Center for Art,
Research and Alliances
05 – 07 August, 2022

Conjuring #3

Publication Cover

As a prologue, Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is pleased to present Conjurings, a public program unfolding over three weekends in July and August 2022. Shaped by scholars, artists, musicians, writers, shamans, machines, sonic technologies, and many other life-forms and undefinable disciplines, Conjurings braids invocation, incantation, questioning, un-earthing, and ceremony to open space for future (un)doings.

Convened by Erika Sprey and artists Lamin Fofana and Sky Hopinka have been working together with Emmy Catedral, Curator of Public Programs, and Manuela Moscoso, Executive Director, conjuring weaved voices inspired by each of their own practices and research throughout the program and beyond. Out of this process of forging new collaborations and expanding our networks, we are happy to present various evolving forms of live and situated experimentings.

Emerson Uýra
Emerson Uýra

Our guiding question is: How do we dream not only about ourselves? That is to say, to dream not only about ourselves, but about each other, about beings of the forest, of water, of animals, buildings,  shelters—of concrete or invisible beings, as porous interdependent entities reliant on each other and everything around us. Such collective dreamwork requires a deep and thorough understanding of the shifting mechanisms of oppression and the realities of racial capitalism. It demands the undoing of Western categories and demarcations of thought; linear and quantifiable time-space notions, and inadequate dichotomies of body and spirit, rational and organic, nature and culture, dreaming and waking. Each invited conjurer will speak to and through these conditions for collective and liberatory dream practice—listening with care to what emerges from these future ancestries, and tending their rich and opaque transmissions.

SCHEDULE

FRIDAY
August 05, 2022

7:00 pm Doors Open
7:45 pm Opening Remarks
8:00 pm Sugar Vendil

Composer and musician Sugar Vendil will share an evening of music that encompasses her practice as a chamber musician, soloist, and budding synthesizer queen. Vendil will share new semi-improvised pieces for synth & voice. The opening installation-style performance of “ooh wo aa oo wa o” for vocalizing chamber ensemble will feature her ensemble The Nouveau Classical Project: Laura Cocks, flute; Marina Kifferstein, violin (NCP alum); cellist Thea Mesirow; and guest clarinetist Yuma Uesaka.

9:30 pm Aldrin Valdez: Writings

Aldrin Valdez will present writing that thinks through romances, histories, and movies.

9:45 pm Les The DJ: Sa Dako Pa Roon

Les The DJ will play an all-vinyl set of music from the Philippines and its Diaspora, and create musical narratives that evoke nostalgia and curiosity.

11:00pm End

Les The DJ
Les The DJ

SATURDAY
August 06, 2022

1:30 pm Doors Open
1:45 pm Opening Remarks
2 pm Lavender Suarez

Lavender Suarez leads a group discussion about dreaming and listening, then invites us to close our eyes and enter a hypnagogic sonic world with a live meditative sound bath.

3:30 pm Kemi Alabi

Prompted by poems from Kemi Alabi's award-winning debut collection Against Heaven, this interactive reading will lead listeners through a sonic spellwork experiment.

4:00 pm Camille Barton and Annika Hansteen-Izora: Chrysalis to Catalyst

A collective and somatic experiment in communal dreaming. Beginning with a conversation between Camille Barton and Annika Hansteen-Izora on dreaming as a source of radical imagination, participants will then collectively engage in a communal dreaming activity to meditate on and hold deep presence with the futures we dream of.

6:00 pm BREAK
7:00 pm Doors
7:15 pm Opening Remarks
7:30 pm charles theonia

charles will read from their manuscript-in-progress, Queer Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can't Relax. Like meeting on the dance floor, these poems posit that citation is an active form of friendship, a method of reaching across generations to reconstitute queer and trans language into a collective moment.

7:45 pm Wo Chan

Poet & drag performer Chan will be reading from Togetherness, their debut collection of poetry which tells "stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant and culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking."

8:00 pm Nicole Wallace

Nicole will read a selection of newer writings // works in progress + poems from their chapbook, WAASAMOWIN.

8:15 pm Maria Hupfield and Electric Djinn: Spirit is Alive, Magic is Afoot

Drawing from their individual practices Maria Hupfield and Electric Djinn reunite in the shared collaborative space, to create new work through the combination of organic sound, electronic music, movement and materials.

9:15 pm Break
9:30 pm Suzanne Kite and Robbie Wing: ᎤᎩᏥᏕᏱ ᎠᏗᏗᏍᎪ ᏧᎸᏫᏍᏓᏁᏗ ᏱᎩ

ᎤᎩᏥᏕᏱ ᎠᏗᏗᏍᎪ ᏧᎸᏫᏍᏓᏁᏗ ᏱᎩ is a sound installation and performance by Robbie Wing and Kite comprised of quadraphonic speakers, three sculptures, and a 20 minute performance. Field recordings taken at dusk and dawn at No Flesh Creek and Kyle Dam in Kyle, South Dakota surround a prairie root system, a sonified pillow, and dreaming medicines. The performance includes body interface, banjo and field recording composition.

10:30 pm AfroOankali: DJ Set

AfroOankali serves ritual bass: a hypnotic blend of low end frequencies and polyrhythms which celebrates the Afro-Caribbean influence in electronic music, underground club culture and the healing potential of bass music.

11:15 pm End

Maria Hupfield and Electric Djinn, performing The Kind of Dream You’ve Never Seen, 2018
Maria Hupfield and Electric Djinn, performing The Kind of Dream You’ve Never Seen, 2018

SUNDAY
August 07, 2022

1:00 pm Doors Open
1:30 pm Opening Remarks
1:45 pm COUSIN Collective (with Raven Chacon, Sky Hopinka, Suzanne Kite, and Adam Piron)

A conversation with members of COUSIN Collective discussion topics ranging from challenges, obstacles, and opportunities for Indiginous art, music, and film, and the need for collaboration and knowledge sharing in navigating spaces not designed for Indigenous Peoples.

3:15 pm Break
3:30 pm Emerson Uýra: Espiral da Morte

When ants lose track of the pheromone scent that keeps them in contact with their main foraging party, they begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle until they die. This is called the “death spiral.” Uýra intercrosses this biological phenomenon with the sociocultural phenomena in Brazil: the resistance of interruption of smell and memory among Indigenous peoples in Brazil’s Diaspora. Uýra brings the feedback from the Forest—another spiral opens, as in a cycle renewal. This turn of the spiral refers to the exchanges and technologies of memories ensured by Indigenous people throughout centuries, countering historical erasure in Brazil.

4:15 Break
5:00 pm Gavilán Rayna Russom

For the closing performance of the first Conjurings series, interdisciplinary artist Gavilán Rayna Russom will share a long form sound work that explores her personal relationship to CARA’s new building. As the in-house electronics technician for DFA Records—the previous tenant in the building—as well as an artist on the label who recorded several albums in their basement studio, Rayna spent countless hours at 225 W 13th St. Her deeply personal performance will weave together electronic and acoustic sound with spellwork and mediumship.

6:30 pm End

Suzanne Kite
Suzanne Kite

INSTALLATIONS

Blue CHiLD. & iris yirei hu will produce a commissioned installation in CARA’s main gallery, accompanying the program of performances, talks, and presentations. The second floor will also host an ongoing exhibition rooting the program in legacies of Black, Latinx and Indigenous intellectual frameworks and their many intertwined cultural expressions, with an intergenerational span of works by Amanda Piña, Betty Tchomanga, Grandma Baby Apothecary, June Jordan, Khari-Johnson Ricks, Marilyn Nance, and Sky Hopinka. Presented in the ground floor gallery and CARA bookstore are works by Neema Githere, Juan Alvear, and the late Anishinaabe and Chemehuevi poet Diane Burns.

Kemi Alabi
Kemi Alabi

BIOS

Conjuring #3
05 – 07 August, 2022

Conjurings are free and open to the public. We have limited capacity, reservations are required.

COVID-19 Protocol: For the health and safety of our staff, invited artists, and public, we shall be requesting everyone to mask during the performance programs.

Accessibility: The entry to CARA is ADA-compliant and our bookstore and galleries are barrier free throughout with all gender, wheelchair accessible bathrooms. CARA shall accommodate guest wheelchair needs if requested in advance via erik@cara-nyc.org. Service animals are welcome. The closest wheelchair accessible subway is 14th St/8th Avenue station.

We would love to have you with us.

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