebekah Edwards, Angela Hennessy, and Deborah Valoma

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The Woolgatherers Collective formed online as an experiential research matrix to explore our interest in liminal and threshold zones, the intersections of dreaming, death, and grief work during the pandemic. We were colleagues at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, working across media and disciplines. We met regularly during lockdown to commune, digest the pandemic's shifting social dynamics and ruptures, and build support as we transitioned to remote/online teaching mid-semester. 

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In July 2021, I facilitated our participation at the International Walking Encounters/Conference: Walking as a Question? in Prespa, Greece. We designed a remote walking performance called WOOLGATHERING along the water’s edge across the globe, synchronized across time zones, to investigate walking as a collective dreaming space. Walkers were invited to record their unedited stream of thoughts via images, audio, or text, which will be posted on a project website. We met to share experiences on Zoom afterward to discover what, if any, alignment of experience that emerges without verbal communication between walkers. 

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We were curious how a night dream is more than individual psychic data. Do dreams speak to each other? What’s possible in sharing dreams/daydreaming in a social space? Is the dream a social form to bring new knowledge to light? How is walking a somatic immersive dreaming process?

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​from our Walking Encounters PROPOSAL:

The walking body is a falling forward body, a catching body, a transitioning body, a questioning body. A walking body dreams. As in dance, prolonged repetitive movement can hold the body in a transitional state at the edge of consciousness, in a hypnagogic-like state of lucid questioning, insights, and enhanced creativity. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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