Arboreal Velvet, with Tiziana La Melia and Ada Smailbegović

The blue of a plum ranges in colour from an indigo to a purple. And even this inconstant primary underlying colour is often smeared with a kind of white dust, an atmospheric haze that indexically links metamorphosis of colour to touch. This substance is known as “bloom,” a fine, powdery film that coats fruits such as grapes and plums giving them a frosty appearance and is in fact the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. To touch the deep arboreal velvet is to mark it, to move the waxy dust around, transferring its white creasing from place to place. In this workshop, we will focus precisely on such material transfers and textures that occur within the interstices of the everyday, as we consider the complexities of creating lifeworlds in the aftermaths of displacement, migration, and war. From this sense of what the theorist Sara Ahmed would call a “migrant orientation,” we will orient ourselves towards the ecological, the botanical, towards the orchard as one of the sites of diasporic time.

About the Facilitators

Tiziana La Melia (b. Palermo) is an artist and author working across many media. In her writing, collaborations, and art practice, she gleans the detritus of the everyday and transmutes it into material textures, and iterative shapes and symbols, which move through layers of diasporic time. Recent publications include I Come From A Long Line of People Who Don’t Use Words (Archive Books, 2022/2025), Glint (Or Gallery, 2025), and Lettuce Lettuce Please Go Bad (Talonbooks, 2024). She has written poems and scripts for and with artists such as Alison Yip, Vanessa Disler, Charlotte Weise, Lotus Kang, Tamara Henderson, Elif Saydam, Nester Krüger, and Sally Späth. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Kitten Healer Litter, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris; Canzone, Unit 17, Vancouver (both 2026); Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster, Or Gallery (2025). Tiziana is based in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Ada Smailbegović was born in Sarajevo and now resides in the emotional triangle between New York, Vancouver and Providence. She studied biology and literature at UBC, completed a PhD in Poetry and Poetics from NYU and is now an Associate Professor of English at Brown University. Her writing explores relations between poetics, ecologies of displacement, nonhuman forms of materiality, histories of description, and the natural sciences. Ada is the author of two books, Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds (Columbia University Press, 2021) and The Cloud Notebook (Litmus, 2023). She is a co-founder of The Organism for Poetic Research.

Accessibility Information

ASL interpretation is available upon request. If you would benefit from ASL interpretation at the workshop, please indicate so in your registration form when prompted. Information regarding accessibility at 221A can be found here: https://221a.ca/about/accessibility/