Dreaming Ecosystems: Film Poetry Workshop
with Caryn Cline + Mita Mahato
Common OBJECTS
Saturday, March 14, 2026
11 am – 5 pm
Sunday, March 15, 2026
11 am – 5 pm
Sliding scale: $110 / $160 / $220 + tax
Free community access is available, please contact us if cost is a barrier.
Zoom in on plant matter as an inspiration for poetry and a material for film. Join Cadence for a poetry workshop, a dream matrix, a discussion on video poetry, and a 16mm film collage workshop that will seed new understandings of native and invasive plant species, deepen our relationship with biodiversity, and dig into the impact of personal roots on ecosystems.
During this generative workshop, we will interpret our changing environment and our role within it. Across millennia, media, and art movements, flowers, ferns, and mosses have provided creative inspiration for their beauty and symbolism.
As the consequences of our changing climate become visible within our lifetimes, we’re bringing a new lens to plants and what their presence or absence reveals about human nature and the natural world.
March 14 – Day 1
11 am – Video Poetry Compendium
From the beginnings of video poetry to the contemporary and local, Cadence co-director Chelsea Werner-Jatzke shares examples of video poetry for conversation and inspiration on the themes and creative approaches to combining your poetry generated on day one, to the 16mm film workshop today.
12:15 pm – Social Dreaming Matrix
Share your night dreams (recent and/or distant) in a supportive, collaborative space hosted by Cadence co-director and dream worker Rana San and explore the collective associations and insights that arise. This reflective process is designed to unlock new cognitive pathways and seed new perspectives.
2 pm – Plant Poetics: Poetry Workshop
What can we grow in the spaces between word and image? Guided by artist and poet Mita Mahato, participants will take inspiration from how plants breathe, feed, communicate, attract and repulse, grow and move, in order to make poems that echo, ease, and answer ecosystemic longing. Activities will be both individual and collaborative, and participants will be invited to experiment with several visual-poetic forms, including comix, collage, erasure, and concrete poetry.
March 15 – Day 2
11 am – Botanicollage Intro
Seattle-based filmmaker Caryn Cline introduces the “botanicollage” technique, made famous by Stan Brakhage and his film, “Mothlight.”
2 pm – 16mm Botanicollage Workshop
Participants will create handmade film frames using local botanicals, art materials, and film supplies to produce a short film that will screen at the Cadence Video Poetry Festival in April. Botanicals and filmmaking materials will be supplied. Participants are invited to bring their own botanicals and a willingness to experiment and make mistakes.
Teaching Artists
Caryn Cline
Filmmaker Caryn Cline has been producing “botanicollage” films for 20 years. She has taught workshops in this handmade film technique all over the country, including in New York City, Albuquerque, Seattle, Los Angeles, and at the San Francisco Exploratorium. The botanicollage technique is akin to the strategies made famous by Stan Brakhage and his films Mothlight and Garden of Earthly Delights. Her botanicollage and other experimental films have screened at venues all over the world, including Jilhava, the Venice Biennale, Strangloscope, Mental Filmness, Brazier’s, Moviate, Cosmic Rays, ANALOGICA, LA International Children’s Film Festival, Antimatter, Istanbul International Film Festival, Ozark Shorts, and many more.
Mita Mahato
Mita Mahato is a comix artist and poet who assembles her panels and pages with cut and collaged papers. Her work joins fragments of used and discarded materials—old newspapers, obsolete maps, junk mail, packaging scraps—in poetic experiments that dramatize entangled processes of death and renewal, specifically within the context of ecosystemic survival against capitalism. Her most recent book Arctic Play is published by The 3rd Thing, and her poetry comix have appeared in places including PRISM, Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah, Coast/NoCoast, ANMLY, and Drunken Boat, as well as in the collection In Between, published by Pleiades and listed in The Best American Comics of 2019.
Rana San
Rana San is an intermedia artist, choreographer, and curator. Her practice centers experimental and analog approaches to storytelling on stage and screen. She recently had a video essay published in TriQuarterly and her cinepoems have screened nationally and internationally at Experiments in Cinema (NM), Fotogenia Film Poetry & Divergent Narratives Festival (MX), and Zebra Film Poetry Festival (DE), among others. She co-curated Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time-Based Disturbances, published by The 3rd Thing, 2023–2024. Based between Seattle and Istanbul, she co-directs Cadence Video Poetry Festival.
Chelsea Werner-Jatzke
Chelsea Werner-Jatzke is an author, filmmaker, and curator exploring the liminal spaces of the literary arts. Her interest in how words are experienced has resulted in gallery installations, classical music performances, broadsides, karaoke, and video poetry. She is co-director of Cadence Video Poetry Festival, co-curator of Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time-Based Disturbances (The 3rd Thing), and a community board member for the Seattle City of Literature. Chelsea was recently published in Tri-Quarterly and featured in Local Sightings Film Festival (WA), Aorta Poetry Film Festival (NZ), and Festival Fotogenia (MX).
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Anyone interested in exploring artistic approaches to environmental issues. If you’re in search of new ways to process the details and complexities of the climate crisis, this workshop is for you.
These workshops are open to everyone, regardless of artistic experience, and aim to provide a safe, inclusive space for personal and community expression.
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Make something new while connecting with a diverse, supportive community, learning creative skills and storytelling techniques, and finding new perspectives on ecology and the nature around us.
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At the end of the workshop participants will have digital and physical film, workshop-generated writing and visual poetry to continue working with. Digitized film footage and poetry will be edited into a short film that will be screened as part of the 2026 festival.
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A notebook, plants, and curiosity. More detailed information will be shared with registrants closer to the workshop dates.
Next Up
Dreaming Ecosystems: Film Poetry Workshop
Space is limited
Cadence Casual [in person]
ceaseless, of the earth
Registration coming soon