Mountain House

From 2015 to 2020, Mountain House came together as a collective practicing radical stewardship of land, relationships, and culture, bringing material sustenance and cultural-intellectual engagement together. Mountain House worked with folks to build and support projects that emphasized a connection between artmaking, knowledge building, and access to care, recognizing that these connections are critical for ensuring and restoring the health of local land, intercommunity relationships, and equitable cultural participation. As a formation of many voices and bodies, Mountain House came into being and existed through the form of relationship. Those relationships were built and fortified through storytelling, deep listening, and responsive care. What resulted from the knowledge created in conversation took the shape of cultural work, networks of mutual aid, and the conditions that are necessary for the creation of lasting social transformation. Like so many cultural formations, the Covid-19 Pandemic and subsequent upheaval forced members of Mountain House to new homes across the state and into strategies for mitigating economic fallout. Community gatherings and relational experiences were a primary vehicle for meeting our goals and the social isolation of the “Covid Years” had a profound impact on our work together. While Mountain House no longer exists as an active collective, the lessons learned through its making have continued through deep commitments among founding members to it’s principle values. 

FEATURED PROJECTS

An Origin Text: How to Build a Mountain House, the manuscript was co-created over a period of three years through conversations with Clare Fox, Sarah Ashkin, Paolo Speirn, Sebastian Sarti, Regino Rodriguez Vazquez, Michael Thurin, Juliane Lovich, Israel Francisco Haros Lopez, and my mother, Holli Teltoe. My role as a caretaker of this information was to document, preserve, and arrange the oral histories and testimony collected. The selected transcripts are stitched together to create an origin story of Mountain House. Download full text here.