Sounds of De/Composition is the Fall 2024 conference organized by the Music Department of New York University’s Graduate School of Arts & Science. We invite participants to consider and create sonic traces of mutually constituted biological and social breakdown, uneven distributions of environmental violences across social categories, and (re)new(ed) futurities emerging from discarded or underground sites.

The conference will feature a keynote address by Dr. Marisa Solomon (Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University) and a keynote performance by myself, as well as paper presentations, performances, sound art, and audiovisual installations.

Projections from Cheyenne Rain LeGrande, ishkwaazhe Shane McSauby, Razelle Benally, Black Belt Eagle Scout, Laura Ortman, Mato Wayuhi, Korina Emmerich, Emily Johnson & Jeffrey Gibson, curated by Relative Arts.

“Kintecoying Now” is a series of free public arts events to be held in two plazas at Bowery and East 4th Streets.  This site and the area of Astor Place, according to modern day sources, was originally known as Kintecoying (“Crossroads of Nations”) and served as a place for meeting, trade, diplomacy, and games by Munsee Lenape, Canarsie, Sapohannikan, Manhattan, and other Nations.

“Kintecoying Now” is intended to activate the site with work by Indigenous/Native American artists, artisans, and culture bearers in order to honor and recognize its history.

Whale Story is a method of paying attention to another scale, another form, another knowledge.

Written and performed by Emily Johnson
Edited and filmed by IV Castellanos on Haudenosaunee lands

Created with support from Aywaa Storyhouse.

Join us on Thursday October 3rd, 6-8pm at Abrons Arts Center for a fire curated by Yanira Castro with artists Marcela Torres, Kristel Baldoz, and Ayano Elson.


Always thrilled to open this space of the otherwise. A site for furthering, for participation, a night to prepare for: steady self, ready community, forms to incite wonder. We are so thankful to Marcela, Kristel, Ayano, Yanira, and are reminded of the understory - what grows beneath the trees.


Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is an ongoing project of Emily Johnson and Kai Recollet. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

And on Sunday, join me for part show and tell, part discussion, part activation to utilize the Decolonization Rider - a tool for artists and cultural workers to usher cultural institutions to equitable, justice-centered working practices.

On Saturday I'll be leading a Lunchtime Care Activation guided with questions, What are your non-negotiable care actions? How do you defend land in a city? How can you disrupt the misuse of these terms: great, migrant, he, she, illegal, free, border? What other terms would you add to the list?

Thank you to everyone who joined us at Relative Arts on 8/12 for a successful sewing session. Stories and laughter was shared and quilt #4 is nearly completed!

Gather with us in partnership with the American Indian Community House as we work together on completing quilt #4 and quilt #5. Each is an integral part of our 84-quilt project, designed by Maggie Thompson.

Help us out by stopping by for a stitch or all day For the consideration of everyone's health, masks are highly encouraged!

Thank you to everyone who has checked in on our missing quilts. We appreciate your support and ideas! Since the quilts have not been located, we are remaking them! Each is an integral part of our 84-quilt project, designed by Maggie Thompson.

Gather with us in partnership with Relative Arts as we work together on quilts #4 and #5. Help us out by stopping by for a stitch or all day 💕

For the consideration of everyone's health, masks are highly encouraged.

✨

Don’t miss our Kinstillatory Summer Fire 🔥 July 11, 6-8 pm in the back garden at Abrons Arts Center with unrelentingly gorgeous offerings from Danielle Olana Jagelski, Ty Fierce Metteba, and Ms.Josephine. Gather with us, the honey locust, evening light, sonic poems, viola callings, song. The fires this spring and summer have been inspiring, tender, familial, remedying. This is the fire before our summer pause. See you there!

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

Ms.Josephine former name known to some as Henu Josephine Tarrant, is a lifetime NYC native community member descending from the Rappahannock, Ho-Chunk, and Kuna nations. She will be sharing her newest original songs created for her EP SERPENT set to record in 2024. The songs she will be sharing are what she hopes becomes the soundtrack of the life of a spiritual indigenous femme surviving the urban landscape . Speaking to death, rebirth, empowerment, sexuality, and native cosmologies in the ever changing metropolis of New York City. Her debut single 'don't miss the sunshine' can be found on all music streaming apps & platforms and she encourages everyone to listen to her newest summer release 'SkyRockets' written & performed with Jayden Avery Love. She also encourages anyone who enjoys her tunes to check out her music video for 'don't miss the sunshine' on YouTube directed by Mi'kMaq New York Native Frankie Pedersen.

Danielle Olana Jagelski is a composer, conductor, and creative producer. She is the Artistic Director of Renegade Opera, Producer for First Nation Performing Arts, and Faculty at Manhattan School of Music Pre-College Division. 

A fierce advocate for equity in artistic spaces and citizen of the Oneida Nation/Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe, Danielle is especially passionate about Decolonization through collective creation and performance. 

Her performances have been described:

“At once timeless and of its time, it expands your heart and mind with every note, telling a story of grief and love that is as honest as it is hopeful.” (Oregon ArtsWatch, 2021)

An avid composer of song, opera, choir, and music for theatre, recent premieres have been by New Native Theatre, Voices of Ascension, Hear Us Hear Them Ensemble, Artemis Singers, and American Patriots Project among others. Her works have been performed throughout  the country including at Roulette Intermedium, Performance Space New York, The Green Room 42, and Shaking the Tree Theatre.

As a conductor she is sought out for her execution of contemporary works, and has worked with companies such as Opera Theatre Saint Louis, Anchorage Opera, Opera Ithaca, and City Lyric Opera. She has received grants from The Plimpton Foundation, Oregon Regional Arts and Cultures Foundation, and Opera America as well as receiving awards from the National Opera Association for her passionate work in contemporary opera.

Ty Fierce Metteba has accumulated an assortment of skills in pursuit of what sparks passion not only in the themselves but in community to motivate and galvanize sustainable solutions to intergenerational poverty and trauma. As a Diné speaker at qualms with reclamation, revitalization, and renewal, the responsibility to demonstrate reciprocity for the continuation of my culture and community has brought far from my homelands but with trust to find my strengths and weaknesses in how to best help community. In being at odds with language, polyglots have inspired me to at least understand the universal languages of math and music, so I can bridge further concepts with the other languages I speak and learn…

Presented with support from the Mid Atlantic Folk and Traditional Arts – Community Projects program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

You are invited to the Kinstillatory Fire ✨June 20, 6-8 pm, in the backyard at Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, LES, Lenapehoking.

Gather with a fire for our futures.
Curated by Ashley Pierre-Louis with artists Eternal Oyster (Jennae Santos of gushes), Ke’ron Wilson & friends, Kimiko Tanabe, Muyassar Kurdi, and a sharing from Eve Tuck.

Eternal Oyster is perpetually moved and held by site-and-community specificity. Ke’ron Wilson & friends transmute through music and poems. Kimiko Tanabe offers us a possibility toward communal remembering, a meditation on the relationship between eroticism, decay, and transformation. In the spirit of resistance, Muyassar Kurdi forwards a meditative embodiment with sounds from the Palestinian sound archive. Eve Tuck will attend to new intentions for collaborative Indigenous research in NYC, with and beyond the university, always for communities and lands and waters.

This special Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet, and is centered practices of rewording in celebration of Catalyst’s newest land-based project Build And Reworld Now. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

FREE! No registration required!

Ashley Pierre-Louis (she/her) is a dance artist and creator freelancing and exploring choreography in New York City. When making, she asks herself and audiences to imagine what our physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us is, and how we can share them collectively in order to create a sense of freedom in the mind and body.

Eternal Oyster (Jennae Santos of gushes) is a Filipinx Bay Area-born, Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist building tactile mythos through eco-erotic performance, love and liberation song, and decolonized social practice.

Fed by Indigenous Filipino psychology and combat, the feminist occult, plant medicine, coastal ecologies, and animal architecture, their practice flows into three art containers: progressive art-rock project, gushes, earth-body research-response play, Eternal Oyster, and sensory installation partnership with Ana Vásquez, Tree+Oyster. 

Eternal Oyster’s work encompasses chamber prog ensemble, dance music, movement cycle, tea ceremony, drone, ritual, video, sound sculpture and other intermedia incarnations as unbound, eternal expressions of liberation. They are perpetually moved and held by site-and-community specificity. They believe in food and climate justice, landback, and a Free Palestine.

Ke’ron J. Wilson (she/they) is a healing-centered transfemme movement artist, choreographer, model, actor, musician, and poet based out of New York City. Born in Lakeland Florida, Ke’ron began training at Harrison School for the Arts and Florida Dance Theater. After graduating with a BFA in dance from Sam Houston State University, her career began as a founding member of Social Movement Contemporary Dance Theater and as a recurring guest choreographer for the Pilot Dance Project in Houston, TX.

Ke’ron’s current creative research is deeply rooted in the spiritual possibilities that are born from art-making within queer community, aiming to decentralize singular perspectives and to expand understandings of queer/trans identity. In this process, she prioritizes care as the bridge to generative collaboration, and compassion as the key to rigorous self and social reflection. Ke’ron’s research has recently been supported by MNE’s Emerging Choreographer’s Series (2022-2024). In addition, she has also appeared on the Tamron Hall Show with Sonya Renee Taylor; on the New York Fashion Week runway as a model for Bad Binch Tong Tong’s SS24 collection; and continues to lead wellness/meditation portals, mostly in collaboration with the Angelito Collective, for the NYC Trans community when and where she can.

Ke’ron is now receiving support through Movement Research’s Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellowship, which is supported by the New York Community Trust through the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund.

Kimiko (she/her) is a yonsei dance artist creating surreal performance art that is both playful and haunting. Her work wanders into the afterlife of Japanese American internment where she wrestles with the joys and failures of the body as a site of remembering.

Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, extended vocal technique, performance art, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. She currently focuses on interweaving electronic instruments into her embodied voice performances, stirring a plethora of emotions from her audience members through ritualistic chants, meditative movements, and sonic sound explorations.

Kurdi was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023 as well as the American Composer Forum. She was awarded a Roulette Intermedium 2020 commission and 2022 artist residency (with support from Jerome Foundation), and is also a recipient of the Queens Fund New Works Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps grant, and Puffin Foundation grant. Recent residencies include Harvestworks and The Watermill Center with OPERA ensemble. Love is Blue, Kurdi’s solo interdisciplinary exhibition, opened in the Fall of 2023 at LaMaMa Gallery in NYC.

Performance highlights include Poetry Project, Roulette Intermedium, Center For Performance Research, Lincoln Center, The Rubin Museum of Art, Issue Project Room, Cafe OTO, Chicago Cultural Center, Center for Contemporary Art Laznia, Fridman Gallery, Zaratan - Arte Contemporânea, and Judson Memorial Church as well as exhibitions and film screenings (solo and group works) at VIERTE WELT, Trieze Gallery, Knockdown Center, Queens Museum, Spectacle Theatre, and Anthology Film Archives. She taught workshops in movement and voice most notably in Portugal at Zaratan - Arte Contemporânea, Bilgi University and Culture in Istanbul Turkey as well as a MoMA PS1 in NYC.

Eve Tuck is Professor of Indigenous Studies and James Weldon Johnson Professor at Steinhardt, in the Department of Applied Statistics, Social Sciences and Humanities, and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, at New York University. She is the founding director of the new Provostial Center for Indigenous Studies at NYU.
Tuck is Unangax̂ and is an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska. She grew up outside of her community, living in Pennsylvania as a child, and New York City as a young adult. She earned a PhD in Urban Education from The Graduate Center, The City University of New York in 2008.

Presented with support from Anonymous Was A Woman in partnership with The New York Foundation for the Arts, and from the Mid Atlantic Folk and Traditional Arts – Community Projects program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Featuring a stellar cast of performers - Stacy Lynn Smith, Sugar Vendil, Ashley Pierre-Louis, Brandi Norton, Emily Johnson - and an original score in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, Being Future Being is a multi-scalar performance for the stage, and beyond—a portal, a care processional, a site for transformation. As it (re)builds new visions of the forces that brought this world into being, Being Future Being invites audiences to become part of creating a radically just and Indigenized future, one we can live in now and foster for generations to come.

Supported in part by Mid Atlantic Arts through USArtists International, a program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding..

Featuring a stellar cast of performers - Stacy Lynn Smith, Sugar Vendil, Ashley Pierre-Louis, Brandi Norton, Emily Johnson - and an original score in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, Being Future Being is a multi-scalar performance for the stage, and beyond—a portal, a care processional, a site for transformation. As it (re)builds new visions of the forces that brought this world into being, Being Future Being invites audiences to become part of creating a radically just and Indigenized future, one we can live in now and foster for generations to come.

Supported in part by Mid Atlantic Arts through USArtists International, a program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Featuring a stellar cast of performers - Stacy Lynn Smith, Sugar Vendil, Ashley Pierre-Louis, Brandi Norton, Emily Johnson - and an original score in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, Being Future Being is a multi-scalar performance for the stage, and beyond—a portal, a care processional, a site for transformation. As it (re)builds new visions of the forces that brought this world into being, Being Future Being invites audiences to become part of creating a radically just and Indigenized future, one we can live in now and foster for generations to come.

Supported in part by Mid Atlantic Arts through USArtists International, a program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Featuring a stellar cast of performers - Stacy Lynn Smith, Sugar Vendil, Ashley Pierre-Louis, Brandi Norton, Emily Johnson - and an original score in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, Being Future Being is a multi-scalar performance for the stage, and beyond—a portal, a care processional, a site for transformation. As it (re)builds new visions of the forces that brought this world into being, Being Future Being invites audiences to become part of creating a radically just and Indigenized future, one we can live in now and foster for generations to come.

Supported in part by Mid Atlantic Arts through USArtists International, a program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Really looking forward to this conversation with Mylène and Léuli; utilizing our Decolonization Rider—a tool for artists, cultural workers, and institutions - and discussing ways it can be used to usher equitable, justice-oriented working practices.

Supported in part by Mid Atlantic Arts through USArtists International, a program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

You’re invited to the May 16 Kinstillatory Fire, curated by Relative Arts ✨ Join us alongside the sound, poetry and performace of artists Somah Haaland @coffeequeer , Rosa Bordallo @whoismanett , Mobēy Lola Irizarry @lola.machine , and DJ Leelander lelandparkerr ✨ This fire creates kin. These artists are Future making.✨

Thursday May 16th, 6-8pm outside at Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Lenapehoking.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

Relative Arts is a new brick-and-mortar community space, open atelier, and shop displaying contemporary Indigenous fashion and design. Our mission is to provide a peer-run space in New York City to celebrate the advancement of Indigenous futurism in fashion through representation and education. We are Indigenous owned and operated by Korina Emmerich (Puyallup) and Liana Shewey (Mvskoke).

Mobéy Lola Irizarry (they/she) is a genderqueer cultural worker, composer, painter, poet, improviser, multi-instrumentalist, and transdisciplinary performance artist. Based in Brooklyn, they hail from the Puerto Rican diaspora in Hartford, CT, and are a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. She makes within the lineages of decolonial uprisings, collections of tiny mirrors at queer clubs, and the precolonial languages of the drum and the braid. Lola is the creative director and percussion section leader for Las Mariquitas, NYC’s Queer and Trans Salsa band. They play in the experimental performance trio Dendarry Bakery, in the Latin Rock group AVATAREDEN, and are a part of the music composition team for Samora La Perdida’s “Spanglish Sh!t” musical. Their work has been performed at Lincoln Center, the Denver Art Museum, and with the New York Theatre Ballet. Lola is quoted in Rolling Stone saying “I want to abolish patriarchy in Salsa… this is a duty to our lineage.”

Rosa Bordallo is a singer-songwriter and native Chamorro (CHamoru) from the island of Guam (Guåhan), an American colony in the Mariåna Islands. She now in lives in Lenapehoking where she has recorded several albums and EP’s under the moniker Manett and as a member of the rock band, cholo. Her music can be found on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp. Her sophomore solo album, Isidro, will be released through Bad Auntie Records in July 2024.

Somah Toya Haaland (they/she) is a queer interdisciplinary artist and community organizer from the Pueblos of Laguna and Jemez in so-called New Mexico. They are passionate about radical healing, climate justice, trans rights, and empowering youth. Somah is a Media Organizer with Pueblo Action Alliance as well as a film & theater maker. This is their fourth year living as a guest in Lenapehoking.

Leland is Onöndowa'ga:' a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians and is currently a student at The New School majoring in Culture & Media. During his time in school, he has developed a passion for DJ'ing and Mixing. Known as leelander behind the decks you can expect a blend of current tracks mixed through house-created beats, that work together to create a dancy and upbeat set. 

Presented with support from the Mid Atlantic Folk and Traditional Arts – Community Projects program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Eileen and I worked alongside one another for years defending East River Park and that we get to share a night with Poetry Project gives me so much joy. I hope you'll join us. I imagine there may be some surprises.

You are invited to the coming Kinstillatory Fire ✨ Thursday April 18, 6-8pm ✨

A collective, urging action. Through our hands, our labor, our arrival. Join us, gather alongside and with famed LES DJ Dat Gurl Curly, deft instigator Andrea Haenggi, and land based poet Anangookwe Wolf.

Thursday April 18, 6-8pm in the backyard garden at Abrons Arts Center. Free. All are welcome.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

Born in a Swiss farming village and residing half of their life in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, andrea haenggi (she/they) is a body-based transdisciplinary artist who cultivates a research-based “ethnochoreobotanic” practice. Rooted in co-creating dance with the land-sea, plant life, and more-than-human kin, their work seeks to foster multispecies communities in the present and shape questions around decolonization, climate change, feminism, liberation, and care.

Anangookwe Wolf is an enrolled member of the Lac Courte Oreilles band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Fort Peck Assiniboine, and Dakota descent. They utilize forms of craft and storytelling to interweave familial narratives concerning cultural inheritance and present-day afflictions. Their focus is to create a visual story of the interpersonal lives of those they’ve known and have never met. 

In 2019, Anangookwe obtained their BFA focusing on Jewelry Design from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since graduating, Anangookwe’s visual work has been exhibited across the United States in galleries such as All My Relations Gallery (Minneapolis, Minnesota); The New Gallery (Clarksville, Tennessee); and Form & Concept (Santa Fe, New Mexico). Anangookwe is the recipient of residencies, grants, and awards through Vermont Studio Center, First Peoples Fund, and Alaska State Council on the Arts. As of 2024, they are an Indigenous Nations Poets fellow.

DJ Dat Gurl Curly is a Lower East Side legend. Her music parties, gatherings, pop ups, and radio shows are vibrantly known and always make a good time for her community and relatives.

Presented with support from the Mid Atlantic Folk and Traditional Arts – Community Projects program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Kinstillatory Fire welcomes us back ✨

The next six months of fire are lightly curated by an incredible collection of individual and collective artist warriors.

March 28, 6-8 pm in the backyard garden at Abrons Arts Center.

Curated by Sugar Vendil with work from Melinda Faylor, Sarah Galdes, treya Iam, Shane Larson ✨

We gather to listen. To fire, to the reverberations of radical empathy, chamber-protest, song. Until we understand solidarity into our bones, under our feet, within our moves, our gatherings - daily, urgent, recurring, mournful, celebratory.

Gather with us✨

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

Sugar Vendil (she/they) is a composer, pianist, and interdisciplinary artist who is forging new creative pathways as a second generation Filipinx American and future ancestor.  She started her artistic life as a classical pianist, and after spending nearly a decade searching for her own voice, her practice evolved into making music and performances that integrate sound, movement, and unconventional approaches to the piano. She has a keyboard/synth duo, Vanity Project, with composer Trevor Gureckis. Vendil is based in Lenapehoking, known as Brooklyn, where she lives with her partner and toddler, who she hopes will pursue dance and volleyball but will not force him/them.

Vendil’s work germinates from a kinesthetic and improvisatory approach rooted in lived experiences. Her sense of physicality and artistic autonomy is evident in her work, whether it is music, performance, or visual scores.

Pianist-composer Melinda Faylor weaves together dense and mercurial sound worlds using field recordings, synthesized sound and piano.

For Kinstillatory, Ms. Faylor will be working with recordings of fire, exploring it as a symbol of rebirth, destruction and protection.

Sarah Galdes is a drummer, composer, and music producer born in Australia to Indian / Maltese parents, Sarah is currently based in NYC and engages with a wide variety of artists. She has delved into traditional South Korean Samul Nori drumming and North Indian music traditions to further enrich her rhythmic syntax. 

Sarah performs as a soloist using Sensory Percussion sensors to explore texture, groove, and leafy found sounds.

treya lam is a multi-instrumentalist composer and multidisciplinary creator whose atmospheric voice, fluency on guitar, piano, looped viola, percussion and found sounds culminates in liberation orientedsongwriting and scores throughout their solo work as well as collaborations across mediums. 

otherland is an interdisciplinary grief and regeneration ritual rooted in chamber-protest songs that explores grief as a catalyst for radical empathy, intersectional solidarity and repairing our relationship to the earth.

Shane Larson is a NYC-based movement and video artist, focused on sense memory. 

listening #1 is a two-person exploration about being and seeing inside of the beast—the city and its people, its movements, and its coincidental events.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter was created with funding from The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Presented with support from the Mid Atlantic Folk and Traditional Arts – Community Projects program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

You are invited to this coming Kinstillatory Fire, Thursday, August 17th, 6-8pm at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side, Mannahatta. This gathering is an ongoing celebration of community, a practice of showing up in care and action. As always, we recognize fire’s capacity to enunciate with us, our joys, our rage, our needs. We gather with artists Savannah Romero and Abdiel who voice future memory and land-body relations, dance for O’Shea, our transformations and justice. We will send support to our relatives on Maui, in community

The Kinstillatory is an ongoing project of Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

This is the last fire before parental leave and a fire to note a loved community member’s last night in NYC.

BIOS

Savannah Romero is an Eastern Shoshone storyteller, writer, poet and educator. She lives in Lenapahoking, also known as Brooklyn, New York. Her poems explore the confluences of colonialism, capitalism, land-body relations, and memory. She is working on a debut collection of fiction stories, is earning her Masters in Fine Arts for Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and serves as a poet editor for Chapter House Journal.

Abdiel (they/them) is a Hustle dance champion, educator, and community organizer dedicated to the cultural preservation and creative expansion of the New York Hustle partner dance style. As co-founder of "Dance is Life"--a communitarian free public dance party event-- Abdiel creates space to facilitate human connection, communal healing, and celebration while revitalizing cultural historical sites where Hustle has been traditionally danced. Abdiel has taught their gender neutral approach to partner dance at the Juilliard School, Harvard University, Stamford University, University of Washington, University of California Irvine, and others. They are also a former Fulbright Specialist with the US Dept. of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and a former Principal dancer of the Martha Graham Dance Company.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

• • • 
Catalyst programs are made possible in part with generous funding from Dance/NYC, Howard Gilman Foundation, Mellon Foundation and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Saturday, July 22, 2023
4:00pm & 6:00 pm
Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College
33 Garden Road
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000

4:00 PM Free with RSVP at Eventbrite
6:00 PM Free with RSVP at Eventbrite [SOLD OUT!]

The Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College presents Being Future Being: Land / Celestial by Emily Johnson / Catalyst as part of a series of programming developed in partnership with CCS Bard to surround the exhibition Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-determination Since 1969.

Being Future Being is a multi-scalar work, created by Emily Johnson for the stage and beyond. Featuring a newly commissioned score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon and a stellar cast of performers, Being Future Being: Land / Celestial invites you into a series of intimate encounters with our more-than-human kin. As audiences journey to three separate outdoor locations, they form a powerful processional—one with the capacity to reshape the way we relate to ourselves, and to the human and more-than-human cohabitants of our worlds.

The performance is approximately 1 hour, followed by a reception, and a performance by Jeffrey Gibson and Arielle Twist.

On Sunday, July 23, 2023: 2:00pm, please join us for Jeffrey Gibson and Emily Johnson in conversation, moderated by Candice Hopkins. This conversation will take place at the Hessel Museum.

For more information, please visit the Hessel Museum of Art’s website.

• • • 
Catalyst programs are made possible in part with generous funding from Dance/NYC, Howard Gilman Foundation, Mellon Foundation and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

You are invited to the Kinstillatory fire, March 16th 6-8pm at Abrons Arts Center.

Ashley Pierre-Louis, Colette Denali Montoya and Camille Georgeson-Usher (via Emily Johnson) share work fireside. 

These artists, in an unassailable power gather us toward story.

Indigiqueer languages flooding letters, finding erotics, holding possibility and moving through layers of light, through complication, through the f*ckery of colonization. Gather on the Lower East Side of Mannahatta in Lenapehoking. There is joy here, partnership, a pleasure activism finding way alongside adrienne maree brown. The fire itself is process. A way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. 

A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

Artists

Colette Denali Montoya is a member of Isleta Pueblo and a descendant of San Felipe Pueblo, living in Lenapehoking. As a queer, Indigenous librarian/ archivist/ oral historian, she works at the intersections of oral history and memory. In her work as a university reference librarian, as well as an audio archivist at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Colette connects people to stories and knowledge. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin – Madison and earned her Master of Library and Information Science degree at the City University of New York – Queens College. Colette is currently an Oral History Association - National Endowment for the Humanities fellow working with Indigenous oral histories from Katahdin Woods & Waters National Monument.

Ashley Pierre-Louis grew up on the lands of the Tequesta, Miccosukee, and Seminole peoples (Miami, FL) and received education from New World School of the Arts and later from Florida State University. After graduating, she moved to Lenapehoking (New York City) and has been working with various artists and collaborators in the field. 

She is the associate choreographer for the play Help (2022) by acclaimed poet and playwright Claudia Rankine, directed by Taibi Magar, and commissioned at The Shed in New York. She premiered the play Thoughts of A Colored Man (2020) by playwright Keenan Scott II and director Steve Broadnax III at Syracuse Stage and Baltimore Center Stage as well as performed for the premiere of Donna Uchizono’s work March Under an Empty reign (2018) at The Joyce: NY Quadrille Festival. She was one of Gallim’s Moving Women spring 2021 artist-in-residence and has also been a part of Alvin Ailey’s inaugural Choreography Unlocked Festival (2018) under the direction of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Urban Bush Women, and Robert Battle. 

Her most current artistic work include working with Shamel Pitts’ multidisciplinary performance collective TRIBE as a performer & maker in Pitts’ performance art residency incubator Solace of RED and as dramaturge for Pitts’ newest evening-length duet, Touch of RED. She also works with Indigenous choreographer Emily Johnson in her newest multi-scalar creation, Being Future Being as a performer, as well as freelances and choreographs in the city. Other current artistic collaborations include working with Edisa Weeks and DELIRIOUS Dances as part of Edisa’s 3 RITES project: Life, Liberty, Happiness as well as acting as the Dream Partner and Program Manager for Florida State University’s 2023 spring semester study domestic program, Arts in NYC.

Camille Georgeson-Usher is a Coast Salish / Sahtu Dene / Scottish scholar, artist, and arts administrator from Galiano Island, British Columbia, unceded territories of the Penelakut and Lamalcha First Nations, as well as other Hul’qumi’num speaking peoples and is the ceded traditional territories of Tsawwassen First Nation. She is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies department at Queen’s University where she is writing on ontologies of gathering. She is interested in looking at the many ways in which peoples move together through urban space, relationalities and intimacies with the everyday, and acts of mark making through the example of public art practices as types of gathering from an Indigenous perspective.

Usher completed her MA in Art History at Concordia University. Her thesis, “more than just flesh: the arts as resistance and sexual empowerment,” focused on how the arts may be used as a tool to engage Indigenous youth in discussions of health and sexuality. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art History and Curatorial Practices (Tenure-Track) at OCAD University in Toronto, ON. She served for over five years as the Executive Director of the Indigenous Curatorial Collective and sits on several boards and committees: Toronto Biennial of Art, Board Member; OCADU Indigenous Education Council Member; City of Kingston’s Public Art Working Group, Committee Member; Research Creation Committee, Queen’s University, Member. In addition to Usher’s professional and academic work she also has a profound love of long distance running and has completed 10 full marathons, one of which was a 50km event that thread through mountainous trails in Quebec. She began learning piano in 2018. She lives in Toronto, ON.

• • • 
Catalyst programs are made possible in part with generous funding from Dance/NYC, Howard Gilman Foundation, Mellon Foundation and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Conflicting Relations is a day-long program that brings together artists, curators, and institutions whose practices go beyond hospitality and act as correctives to prescribed host and guest hierarchies, on intimate and infrastructural levels.

It is convened by Frame Contemporary Art Finland as part of their 2023 Rehearsing Hospitalities program and is co-presented with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York as part of artist Matti Aikio’s 2022–2023 Vera List Center Sámi Fellowship.  

Since the inception of Rehearsing Hospitalities in 2019, Indigenous perspectives on matters of hospitality—and acknowledging the various forms of social, cultural, and political inhospitality that Sámi people experience—have been critical to the program and the dialogues it fosters. This two-part event “re-turns” to matters of Indigeneity and hospitality in a US and Canadian context and presents Matti Aikio’s practice alongside a range of practitioners to exchange resonances and resistances. Speakers include Matti Aikio, Emily Johnson, Elina Waage Mikalsen, Wanda Nanibush, S.J Norman, Ali Rosa-Salas, Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda, and Karoline Trollvik, among others.  

11:00 am EST Committed Relationships 
This session reflects on diverse modes of hospitality and its attendant politics. Pairs of artists and host institutions discuss their long-term relationships and how they redefine practices, understandings, and engagements between them. Choreographer and director Emily Johnson and Ali Rosa-Salas, Vice President of Visual and Performing Arts at Henry Street Settlement, discuss the transformative power of their collaboration and its reverberation throughout the institution. Artist and writer S.J Norman and Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda, Head of Community Access and Inclusion, at Performance Space, map out the relations powering Knowledge of Wounds, a series of care-oriented programs that originated at Performance Space in 2018 and other partner organizations. Artist Elina Waage Mikalsen and Karoline Trollvik, Head of Communications and External Relations, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, discuss their experience working for and in Sámi and majority institutions. Through these and other examples, the panel considers what hospitality looks like when led by Indigenous artists and how institutions self-correct to be in good relations with artists, the land, and local communities. Introductions and moderated discussion by Yvonne Billimore, Associate Curator, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, and Eriola Pira, Curator and Director of Programs, Vera List Center.

1:30 pm EST Lunch
Hospitality for this program extends to include lunch for all participants.

2:30 pm EST  Matti Aikio in conversation with Wanda Nanibush 
In conversation with Anishinaabe curator, artist, and educator Wanda Nanibush, Curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Sámi artist Matti Aikio presents his research on the so-called “neo-Lapp movement” in Finland and settler-colonial attempts at claiming Indigenous identity. Taking into consideration Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, Aikio looks past individual violations to question the structural and large-scale implications of this movement as a counter-strategy to the political mobilization of the Sámi. Aikio’s practice considers the ongoing conflict between the Sámi culture and the Nordic nation-states’ use of natural resources. Introductions by Monica Gathuo, Executive Producer of Together Again project, the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York.  

Closing remarks by Jussi Koitela, Head of Programme, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, and Carin Kuoni, Senior Director and Chief Curator, Vera List Center.

Conflicting Relations is presented as part of Matti Aikio’s 2022–2023 Sámi Fellowship, a joint initiative between Frame Contemporary Art Finland, the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. It is presented as part of FCINY’s Together Again project and Aikio’s participation in Frame’s Rehearsing Hospitalities 2023 public program.

• • • 
Catalyst programs are made possible in part with generous funding from Dance/NYC, Howard Gilman Foundation, Mellon Foundation and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Artist Salon Presentation with

EMILY JOHNSON / CATALYST: BEING FUTURE BEING

SUNDAY, JANUARY 15
11:30 am eastern

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS
219 W 19th St, New York, NY 10011

PLEASE NOTE THAT FACE MASKS ARE REQUIRED FOR THIS EVENT

Emily Johnson / Catalyst invites you to learn more about our newest touring project and process Being Future Being, which delves into the power of creation to build a visual, aural, and ancestral landscape of Indigenous power. Featuring an original score by Pulitzer-Prize winning composer Raven Chacon and a stellar cast, Being Future Being is a multiscalar performance and a starting point for relationship. By (re)building new visions of the forces that brought this world into being, the work becomes a site for transformation, ushering into focus new futures with the potential to reshape the way we relate to ourselves, our environment, and to the human and more-than-human cohabitants of our world. 

Emily notes, “Being Future Being asks audiences to join in Indigenous-led community processes that move from each presentation out into the world in what I call the Speculative Architecture of the Overflow, with actions that directly support local rematriative, protection, and Land Back efforts in ways that foster Indigenous kinship, accomplices, and audience relationships." We will also share updates on our kinstillatory network of collaborators—Catalyst's four Branches of Making, Scholarship, Knowledge and Action—who guide the frameworks of our work and steward its values. 

In addition to ours, this shared program includes presentations by Milka Djordjevich, Miguel Gutierrez and Abby Zbikowski.

FREE, RSVPs Encouraged
https://newyorklivearts.org/event/artist-salon/

• • • 
Catalyst programs are made possible in part with generous funding from Dance/NYC, Howard Gilman Foundation, Mellon Foundation and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

You are invited to the Kinstillatory Fire, with artists S.J. Norman and Razelle Benally.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring our practices, grammars, needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. Alot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

Artists

Oglala Lakota/Diné film director and writer Razelle Benally holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is currently a 3rd year MFA candidate of Film Production at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She was a 2015 Sundance Institute NativeLab Short Film Production Fellow with her first short narrative I am Thy Weapon. In 2017 her two-hundred dollar budgeted thesis film Raven traveled the international film festival circuit and found local success winning several awards including best short narrative at: the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, Native Cinema Showcase, and the New Mexico Film Foundation.

In 2018 Benally directed a PSA promoting the Indigenous Vote featuring Mark Ruffalo, Tonia Jo Hall, and Shailene Woodley. Her latestshort narrative Ókiya was funded by Academy Award Winner Spike Lee and is currently in post-production for a December 2020 premiere. She is in development of two feature-length narratives: Winter in Black Mesa (pre-production 2022), and War Cries (pre-production 2023). She has received support from Sundance Institute’s 2018 Creative Producing Summit and is now being supported through the 2020 Sundance Institute Feature Film Program as part of the Screenwriters Intensive track. She is represented by Rain Management Group, a talent and creative firm out of Los Angeles, CA.

S.J. Norman is an artist, author and cultural worker. He is a transmasculine Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Since 2006 he has lived and worked between so-called Australia, Germany, the UK and the continent known to many Native tribes as Turtle Island (US).

His practice is routed through the volatile interstices of the social and the corporeal. His artistic and curatorial praxes are sites of ongoing, situated research into the body and its extended field of political, cultural, physical and metaphysical interactions. Drawing on embodied ancestral lineages of ceremonial praxis, Norman frequently utilises relational and process-based choreographies as a mode of structural critique: reflected in his work is an abiding interest in the space of co- and inter-corporeality, the forces that suffuse it, and how the live act might be utilised as a mean to examine, disrupt and re-inscribe prevailing systems of social power.

He was the recipient of the the 67th Blake Prize for Art, a 2018 Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and a 2019 Australia Council Fellowship. His most recent exhibitions include the 22nd Biennale of Sydney and the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia. His work has been featured in Artforum, the New York Times, and Vogue Magazine, among many others. A forthcoming monograph of his practice will be published by Art+Australia in 2023. Since 2019 he has been the co-curator (with Joseph M. Pierce, Cherokee Nation), of Knowledge of Wounds, a multi-disciplinary platform centering queer and trans First Nations artists, writers, healers and cultural workers.

He is also a poet and storyteller: his first book, the short story collection Permafrost, won the Kill Your Darlings Prize for Unpublished Manuscript in 2017, and upon publication in 2021, was shortlisted for 6 major literary awards in Australia, including the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in two categories, and the Stella Prize. His second book, Blood from a Stone, is forthcoming with the University of Queensland press in 2023.