Source: An Upstream Collective Launch at Ulises – Philadelphia, PA

Enjoy a raw oyster bar and other delights while savoring readings and remarks from our contributors and editorial team, accompanied by a live set from Yaka and sonic mix from Camus Compris. Downstairs, a quiet space for reading, making, and listening awaits. Allow your senses to be flooded and the deity of the deep to gently guide you Upstream.

We also invite you to bring a small object for the (Out)Sourced Museum — displayed for one night only, then carried back home with you.

These works explore origins as layered, contested, and continually remade rather than fixed points of departure, questioning what it means to locate (or lose) a beginning: 

Kelvin Vu’s “TMITBD” combines movement, sound, and animation to explore meaning-making in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown. Vu draws from archival gaps, unanswered questions, and the simultaneity of too much and too little information.

Miriam Saperstein’s “Incantational Contaminations” examines how demon bowls—amulets buried in ancient Babylonian doorways as protective technologies—were extracted to fuel the expansion of the University of Pennsylvania and similar projects across the so-called US.

Hannah Jo King’s “Without Origins, We are Sacred” traces interconnected genealogies of Black family and native Tobacco through ancestral channeling, interview, storytelling, ritual, and Black feminist scholarship.

Zoe Morrison’s “On the Ground” is an essay on asphalt, tracing its material origins and histories from ancient building material to modern-day petro-chemical extraction landscapes.

Maya Björnson and Liam CU’s “Where the Ghost Cloud Meets the Lake” is an alchemical poetry collaboration. Using the Manoa Method—a futures visioning tool—they use seed-words to bloom language into new forms.

Jacob Weinberg’s “Stochastic Media” traces Florida’s property insurance crisis through Baudrillard, the RAND corporation, and a VLF radio on Miami Beach at dawn. 

Upstream is a publishing collective based in Lenapehoking (so-called Philadelphia), formed through a shared desire for cross-disciplinary exchange, collective study, and peer support. We gather to notice, question, and map the dynamic ecologies between people, the built environment, and our nonhuman relatives. Our work takes form through workshops, editing, experimental publications, and in-person gatherings rooted in slow collaboration.

Image courtesy of Upstream Collective