Land and An Architecture of the Overflow

Through the Ruins: Talks on Human Rights & the Arts 1 is the inaugural volume of talks by activists, scholars, and artists from around the globe, presented at the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA). In their own words and in conversation with others, they make evident the richness and range of contemporary practices at the intersection of human rights and the arts.

Contributors include Ashmina Ranjit, Border Forensics, Cassils, Emily Johnson, Faustin Linyekula, Hamed Sinno, Mark Sealy, and the White Pube. Emily’s contribution is from CHRA’s inaugural talk series, where she offered the lecture “Land and An Architecture of the Overflow”.

The book can be purchased via online booksellers (such as Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc). 

A digital copy of Through the Ruins is available at CHRA’s website.

That dancing in/of past, present, and future is a shaking...

That dancing in/of past, present, and future is a shaking...

That dancing in/of past, present, and future is a shaking, is a way of transforming this place we are caught up in, this place of knowing only one way of knowing, of forced worldview, of bunkers on mountains, of concrete levee, of rising heat, of 1000 dead trees, of nothing in promise, no sound of bee or bird or place to fish or carry on, for career, for nothing real, for what you have been sold, for a future you. This is land. This is water. This is air. This is Lenapehoking. This is for you Carlina Rivera, Council Member District 2, Mannahatta, Destroyer of East River Park.

Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars

Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars

I welcome you. Go for a walk in the field. In the woods. Meadow. Desert. Street. Bring a roasted chicken dinner. Share it. All night there are sighs amongst us, a caress. Fingers moving. Skin touches, enters skin. Fish are caught. Gutted. Wrapped in aluminum foil, sprinkled with lemon, a little butter, salt. Put into ready coals. The birthed take a first deep breath. Our stresses leave. We fold and unfold napkins. Our hearts, too. We unfold these.

SURGENT LOVE

SURGENT LOVE


My Grandma Hanna made the wallet I carry with me every day. It’s tanned caribou hide, trimmed with small green and white glass beads, a perfect five-petal flower — dark green, iridescent orange, with a light-pink centre. It’s sitting next to me as I write this from Lenapeyok homeland, Lenapehoking. I carry my grandma’s gorgeous wallet with me, proudly lay it on the table or bar when I am about to pay. People always ask. And I smile. I get to tell them Grandma made it. And I get to tell them she won a blue ribbon at the state fair.

A Letter I Hope in the Future, Doesn’t Need to be Written

I sent the following letter on January 20, 2021 to the National Endowment for the Arts to share with them my experience as a Yup’ik womxn and artist with Jedidiah Wheeler, Executive Director of Peak Performances at Montclair State University. I’m publishing it here so that we — artsworkers, audiences, presenters, funders, and a broader public — can examine what exists. And so we can build processes and relationships forward that are equitable, justice centered and decolonized, rather than stay in systems and experiences that perpetuate violence and extraction.

Instigating Institutional Change Towards Decolonization

Instigating Institutional Change Towards Decolonization

When it comes to the work of decolonization and indigenization, everything about an institution must change—from structure, governance, and leadership to ethos, values, and worldview. The shift of consciousness and action that is needed in the world—recognizing, acknowledging, centering, respecting, and understanding Indigenous knowledge, art, making, culture, leadership, and sovereignty—becomes reality. This is what is needed to build equity.

SILENT STORY

SILENT STORY

Weeks ago I was sitting in my backyard reading about a poem Denise Levertov wrote called In Obedience. It’s an elegy for her father and in it she tells of doing a wild solitary dance among the fireflies in a New England garden one night, while my father lay dying, in London.’ She writes that it was a joyful dance and also a dance of love and mourning. Later she learned that just before her father died, he got up out of his bed in London to dance the Hasidic dance of praise. Both dancing in their grief, not with or for one another, they were connected across their physical distance by the passing of this story and the writing of her poem. 

THE STORIES IN OUR BODIES

THE STORIES IN OUR BODIES

The other day I was jostled into a memory. Simply walking up a short set of stairs, my body suddenly remembered what day it was. I say it was my body remembering because that is where I felt it. It was not a thought connected to a date and time. It was not a moment connected to a memory. It was a physical interaction with time - a sudden condensation of time and place. I wondered what this sudden feeling was and then my mind caught up... And then I remembered.

A Cultural Democracy in the Performing Arts Interview

The Brooklyn Commune’s Cultural Democracy and Representation Team, led by Kyoung H. Park, has created a series of interviews with artists and arts leaders to address issues of diversity and social inclusion in contemporary performing arts. Over the course of the next few months, we will highlight interviews with artists who are in conversation with our team to ask ourselves how we can insure that people from all points on the age, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and cultural spectra have a place in the conversation. 

Salmon Brings us Together

Salmon Brings us Together

This has been happening my whole life. Salmon brings me to harvest with my family, brings me across Kachemak Bay in Alaska to learn fish-skin sewing from Audrey Armstrong, brings me to awe as I watch them swim upstream, brings people to my table again and again, and brings me here, to Vermont Performance Lab. Of course, in this case, we had to arrange for the wild salmon to be here.

Office, Minneapolis, MN, US612.597.7400emily@catalystdance.com

Emily Johnson / Catalyst is based on Mannahatta in Lenapehoking. We work to pay respect to Lenape homeland, people and ancestors past, present, and future by organizing with communities from the Lenape diaspora to build pathways for Lenapeyok return. We have been taught to name Lenape Nations and say cama’i to our relatives from Delaware Tribe of Indians in Bartlesville, OK; Delaware Nation of Oklahoma in Anadarko, OK; Stockbridge-Munsee and Mohican Community in Wisconsin; Moravian Delaware of the Thames in Ontario, Canada; Munsee-Delaware Nation at Munceytown in Ontario, Canada; Delaware of Six Nations in Ontario, Canada. 

We strive to be in good relations with our kin—human and more than human—and in effort to support growing kinstillatory relations and sovereign, liberated futures we are anti-colonial and abolitionist in all capacities. We are committed to on-the-ground water and land protection, consistent decolonization work, and Land Back. 

Quyanaqvaa-lli elpeni to all Sovereign Nations, Indigenous and First Nations people who live in relation to and from Lenapehoking and upon whose lands we work and tour.

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