KIN: Earthseed, Memory and Mancala

In response to the crisis our communities are facing in Crown Heights, Field Meridians’s Fall Nature School is offering programs that support the creation of tools for ecological and social resilience and restoration. We will be grounding our artist facilitated workshops and activities in Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 speculative fiction, Parable of the Sower, continuing our year-long dialogue with this transformative text. In it, the protagonist Lauren Olamina begins to craft a book of tenets that organizes a religion she dubs Earthseed against and through a time of environmental catastrophe, societal collapse and great violence.

Using the Kinfolk monument to Octavia Butler as a starting point, we’ll be discussing the importance of seeds—seed saving, planting, and harvesting—in the text. Participants will then "sow and harvest" with a round of mancala, the oldest board game in the world, before gathering a few seeds to plant in your own garden this spring.

What's Included:

• Mancala Sets
• Community Seed Library

About Kinfolk Tech

Kinfolk Tech is a nonprofit using immersive technology, public art, and community-led design to help displaced and excluded communities tell their own stories—and shape their own legacies.

We believe every community deserves the tools to preserve its past and imagine its future. Through co-creation and cutting-edge storytelling, we transform memory into a force for justice, belonging, and possibility.

This program is part of KIN: A Kinfolk Tech Festival of Memory and Imagination, opening Friday October 10 and running until Sunday to November 2. Kinfolk Tech will transform the WSA building in Downtown Manhattan into an immersive, living archive—a constellation of portals into collective memory and imagination.

Also check out other Arts events in New York, Festivals in New York, Workshops in New York.