Living Library

Title of the book: Art + Information + Conversation = Social Impact

Ariel uses theater to advance community issues like homelessness, not just talk about them. The issues we care about persist despite all the data on them because data doesn’t move people to action, experiences do. Ariel commissions artists to turn data into entertaining, emotionally engaging plays and pairs them with community conversations over meals and cocktail parties. People leave feeling more connected, knowing and caring more about the issue, and ready to take action. Ariel wants to put artists everywhere to work on their communities’ most pressing needs.

Title of the book: Blue Crab Blues

Kerkennah, Gulf of Gabès, Tunisia… The invasive blue crab is disrupting small-scale fisheries. A symptom of the increasing complexity of migration routes and of the acceleration of environmental changes, its presence draws fishermen, politicians, police officers, economists, and scientists into the controversy—in short, a whole procession of border patrols impossible to map in a sea of metamorphoses. A monitored border zone and a contested resource extraction area, the tunisian island is marked by invisible boundaries that generate strong, albeit underlying, tensions within an island society that is the beneficiary of a rich intangible cultural heritage.

Matthieu Duperrex is philosopher and anthropologist, associate professor at the National School of Architecture of Marseille. Performances, installations, films, photography, multimedia publications, curating ideas, literary narratives… His creations transcend disciplinary boundaries and are always based on field research into anthropized environments and sentinel territories. Granted by the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program, he works on wetland restoration projects in Louisiana.

Title of the book: Orixálidade: Aṣẹ – Ancestrality – Alchemy

Alexis Peskine graduated from Howard University in 2003 winning the first Verizon HBCU Student Art Competition and was the first foreign student to bring a Fulbright at the M.I.C.A where he completed his MFA. His 2007 exhibition at MOCADA was written up in the New York Times. He exhibited in the 2010 Black Arts World Festival, and at Dakar’t Biennale 2016 leading to a solo show at the French Institute in Senegal. Peskine has participated in residencies, biennales, art fairs and exhibitions in Angola, Brazil, Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, Guadeloupe, Italy, Jamaica, Morocco, Senegal and the U.S.A.