The Artwork
Marooning Bodies
Participatory events
The Audubon Center at Debs Park
March 28 - Game-play Activation | 12:30PM - 2:30PM
May 9 - Performance Event | 12:30PM - 2:30PM
West LA Library
May 17 - Game-play Activation | 12:30PM - 2:30PM
Marooning Bodies is a worldbuilding platform led by artist Mims, using play, ritual, and collective imagination to design liberated futures through an immersive worldbuilding game, public installations, and a growing collection of Future Relics: art objects inspired by imagined futures created through gameplay. The Collective Prayer Stool is one such relic.
The Collective Prayer Stool originates from a future history near the Savannah River, where communities practice collective grieving and shapeshifting as civic acts. Composed of a prostration stool, the Collective Prayer Book, and a prayer stone housing the Marooning Bodies x Botanica Cimarron herbal tincture, its legs are cast from memory-holding matter: ash from burned letters, soil from ancestral land, and fragments from kitchens, jails, and gathering spaces. Visitors are invited to sit, write their prayers in the Collective Prayer Book, and pour the herbal tincture into the soil. Mims will share a site-responsive dance performance at the site of the stool, unfolding in three movements each guided by a different herb within the herbal tincture, treating the body and landscape as intertwined spaces where memory, grief, and possibility can be held at once.
Marooning Bodies is also hosting an LA Public Library Tour throughout March, April, and May, bringing facilitated gameplay sessions to communities across the county for an immersive experience designed to explore community-building as a creative practice.Mims created the Collective Prayer Stool in collaboration with McBog Design and MB Creative Director, Mười. The Prayer Stone was created by Annahstasia, and The Herbal Tincture was created by Botanica Cimarron.
Mims is an artist, abolitionist, and facilitator based in Los Angeles. Her work spans performance, advocacy, public art, social practice, and the creation of fine art objects. She experiences the body as a site of liberation and approaches it as her first place of inquiry. Grounded in embodied knowing, her practice explores relationships between self, community, land, and more-than-human life. She is deeply interested in questioning as a tool for collective understanding, the role of interpersonal relationships in building healthy communities, and the sacred wisdom held in cultures and ecosystems around the world.
She is the founder of Marooning Bodies, an immersive worldbuilding game and artistic ecosystem rooted in maroon histories, biomimicry, and communal imagination. She is also the creator of Uncle Ronnie’s Room, an installation and advocacy project centering her uncle’s incarceration and the collective labor of abolition. Mims’ work has been supported by the California Arts Council, Converse, the NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and residencies in Senegal and Ghana.