Master Class BECOMING PLANT: The New Weird Divine by Jasmine Reimer

Description

“Becoming Plant: The New Weird Divine” is a 5-day intensive program held in a studio environment hosted by the BERLIN ART INSTITUTE  from June 29 – July 03, 2026. The masterclass focuses on experimental drawing methods, writing, journaling, and sketchbook exercises applicable to drawing, writing, research, curatorial, collaborative, and other art practices. In this masterclass we will learn about historical and contemporary feminist mythologies, the role of the hybrid and monster as cultural symbols/models, divine feminist symbols and narratives of transformation, in addition to discovering new drawing techniques, and journaling/sketchbook processes.

The curriculum is based on feminist understandings of transformation, the hybrid body, and the monster as they relate to the weird, eerie, and divine. As concepts, the hybrid and the monster are symbols of resistance – in contrast to our modern ideas of perfection, they exist in a constant state of in-becoming, never finite or complete. As symbols of transformation and change, the hybrid and the monster exhibit relational, material, and spiritual unbounded-ness. Situated outside of normative language, within an incoherent embodied experience, they confront us with what we believe is impossible, challenging self-restricting and damaging ideas imposed upon us by capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism. The monster-hybrid-body is a thriving “mess” of disparate parts, ecstatically grinding and writhing against itself and its surroundings, eradicating socio-politico-geo-biological boundaries with every swath of its furred tail, every multi-directional thrust of its many tentacled arms. As such, the monster poses an existential threat to the need for linear order and Progress, rational sense, gender binaries, single-species policies – in other words, for a “neat and tidy” life.

Over the course of five days, Reimer will trace the origins of feminist hybrid symbols from Neolithic Goddess mythology to 19th century Italian grotesque murals to contemporary theories of “queering”, and the monster. Focusing on the hybrid and the monster as generative critical symbols and models for change, we will explore the hybrid and the monster as a way to think beyond and through Anthropocentric systems and ideologies, and as a way to discover a new and weird divine – or as Reimer says, a way to “(re)monster” ourselves. We will study what it might mean for humans to “become plant”, become monsters.” (Text & photos by courtesy of Jasmine Reimer )