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.

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. This presentation is made possible in part through 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.

Saturday, October 15, 3:00 and 5:00 pm

Location TBA for all ticket holders

Being Future Being: Land / Celestial is an outdoor performance activation that will take place at an offsite location Saturday, October 15th, at 3:00 and 5:00 pm. The location in Lower Manhattan will be shared with ticket holders directly on the day of the event. Audiences are offered an encounter filled with story, movement, and sound that invites us into relationship with our more-than-human kin, and calls us to honor and protect the beings we live amongst.

About Being Future Being:

Celebrated for a distinguished body of dance works, Emily Johnson unites audiences in a shared experience of movement, place, history, collective action, and the continuance of Indigenous cultural practices and perspectives. Her newest dance performance and process, Being Future Being, delves into the power of creation, with new stories that seek to sustain a world that must begin again. Co-commissioned by New York Live Arts and featuring an original score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, Being Future Being conjures present joy as it seeks to build a radically-just and Indigenized future, one we can live in now and foster for generations to come.

Being Future Being: Land/Celestial
Tickets & Info

ABOUT

Emily Johnson, originally from Alaska, is an artist who makes body-based work and the artistic director of her performance company, Emily Johnson/Catalyst. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, she is based on the Lower East Side of Manahatta in Lenapehoking. Emily is of the Yup’ik Nation and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. She is a land and water protector and an activist for justice, sovereignty, and well-being. Her dances function as portals and installations, engaging audiences within and through space, time, and environment–interacting with a place’s architecture, people, land, history, and role in community. Emily is a co-compiler of the document Creating New Futures: Guidelines toward Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts, is developing a Global First Nations Performance Network with colleagues Reuben Roqueni, Ed Bourgeois, Ronee Penoi, Lori Pourier, Vallejo Ganter; and has hosted ceremonial fires in partnership with Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side since 2017.

Karyn Recollet Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is an urban Cree scholar/writer currently living in the Williams Treaty territory, and teaching in the Dish with One Spoon treaty territory. Recollet explores celestial land pedagogies as ‘kinstillatory’ in her work, expressing an understanding of land pedagogy that exceeds the terrestrial. Recollet thinks alongside dance making practices, hip hop, and visual/digital art as they relate to forms of Indigenous futurities and relational practices of being. Recollet co-writes with dance choreographers and artists engaged in other mediums to expand upon methodologies that consider land relationships and kinship making practices that are going to take us into the future.

IV is a gender deficient Trans* Queer mx Indige POC Water-Protector-In-Training. One’s work bridge’s abstract performance art, sculpture and group task based vignettes. The anchor is the futility of labor and generating an action without a ‘purpose’ or with no inherent value; questioning value structures.

FUNDING

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.

Image courtesy of Emily Johnson

ACCESSIBILITY

This event will take place in the Amphitheater.

The Amphitheater consists of sixteen steps including four distinct landings. Patrons who cannot navigate stairs can only be seated on the upper landing. The Amphitheater can be accessed via an elevator.

Read more about accessibility at Abrons Arts Center

The second live-streamed online conversation of the Jeffrey Gibson Screening Series features the artist in conversation with the three Indigenous creatives he collaborated with to activate his monument sculpture ‘Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House:’ Laura Ortman, Emily Johnson, and Raven Chacon.

Of the three, Gibson said “I knew immediately that I wanted to work with Laura, Emily, and Raven on programming for ‘Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House.” He continued “They are all established artists in their own right, and I have so much respect for how they each use process-based work to extend cultural philosophies in new ways.”

The discussion will be moderated by Socrates’ Curatorial Assistant, danilo machado and will include time for questions from the audience.

WATCH ON ZOOM*

*registration is full for Zoom, please watch the live-stream on Facebook

zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wJxOwdzVRIWD0QC7FI8duA

WATCH ON FACEBOOK

fb.me/e/c6GmBqFO7

All times listed in Eastern Standard Time

This event is captioned.

You’re invited to join us, Indigo Arts Alliance, and a very special panel of artists in a new conversation Seeking Resonance: Toward Being Future Beings. Looking toward the Maine development of Yup’ik artist and choreographer Emily Johnson’s new multidisciplinary project, “Being Future Being” – join us for a conversation that brings Maine-based artists Jason Brown (Penobscot), Donna Decontie (Penobscot) and Chris Newell (Passamaquoddy) into dialogue with Emily, her collaborator Drew Michael (Yup’ik and Inupiaq) and you.

Together, they share a conversation that spans fashion, dance, performance, music and visual arts, as they discuss their experiences as Indigenous artists making work today.

Free RSVP to receive the Zoom link to this conversation.

IN CONVERSATION

• Emily Johnson, Dancer, Choreographer & Director

• Jason Brown, Designer & Performer (Firefly the Hybrid)

• Donna Decontie-Brown, Jewelry Designer

• Drew Michael, Visual Artist

• Chris Newell, Facilitator, Executive Director of Abbe Museum & Senior Partner to Wabanaki Nations

The Seeking Resonance Series is a partnership between Portland Ovations, Indigo Arts Alliance, in collaboration with the Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center.

All times listed in Eastern Standard Time

The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better, Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s) 

This International screening and live witnessing event will take place online at 7pm Plymouth, UK // 2pm EST NYC US

Register HERE for the live Zoom event

You are invited to a screening of the film performance, The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better, Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s), followed by a responsive witnessing with Karyn Recollet, Emily Johnson, Dylan Robinson and Camille Georgeson-Usher. In partnership with Digital Hub and Socrates Sculpture Park.

Emily Johnson will be joined by the BODY of SCHOLARSHIP - Indigenous futurists, visionary thinkers and organizers:

Karyn Recollet is an urban Cree scholar/artist/and writer, Recollet’s work focuses on relationality and care as both an analytic and technology for Indigenous movement-based forms of inquiry within urban spaces. Recollet works collaboratively with Indigenous dance-makers and scholars to theorize forms of urban glyphing. Recollet is in conversation with dance choreographers, Black and Indigenous futurist thinkers and Indigenous and Black geographers as ways to theorize and activate futurist, feminist, celestial and decolonial land-ing relationships with more-than-human kinships, and each other.

Dylan Robinson is a Stó:lō scholar who holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University, located on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples. Dr. Robinson’s current research project documents the history of contemporary Indigenous public art across North America, and questions how Indigenous rights and settler colonialism are embodied and spatialized in public space. Dr. Robinson is also an avid Halq'eméylem language learner. Yú:wqwlha kws t'í:lemtel te sqwá:ltset!

Camille Georgeson-Usher is a Coast Salish/Sahtu Dene/Scottish scholar, artist, and writer from Galiano Island, BC of the Pune’laxutth’ (Penelakut) Nation. She completed her MA in Art History at Concordia University where she worked to prove the impact of the performing arts in building confidence and leadership amongst Indigenous youth by learning to talk/embody discussions about safer sexual practices. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies department at Queen’s University and has been awarded the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships-Doctoralfor her research-creation workaround urban Indigenous experiences within Indigenous arts collectives and other groups activating public spaces through gestures both little and big. Her artistic and curatorial practices are predominantly looking through acts of deep, loving convergences with colleague Asinnajaq (Isabella Weetaluktuk).

Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the forthcoming special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” Along with SJ Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds.

The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better, Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s)

Performed by Emily Johnson and Angel Acuña, Nia-Selassi Clark, Linda LaBeija, Denaysha Macklin, Annie Ming-Hao Wang, Angelica Mondol Viaña, Ashley Pierre-Louis, Katrina Reid, Kim Savarino, Sasha Smith, Stacy Lynn Smith, Paul Aster Stone-Tsao, Kim Velsey, Sugar Vendil

Invocation by Nanate River
Garments and Masks by Jeffrey Gibson
Sculpture by Jeffrey Gibson

Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House, 2020.
Plywood, posters, steel, LEDs, and performances, 44 x 44 x 21 ft.

Original performance presented by Socrates Sculpture Park, NY, September 16, 2020

Photo by Scott Lynch

Presented by Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter and
the New York AIDS Memorial

DATE: Thursday, February 18, 2021

TIME: 7-9 pm EST

LOCATION: In the outdoor amphitheater at the Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Lenapehoking (NYC)

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

We invite you to join us for a community fire.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter (a project of Emily Johnson/Catalyst Dance and Karyn Recollet) and the New York AIDS Memorial invite you to gather around a fire in the outdoor amphitheater at Abrons Arts Center at Henry Street Settlement for a re-presentation of our December program HEAR ME: VOICES OF THE EPIDEMIC, an open-space sound installation composed of historical texts, poetry, speeches, music, and more that capture the history and ongoing story of HIV and AIDS in NYC. This event is also in support of Love Positive Women and will feature a number of special guests!

This event is free and everyone is welcome. No prior experience with fire or HIV is required. Hot beverages will be on hand.

By attending you are required to respect our Community Agreements to wear a mask over your mouth and nose at all times and maintain 6 feet of physical distance from others at all times.

#nycamhearme #nycaidsmemorial #kinstillatory #lovepositivewomen

The second documentary premiere of the Jeffrey Gibson Screening Series features Emily Johnson‘s new piece ‘The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better – Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s)’ performed on and around Gibson’s monument installation, ‘Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House.’

Johnson’s site-specific dance work stages pathways for regeneration, renewal and transformation. The performance begins with a gathering at the shore of the East River estuary with words from artist and activist Nataneh River, and then moves to ascend Gibson’s monument. ‘The Ways We Love…’ incorporates storytelling, invocation, movement, and light to illuminate Indigenous presence and the histories held in the parkland, which is situated in Lenapehoking – homeland of the Lenapeyok people. The evening culminates with the planting of tobacco, and the project continues spring 2021 with the planting of Sehsapsing corn seeds — a tribute to the future and a commitment to Lenape return.

The documentary premiere will be preceded by a Land Acknowledgment from the Indigenous Kinship Collective.

PREMIERE WATCH LINK

bit.ly/JohnsonPremiere

All times listed in Eastern Standard Time

Photo by Scott Lynch

at Tufts University
Sophia Gordon Multipurpose Room 
15 Talbot Avenue
Medford, MA 02155

FRIDAY, MARCH 27 // 6:45 PM – 8:00 PM
Emily Johnson (Yup’ik) and Karyn Recollet (Cree) offer a performance that extends from their ongoing Kinstillatory Mapping collaboration.

Presented as part of Resurgent Futures: Indigenous Arts, Theory & Practice, a two-day interdisciplinary symposium that brings together a diverse group of artists and scholars working within critical Indigenous studies and the visual and performing arts.

“It is not happenstance or luck that Indigenous peoples and our lands still exist after centuries of attack. This is our strategic brilliance. Our presence is our weapon, and this is visible to me at every protest, every mobilization, every time a Two Spirit person gifts us with a dance at our powwows, every time we speak our truths, every time we embody Indigenous life” (As We Have Always Done)

—Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

at Performance Space New York
150 1st Avenue, New York, NY 10009

This discussion with Emily Johnson (Yup’ik) and Karyn Recollet (Cree) expands on the process of their collaborative project Kinstillatory Mapping. Kinstillatory Action builds our relations at the center of a radical and (possibly) joyful corporeal–and otherwise–present.

Presented as part of Knowledge of Wounds, organized by S.J Norman and Joseph M. Pierce. For more information visit Performance Space New York.

A monthly fire-side gathering on the Lower East Side in the amphitheater at Abrons Arts Center. Hosted by Emily Johnson/Catalyst.

Sit by the fire and welcome the evening with neighbors, stories, and food (bring some to share). The January fire includes readings by Nicole Wallace, Demian DinéYazhi', and Karyn Recollet. Pumpkin soup and cornbread generously prepared by Anne Apparu.

Gather and welcome.

January 9, 7pm, 466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Mannahatta, Lenapehoking

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
Nicole Wallace is the Managing Director of The Poetry Project and author of WAASAMOWIN (IMP, October 2019). She is originally from Gakaabikaang, located in what is currently called Minnesota, and is of settler/European ancestry and a descendent of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe).

Demian DinéYazhi´ is a transdisciplinary Indigenous Diné Nádleehi´ artist, poet, and curator. In 2018 they self-published two books of poetry, ANCESTRAL MEMORY: poems 2009-2016, and AN INFECTED SUNSET. Demian’s stance as a self-publishing poet is a political statement of maintaining autonomy without the jurisdiction or approval from Western-trained editors, publishers, or critics. Demian also publishes zines and publications through R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment. Follow Demian: @heterogeneoushomosexual + @RISEindigenous

Anne Apparu is a cook, guerrilla gardener, community builder, home maker and is dedicated to building sustainable ways in her locality. Anne generously created the feast for 2019 First Nations Dialogues' Tëmikèkw, An honoring and welcome gathering.

Karyn Recollet is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto’s Women & Gender Studies Institute, and is a Cree woman originally from the Sturgeon Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan. Her research and writing explores Indigenous performance, hip-hop culture, and Indigenous hip hop feminism, with a particular focus on new Indigeneities produced in urban hub spaces as they shape solidarity movements and social activism. 

• • •

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Emily Johnson gratefully acknowledges Karyn Recollet's work and collaboration in the concepts of kinstillatory.

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. Emily Johnson/Catalyst gratefully acknowledges Amerinda and their fiscal sponsorship of this project.

photo by Rahim Fortune

A monthly fire-side gathering on the Lower East Side.

Join us each month as we welcome the fire, the evening, and each other with offerings of stories, food (bring some to share), star knowledge, and dancing. Hosted by Emily Johnson/Catalyst and Abrons Arts Center in partnership with Lenape Center and support from Amerinda.

Emily Johnson gratefully acknowledges Karyn Recollet's work and collaboration in the concepts of kinstillatory.

Gather and welcome.

October 3, 7pm, 466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Mannahatta, Lenapehoking

A monthly fire-side gathering on the Lower East Side.

Join us each month as we welcome the fire, the evening, and each other with offerings of stories, food (bring some to share), star knowledge, and dancing. Hosted by Emily Johnson/Catalyst and Abrons Arts Center in partnership with Lenape Center and support from Amerinda.

Emily Johnson gratefully acknowledges Karyn Recollet's work and collaboration in the concepts of kinstillatory.

Gather and welcome.

September 6, 7pm, 466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Mannahatta, Lenapehoking

A monthly fire-side gathering on the Lower East Side.

Join us each month as we welcome the fire, the evening, and each other with offerings of stories, food (bring some to share), star knowledge, and dancing. Hosted by Emily Johnson/Catalyst and Abrons Arts Center in partnership with Lenape Center and support from Amerinda.

Emily Johnson gratefully acknowledges Karyn Recollet's work and collaboration in the concepts of kinstillatory.

Gather and welcome.

July 20, 7pm, 466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Mannahatta, Lenapehoking