Desire Trails Program @ Headlands Center for the Arts
As program manager at Headlands Center for the Arts between 2012 and 2016, I developed public program series models, curated and implemented programs, and developed discrete events. Desire Trails was a program series in which several artists led concurrent hikes throughout the Marin Headlands framed by a concept, place history, or embodied practice with the goal of facilitating an encounter with the place anew for participants. Desire Trails was a past program at Headlands originally envisioned by Brian Karl that I revamped and curated from 2015 through my departure in 2016, organizing three iterations.
Curatorial Statement:
Although primarily concerned with our propensity to restlessness and the always seeking more that a road facilitates, Rebecca Solnit in her essay “Timelines,” from the first Headlands Journal, offers many salient points on that passageway’s mediating qualities, and they are in many ways just as applicable to trails. Solnit offers roads as apt metaphors for time, “for future becoming present and then past.” She writes that they “are less places than promises.” They take us where we want to go.
And this seduction to visit other places, to visit other times, brings us to the heart of the Desire Trails program. Unlike sanctioned trails with their clear promises of destinations known or imaginable, desire trails are the paths we lay ourselves by walking them. They are manifestations in the present and imprinted evidence for the future of a different path taken. To quote Solnit one last time: “Roads render permanent someone else’s notion of negotiating territory, and to follow a road is to accept an interpretation.” Desire Trails invites you to blaze a new trail of thought, and to encounter this place anew.
Desire Trails:
Artist-led hikes to re-frame the experience of place followed by a meal
Fall 2016: hikes led by artists Samson Kambalu, Jenny Sharaf, Stairwell’s (Carey Lin & Sarah Hotchkiss), and Ewa Weslowska, and poet Hazel White (Sept 25, 2016)
Fall 2015: hikes led by poet CAConrad, artists John Chiara, Patricia Ferdández, Sanaz Mazinani, and Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, forager Mia Andler, and perfumer Hall Newbegin (Sept 27, 2015)
Spring 2015: hikes led by artists Miguel Arzabe, Sofía Córdova, David Janesko, and J. John Priola, historian Elaine Elinson, novelist Tupelo Hassman, ethnobotanist Deepa Preeti Natarajan, and planner Egon Terplan (Mar 8, 2015)
