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The Big Thirst7:30 p.m. Wednesday April 11
Englander Studio (N420), Granoff Center
154 Angell Street, Providence, RI

This event will be preceded by a Conversations | Collaborations program The Encounter, part of a series curated by Charlie Cannon at Brown University.

Join us for a OneBook book club to discuss The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman with people from a wide spectrum of Providence area arts and community organizations and affiliations - artists and non-artists, students, academics, activists, and public sector representatives who are commonly concerned/passionate about the future of water.

In addition to the issues raised in this book and their relationship to the Providence community, we will also examine the artist's role as public intellectual in displaying, provoking, engaging environmental degradation (and individual, community responsibility) themes, specifically surrounding water. This discussion will be a great opportunity to make new connections, cross-pollinate, and learn more about the subject from multiple perspectives.

This one-time discussion is facilitated by Leonora Zoninsein. Zoninsein is a fluent systems thinker and current Water Fellow at Purpose.

Since her undergraduate in literary and visual arts at Brown University, Leonora has worked on a diversity of community-based water provision and environmental engagement strategies in a diversity of contexts.  She has produced ceramic water filters in coastal Kenya, constructed rainwater harvesting systems in Mexico City, and participated in health-oriented performances in Mali and Mozambique. She recently earned an MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management from the University of Oxford, where her dissertation focused on food security and
adaptation to environmental change in the Brazilian semi-arid region.

At Purpose, she is critically engaging with emergent forms of activism, and developing a social business plan for decentralized water services in poor New Delhi neighborhoods. In New York, her participatory action projects are expressed through food-justice themed dinner parties, climate change research poems, guided improvisational movement investigation, and a nascent river basin children’s book series. She looks forward to discussing the complexity of our shared water futures with the Artists in Context, producing new meaning about these issues, and elaborating the iterative practice of artist as anthropologist, urbanist, and activist.