Metabolic Studio

06/23/2026

FREE KN95 MASKS AVAILABLE

As the Boyle Heights Lineage Fire continues to impact air quality across Los Angeles, Metabolic Studio has free KN95 masks available for community members who may need them.

Masks can be picked up at Metabolic Studio, or email us and we will coordinate getting them to people and communities affected by the fire and ongoing smoke conditions.

📧 [email protected]

The Boyle Heights Lineage Fire has been burning for days at a 500,000-square-foot cold-storage facility. Smoke from the fire contains fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and other combustion byproducts that can travel well beyond the immediate area. Air quality impacts have been reported in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, Downtown Los Angeles, Montebello, Monterey Park, and portions of the San Gabriel Valley. (The Guardian⁠)

For current information and health guidance:

🔥 Los Angeles Fire Department
https://www.lafd.org

🌫 South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD)
https://www.aqmd.gov

🌫 Smoke & Air Quality Safety Information
https://www.aqmd.gov/smokesafety

🌫 Real-Time Air Quality Map
https://www.airnow.gov

🌫 Community Air Monitoring Map
https://map.purpleair.com

🏥 Los Angeles County Department of Public Health
https://publichealth.lacounty.gov

☎️ LA County Information Line
Dial 211 or visit:
https://211la.org

Please consider limiting outdoor activity, keeping windows and doors closed, running air filtration where possible, and wearing a properly fitted KN95 or N95 mask when outdoors. Public health officials continue to advise caution while smoke impacts remain active. (The Guardian⁠)

Please share this post with anyone who may need masks, information, or support.

MutualAid MetabolicStudio KN95 N95 SmokeSafety LARiver ChinatownLA

06/23/2026

05/21/2026

On this date sixteen years ago, Metabolic Studio opened the IOU Garden on Main Street in Lone Pine, California.

The “IOU” emerged from a simple but unresolved premise: Los Angeles owes Owens Valley.

What began as a garden quickly expanded into a larger public inquiry around extraction, reciprocity, water, soil, food production, transmission, and collective memory in Payahuunadü / Owens Valley.

That same weekend, the project Pipeline unfolded across the silos near Owens Lake with workshops, sound recordings, handmade film experiments, and performances directed by Walter Asmus, Samuel Beckett’s longtime collaborator from Berlin. Residents of Owens Valley and Los Angeles formed the Waiting for Godot Community Chorus together on the dry lakebed.

Many of the ideas that continue through Bending the River, Moving Mountains, the Milpa, and the cyborg watershed of the Intermountain West were already germinating here.

05/14/2026

On May 1, under the full moon, we gathered in Tovaangar for a conversation with PEN America. Amy Cordalis Bowers, author of “The Water Remembers,” shared the Klamath River’s journey back to freedom, while Emma Robbins, Navajo water warrior and founder of The Chapter House, led the conversation with fluency and grace. As we prepare to cleanse the LA River with Bending the River, we acknowledge the Tongva land and its original caretakers. Restoring water is restoring life. How do you see the water remembering, in your world and in ours?

05/09/2026

Visit us tomorrow, Saturday, at in Pasadena.

will be at the table from 11 AM–1 PM discussing her zine Protocols of Repair.
will be there from 1–3 PM to share Teachings That Have Taken Root.
From 3–7 PM, Lauren Bon will be at the table discussing Artists Must Behave Like Rivers.

We’re excited to share Farmlab’s growing series of zines exploring ecological art, watershed repair, soil, infrastructure, collective learning, and the living systems beneath Los Angeles and the Intermountain West.

You can also pick up an apron or ceramic tile featuring our mission statement:
“Artists need to create on the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy.”
We have a guest curator, with us all day tomorrow to discuss her publications too!
We look forward to seeing you there.

05/08/2026

Farmlab Zines 01–10
Metabolic Studio / Printed Matter Art Book Fair
Table D9

We’re excited to share a new set of Farmlab zines produced especially for this year’s Printed Matter Art Book Fair.

Emerging from Metabolic Studio’s Farmlab, these publications move through ecological art, watershed repair, soil remediation, floodplains, compost, insects, Indigenous knowledge, clay, flowers, urban infrastructure, and the living systems that persist beneath the city.

One of us will be at the table throughout the fair and would love to talk with you about the work, the watershed, and the ongoing experiments, collaborations, and questions that shaped these publications.

Featuring:

• All The Pretty Little Bugs — Michel Bréard
• What the Soil Keeps — Bella Escobar
• Protocols of Repair — Maru García
• Touching The Past: Clay as a Medium of Connection — Alex Tanasi
• Teachings That Took Root — Milli Macen-Moore
• Unseen Un-Development: How Big Is Here? — Diego Zapata
• Compostmortem — Michel Bréard
• Compostpartum — Michel Bréard
• Artists Must Behave Like Rivers — Lauren Bon
• Speed Dating with Flowers on a Cloudy Day — Michel Bréard

To gather, form, and release.

Come visit us at Table D9.

04/28/2026

Crisis is no longer episodic.
It has become the ground we share.

Between 2016–2020, we began building a crisis archive—
from the streets to the studio,
from protest to print.

What emerged was not just documentation,
but a commons:
images, language, tools—held collectively.

These works by Red Rotkopf, alongside screens made in our open maker space, mark a shift:
from witnessing to making,
from reaction to infrastructure.

We’re continuing this work.

Join us Monday, May 4
5–8 PM
(link in bio)

04/19/2026

An archive launched by Prof. Rana Dajani to honor Palestinian scholars killed in Gaza and challenge the silence on "scholasticide."