What is New York City without its beloved — and reviled — creatures? In CREATURES, we attend to the lives of rats, pigeons, and cockroaches. This three-session seminar invites participants to reconsider their relationship with NYC urban wildlife through embodied attention practices of disgust, emulation, and fascination. 

Disgust is a trained emotion that we learn at a young age from teachers of social culture & morality: mothers, schooling, religion. Evolutionarily, disgust serves the function of distancing us from disease vectors such as feces, rot, vomit. But what happens when disgust responses outgrow their evolutionary function? Social disgust becomes an abstracted, embodied moral judgment towards the “other”: that which is rejected, outcast, disgusting, repulsive. 

Attending to our experience of discomfort can help us transform disgust into fascination.  

If we want to move towards kinship with the more-than-human — even vermin — how might we examine ways in which disgust walls us from curiosity, connection, and understanding? Participants will attend to the secret lives of NYC creatures through full-body practices, field observations, and reading discussions. Each session focuses on the cultural history and ecological role of different local vermin: rats, pigeons, and cockroaches.

Led by Olivia Tai and Kyle Barnes of the Chimera Collective, a community dedicated to interspecies gatherings.