This event is organized by Emily Johnson and Clara Rodriguez Torres with support from Karyn Recollet. Featuring readings, performances, and more from: Indigenous Kinship Collective / DJ Raphy CBS / Goldy Lox Lowess Lane / thee goon & lord haydeez / Claritmente / Eileen Myles / Stop Shopping Choir​​

ABOUT

BATTLE FOR THE PARK BATTLE FOR THE PARK is an ongoing series of public actions launched on August 16, 2021. The mission of BATTLE FOR THE PARK actions are to advocate for community-focused mitigation projects that protect our neighborhoods with truly resilient plans and community-focused organizing while we dismantle the capitalist structures that ensure, promote and profit from extractive logics. BATTLE FOR THE PARK advocates for Indigenous-led land protective and rematriative efforts such as returning to wetlands, acknowledging, locating and protecting sacred sites, and LandBack. Their goal is to expose and end the increasing erasure of and extraction from Indigenous land. They work with their allies to protect the East River Park, its 1000 trees and to fight against the destruction of a vital biodiverse greenspace that impacts the Lower East Side community.

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 RecolletPh.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 City Artist Corps, The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.Image Credit: Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter, photo by Jeong Lee.