This week educator, community organizer, public health researcher and artist Robert Sember will facilitate the weeklong online workshop ‘The Interregnum: Making this Moment Count’ within the context of the Community Engagement II aspect of the program.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” – Antonio Gramsci

We are in a time of crisis when the habits of ordinary life are either suspended or shadowed with uncertainty. In ancient Greek, the word krisis names the point in an illness when a patient either begins to recover or their condition worsens. It is a wait-and-see time: we wait for a fever to break, breathing to ease, pain to subside. Krisis ends when we are able to answer the question: Are we moving closer to life or closer to death? Until then, we live a paradox: we must act urgently and we must be patient.

We come together to compare experiences, deepen our understanding, and create ways to be together differently. We strive to end habits of destruction—over- consumption, over-extraction, hyper-individualism, fracturing rather than unifying, war rather than justice—and cultivate habits of life—inter-dependence, take just-enough, celebrate difference, and prepare constitutions for life, all life, rather than profit.

• The workshop is divided into four sessions:⁣
  Session I. Place | Gathering ⁣
  Session II. Inquire | Resist⁣
  Session III. Trauma | Recovery ⁣
  Session IV. Hope | Love⁣

During the workshop the participants will read and make together and sketch out frameworks for understanding and imagining in this time of trauma, resistance, and hope. Our task is to connect to rather than avoid the possibilities of crisis.

Robert Sember works at the intersection of art, public health, and social justice. He is a member of the sound art collective, Ultra-red, which contributes to political organizing initiatives in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Berlin. In New York, Robert works with the Black and Latino LGBTQ community on a political education and political organizing project rooted in the principles of popular education. Robert teaches interdisciplinary art at Eugene Lang College, The New School in New York City where is also on the faculty of the Lang College’s Prison Education Initiative, which offers college courses in a federal detention center in New York City. Robert is a Senior Associate with C4 Innovations in Boston, USA, where he works on addiction and mental health recovery research and education initiatives and is co-chair of the 400 Years of Inequality initiative’s organizing committee, which supported national observances in 2019 of the 400th anniversary of arrival of the first African in North America to be sold into bondage. From 2009-2001 Robert was a fellow with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and is currently a teaching artist with Artist Space working with middle school students in New York City public schools on sound-based investigations of local history. He has held teaching posts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, the University of Amsterdam’s Summer Institute for Sexuality, Culture, and Society, the Department of World Arts and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Department of Theater, Ohio University, and the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He is the recipient of the New School’s Distinguished Teaching and Social Justice Teaching awards.