The Artwork
Marooning Bodies
2026
Participatory events
Audubon Center for exhibition
Gameplay session #1 at Cypress Park Branch
Gameplay session #2 at Wes Craven Library at Audubon Center
Gameplay session #3 at West LA Branch Library
April – May 2026
Marooning Bodies is an immersive worldbuilding game led by artist Mims that is designed to explore community-building as a creative practice. Through art-making, conversation, and storytelling—players are prompted to create relics and rituals for a collectively imagined future and granted the task of dreaming new ways of being together.
In its latest form, Marooning Bodies: Collective Prayer Stool comes alive as a public altar and interactive sculptural work inspired by the first Collective Prayer Stool found beneath a tree near the Savannah River. The stool became a place for collective grieving and shapeshifting when communities realized grief had grown too large to carry alone and every act of change carried loss.
Collective Prayer Stool is comprised of a prostration stool, a prayer book, and ceramic prayer stone containing a botanical formula. The stool’s legs are cast from memory-holding matter: ash from burned letters, soil from ancestral land, fragments from kitchens, jails, and gathering spaces. Together, these materials form a living archive, absorbing the stories of those who lean into them. Visitors are invited to sit, write a prayer in the prayer book, and pour a small amount of herbal medicine into the soil, allowing their words to be planted into the earth. Mims will facilitate a collective chanting, call and response, and the passing of the prayer stone to explore the ways in which grief moves us into new shapes and new visions; the body, the stool, the herbs, and the earth converge as a living altar, a collective prayer for new worlds.
Each game session will travel to various County sites and will be accessible to the general public, further contributing to the growth of Marooning Bodies as an archive and a roadmap of the future. The Collective Prayer Stool was created in collaboration with McBog Design and MB Creative Director, Mười.
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.