PRESENTATION :: the::sense::archive is a pursuit

On April 25, 2025, MONICA HUERTA & AVA SHIRAZI, founders of the::sense::archive, were invited to present at the American Studies Forum at Wesleyan College.

Here is an excerpt::

“…the::sense::archive began and continues as a collaboration between us, that, for now, is an arts community and curatorial experiment that hosts artist residencies, curates programming, and produces site specific installations through long term relationships with makers of all kinds. Our vision includes artist-scholar colliders, activations, and generators, maker’s space events, on-site labs and experiments in thinking.

The long term aim of the::sense::archive is to use these more open, intellectually undisciplined spaces to collectively theorize with artists, participants, and with all our morphing sensoria. We aim to collaborate with one another freed from logic-driven impulses to “make sense” of or “extract meaning” from art or making. We’ve been talking about our workshops as spaces “where morphing sensoria take the lead,” to foreground that we’re pausing the scholarly habit of working from the isolated cognitive, in favor of dropping down into bodies, bones, muscles, vascular organs, and sensory neurons held together by skin. …”