The story of Persephone is both ancient and urgently contemporary. At its center is a cyclical journey between two realms — the Underworld and the Upperworld — descending into the darkness and emerging into the light..
This same movement shapes the residency itself. Selected artists enter a period of process and exchange — working in dialogue, sharing unfinished material, allowing their work to be changed by what surrounds it — before returning to the light in two evenings of public performance. Like Persephone's passage between worlds, the residency does not separate the dark from the bright; it treats both as necessary stages of the same journey.
Throughout the summer, 19 visual artists and performers are responding to the myth of Persephone through the lens of extraction and transformation. 12 are collaboratively developing a time-based, immersive experience that unfolds throughout the rooms and spaces of 6018North, while 7 are providing discrete works that invite or set the stage for performances and interactions. All are activating rooms or spatial environments as part of a single collective journey.
Each session culminates in a performative event — First Session: June 27–28 and Second Session: July 25–26 — that guides audiences through the house in small groups, creating a beginning-to-end experiential passage through Persephone's myth as it resonates with our present ecological, social, and spiritual realities. Extraction, here, is not only myth: it is the present condition of a warming, depleted earth, and transformation is not only Persephone's, but ours to make.
Session One of The Persephone Project features visual, installation, and performance artwork by the following artists: Kyle Gregory Price, Lauren Reed, Lizz Windnagel with Patrick Marschke. Bei Qi, Hailey Becker, Gray Snyder, and Raissa Bailey.
Session Two of The Persephone Project features visual, installation, and performance artwork by the following artists: Adriana Vignoli, Bobbi and Stephan Meier, Edyta Stepien, Eileen O'Halloran, Kierah-Kiki-King, Lise Haller Baggesen, and Monika Plioplyte, William Raynovich, and Charles Krampah.
For audiences, the project extends that invitation outward. Moving through the designated spaces at 6018North, visitors are not simply observing a myth retold, but undergoing their own brief descent and return — entering the unresolved, the in-process, the unfamiliar, and emerging changed by what they encounter.
The project unfolds through a structured yet experimental collaborative process.
Persephone: Extraction & Metamorphosis is a collaborative 4D project — time-based, process-oriented, and spatial. This work draws on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Meg Stuart’s choreographic work, Crash Landing. Artists are creating a range of the following:
An installation-based room activation
A short time-based performative work
A hybrid work that combines installation and performance
An experience or medium not contained within any one room
A designed space which can be activated by someone in the session or later
While each work has its own integrity, all are developed in dialogue to contribute to a cohesive audience experience. The project prioritizes process, experimentation, and collective development. The emphasis is on creating a spatial and/or performative environment that contributes to a collective narrative arc.
The project originated with artist Tria Smith’s Persephone Project and builds upon Myth of the Organic City, 6018North’s recent exhibition exploring climate change through myth and the built environment. That inquiry continues here, extended into a fully collaborative, time-based form. Each artist brings their own interpretation of the myth, the moment we are in, and how to respond.
Mirroring the Persephone myth, we are in a moment of traversing into an unknowable future. At its heart Persephone: Extraction & Metamorphosis asks: in the midst of climate change, conflict, and widespread uncertainty, how do we come out of this moment and learn to work together rather than alone?