Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet: Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter

November 18–18, 2021
6:30pm

“How do our cells become oriented to justice? I think sometimes it is when we tune all of our cells toward listening.” —Emily Johnson

A gathering to tend, to defend, to protect. Land, one another, kin.

Join us for a fireside gathering with offerings by Savannah Romero, Lowess Lane, Oz Halo, and Chloe Alexandra Thompson.

ABOUT

Savannah Romero is an Eastern Shoshone poet, land defender, and organizer. She shared poems at last week’s 1000people1000trees / east river park action / xr_ny vigil where her words reminded me how deeply we must root to the knowledge of land and to the knowledge that our protection of land is our right and our kin.

Oz Halo is a multimedia artist building synesthetic language to heal colonial trauma & ancestral memory carried in the body as a mixed Rroma and Quileute multigenerational sex worker and survivor of sex trafficking, homelessness, and domestic violence. Their soundwork falls under the name Morher and will include remote sound offerings from Chloe Alexandra Thompson, an incredible Cree sound artist living and working in Lenapehoking.

"Do unto others as you would have done unto you" neighborhood phenom, Lowess Lane powers beats and lyrics from her soul. She is a Lower East Sider through and through, a force who brings joy with her as she fights for her community and East River Park.

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.

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 Credit: Ash Gilbertson