Minor Drama: Emanuel Almborg’s Baby Group
with Julia Leonard and Michelle Millar Fisher
Géza, 306 Maujer
Join us for a screening and discussion of Baby Group (2021), a film by Emanuel Almborg that reconsiders infancy through the lens of collective experience. Now on view as part of Amant’s exhibition On Education, the film was created as part of The Social Infant, Almborg’s postdoctoral research project with the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and the BabyDevLab at the University of East London. Baby Group examines early childhood as a site of social complexity: over several months, Almborg closely observed a group of six-month-to-one-year-old babies placed together in a shared space—without adult intervention—to explore how early forms of care, negotiation, and communication take shape.
As the film plays, Dr. Julia Leonard—Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University and principal investigator of the Leonard Learning Lab—will provide live commentary drawn from her research on infant learning and social behavior, offering reflections that are both analytically precise and wryly attuned to the quiet, sometimes comic, negotiations unfolding onscreen.
Following the screening, Dr. Leonard will be joined by curator and educator Michelle Millar Fisher for a conversation about how Baby Group engages questions of institutional design, developmental psychology, and the subtle ideologies embedded in how we raise and organize children.
Amant programs are always free. RSVPs are strongly encouraged. Seating is first come, first served, with some standing room available. Doors for Minor Drama will open at 3:45pm on Saturday, June 21 in Géza located at 306 Maujer.
Dr. Julia Leonard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale. She received her B.A. in Neuroscience and Behavior from Wesleyan University, her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from MIT, and completed a MindCore funded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Leonard wants to understand the factors that support both children’s approach to learning and their capacity to learn. She addresses these questions with the tools of cognitive science, developmental psychology, and neuroscience, with a focus on early childhood and educational implications.
Michelle Millar Fisher is currently the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts within the Contemporary Art Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The recipient of an MA and an M.Phil in Art History from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, she received an M.Phil from and completed her doctorate in art history at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She was part of the 2022 fellow cohort at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. She also leads an independent team on a book, touring exhibition, and program series called Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births.