.

As a prologue, Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is pleased to present 

, 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, 

 braids invocation, incantation, questioning, un-earthing, and ceremony to open space for future (un)doings. 

, 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.

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.



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


7:00 pm Doors Open
7:45 pm Manuela Moscoso: Opening Remarks
8:00 pm 

concerns time; the immeasurable and unfathomable. It worries time. It is a disruption of the linearity of historical time, and a gesture towards what historian Robin D. G. Kelley alluded to as blues time — “simultaneously in the moment, the past, the future, and the timeless space of the imagination.” It’s about slowness, slowing down long enough and digging deep enough to open up new temporalities and possibilities, as the structures (of domination/ power/tyranny of time, of man) crumble and break down, something else bubbles up with a sense of urgency — I only hope you can hear it. 

is the name of a poem by Amiri Baraka and it is the first installment in a new material from an upcoming album trilogy.

9:45 pm 

1:30 pm Doors Open
2:00 pm Manuela Moscoso: Opening Remarks
2:15 pm 

We gather to celebrate the 20th anniversary edition of Professor Robin D. G. Kelley’s influential book 

, an exploration of Black radical writers, artists, activists, and intellectuals; a deeply insightful book overflowing with lessons for surviving, resisting, transforming, and transcending our turbulent and uncertain times. To do so the scholar, activist, and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kelley and Fofana will gather and create a space for collective listening and dreaming and dancing our way out of our constrictions.

is an experiment in embodied sound, poetics, and gesture exploring how we can give voice to both the heaviness and tenderness that swirl swiftly around us.

5:15 pm 

6:00 pm End of Afternoon Session

7:15 pm Manuela Moscoso: Opening Remarks
7:05 pm 



Musician and poet JJJJJerome Ellis will play new music with Kenita Miller-Hicks, Justin Hicks, and John Murchison. The musicians will improvise around sounds from Ellis’ projects 


Perched, performer ray ferreira conjures an assemblage of texts that, in their reverberations, attempt to mark the moment as a node in a sea of complexity.

Assembling a Black Counter Culture

Assembling a Black Counter Culture 

is a history of techno and critical reconsideration of the extended thinking and techniques behind electronic music created from a Black theoretical perspective. A brief lecture and performance by Brown, Jr. encourages a reimagining of techno beyond the dancefloor as a timeline for technologies of Black exodus and a myth-scientific world system, spanning 1582 to 2100. DeForrest Brown, Jr. will end the night with music.

11:15 pm End




1:00 pm Doors Open
1:30 pm Manuela Moscoso: Opening Remarks
1:45 pm 


Presenting for the first time together, artist RaFia Santana and her mother artist Marilyn Nance discuss ancestry, deep time, and visual thinking.

3:00 pm 


A gamified interactive performance piece created by Neema Githere. Using the artist’s Feminist Tech Principles as a departure point, Obfuscation Politics explores the fragility of consent within our digital ecospheres and experiments with reflection around the following question: 


A one/card reading/meditation using a card from the 

; a 37-card deck celebrating the enduring legacy of Black Americans.

5:00 pm End



We would love to have you with us.

 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, Emerson Uyra, Grandma Baby Apothecary, June Jordan, Khari-Johnson Ricks, Marilyn Nance

. Presented in the ground floor gallery and CARA bookstore are works by 

, and the late Anishinaabe and Chemehuevi poet 

—Schedule is subject to change.
—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 

. Service animals are welcome. The closest wheelchair accessible subway is 14th St/8th Avenue station. 

(she/ they) is a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. She is/ they are the author of several books, most recently 

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals 

and the co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Trust, an intergenerational experiential living library of Black LBGTQ brilliance.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

is an Alabama-raised, Ex-American rhythm-analyst, writer and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. As Speaker Music, he channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of generational trauma, bursting through the frames of Western music and thought. His written work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music.

DeForrest Brown

is a Black owned and operated spiritual apothecary specializing in tools that specifically align with the practices of Black American people.

Grandma Baby Apothecary

is an artist and writer, also known as DJ/rupture. Clayton uses an interdisciplinary approach to focus on how sound, memory, and public space interact, with an emphasis on low-income communities and non-Western geographies. He is the author of 

Uproot: Travels in 21st Century Music and Digital Culture 

and was awarded a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant to support 

, his upcoming book on contemporary art, faith, and social media.

Jace Clayton

is an animal, stutterer, and artist. He was raised by Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants in Tidewater, VA, where he prays, gardens, and resides among the egrets and asters. Through music, literature, performance, and video he researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. He dreams of building a sonic bath house!

Jerome Ellis

is an artist and musician currently located in New York and Berlin. His music contrasts the reality of our world with what’s beyond, and explores questions of movement, migration, alienation and belonging. Fofana’s overlapping interests in history and the present, and his practice of transmuting text into the active medium of sound, manifests in multisensory live performances and installations featuring original music compositions, eld recordings and archival material. Lamin Fofana is based in New York City.

Lamin Fofana

has produced images of unique moments in the cultural history of the US and the African Diaspora. While serving as the photographer for the US delegation of FESTAC ’77, Nance made one of the most comprehensive photographic accounts of this landmark Pan African festival of arts and culture. 

published in 2022 is a focused study of Nance through an archival encounter with her documentation FESTAC.

Marilyn Nance

is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and filmmaker of Kenyan-Liberian-American heritage. She explores hybridity within the African Diaspora and the liberatory and regenerative potential of gesture and softness. Still and moving images, the voice and body, language, objects, space and sound are all forms to explore practices of re-imagining the self, identity, and culture through abstraction & poetics. Kawinzi is based in Brooklyn.

Miatta Kawinzi

(they/she) is a guerrilla theorist and curator whose work explores love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris. Having dreamt themselves into the world via the Internet from an early age, Neema investigates digital Africanity through work that spans public lectures, performance, travel, community organizing, and image-making. Presentism2020 is the manifestation of a series of ongoing theories, projects and relationships birthed along the way: afropresentism, radical love, #divestfrominstagram, reindigenization, and data::healing. Githere is based in Brooklyn.

Neema Githere

(she/her) is a Black genderqueer and neurodivergent multidisciplinary artist from Brooklyn, New York. As a self-taught singer, RaFia Santana discovered the wellness benefit of respiratory kinematics through vocalization. RaFia Santana’s music emulates breathing and rumination as she uses it to soothe the stress of existing in an antiblack, ableist world. Her echolalia turns to chants, choruses, and background vocals. RaFia seeks to provide herself with excitement, serenity, and relief.

RaFia Santana

(she/her) a performer of sorts. She is a blaqlatina from occupied Lenape lands called New York, NY: the illegitimate EEUU. Another spacetimemattering/materialdiscusive (dis) continuity: [a n o t h e r a r c h i p e l a g o] the Caribbean>the Greater Antilles>Hispañola>the Dominican Republic [a n o t h e r a r c h i p e l a g o] Corona> Queens>Brooklyn>Lenapehoking She stays playin, showing work at the Little Island, Performance Space New York, Queens Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Wendy’s Subway and The Knockdown Center.

ray ferreira

(Soft Skull Press). She has received awards from the NYFA, the National Theater Translation Fund, and others. Phipps has collaborated on numerous theatrical productions as a founding member of Yara Arts Group, and has curated reading series at the Poetry Project. She is based in Brooklyn.

Wanda Phipps

started dancing at the age of nine and turned to contemporary dance in 2007 when she studied choreography at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine (CNDC) in Angers. To this she added a master’s degree in modern literature from the Sorbonne, which becomes visible in her work firmly rooted in dramaturgy. Tchomanga was born on the French Atlantic coast and is the daughter of a Cameroonian father and a French mother.

Betty Tchomanga

(1957–2006) was born in Lawrence, Kansas to a Chemehuevi father and an Anishinabe mother. She moved to New York in the 1970s where she became active in the poetry scene of the Lower East Side. She was a founding poet of the Nuyorican Poets Café, a frequent performer at the Bowery Poetry Club and the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, and published a book of poems entitled 

(1981), illustrated with her pen and ink drawings. In her direct, wry poems, Burns engages themes of Native American identity and stereotypes. She lived in New York City until her death.

Diane Burns

(she/her) is a journey-based artist and educator who paints, weaves, dyes, writes, and composts her lived reality into installations, public artworks, and intercultural, generational, and geographical collaborations. Central to her work are the building of relationships with people and places through slow and critical reflection, and the uplifting of feeling, sensuality, and beauty. She is interested in how storytelling and working with our hands deepens our relationships to what we experience, with whom we connect, and how we live.

Iris Yirei Hu

is an artist and straddles the adjacent and often separate realms of fine art, design and beauty industry by crafting his instantly recognizable nail art. He has recently been featured in the Vogue World 100, Paper Magazine 100, Milk 10, and numerous other publications. Alvear was born in New York City and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NYC.

Juan Alvear

(1936, 2002) is one of the most widely-published and highly-acclaimed Jamaican American writers of her generation, poet, playwright and essayist June Jordan as known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism. Jordan engaged the fundamental struggles of her era: for civil rights, women’s rights, and sexual freedom. Jordan was passionate about using Black English in her writing and poetry, teaching others to treat it as its own language and an important outlet for expressing Black culture.

June Jordan

is a multimedia artist whose practice extends across media, including painting, performance, murals, zines, and nightlife spaces. Johnson-Ricks’ explores fellowship, engaging acts of fiction and poetry to capture moments with kith and kin that feel loving. He asks himself what it means to make a family, community, friendship, when the world is so precarious, when the water rises, when death comes, and when all that is visible is capital. Ricks lives in New York City.

Khari Johnson-Ricks

Conjuring #1

 braids invocation, incantation, questioning, un-earthing, and ceremony to open space for future (un)doings. 

Convened by 

7:00 pm	Doors Open
7:45 pm	Opening Remarks by Manuela Moscoso
8:00 pm

	Humeysha with Mimi Bai, Sam B. Jones, Don Christian, and Special Guest: 

Apparitions, Ancestors, and the Diasporic Imagining

Field recordings of Pakistani cities; the distinct dialect of an ailing grandmother’s reminisces; quick rhythmic loops from favorite childhood Bollywood songs—all of these sounds find their way into 

(Zain Alam). For this program, the artist and musician will play a blend of field recordings, ancestral text, and new works-in-progress - an experiment in braided compositional process from which the score for the film 

was born, and which has continued this past year in residencies across the Rockies and Appalachian Mountains. 

A screening of 

, will be accompanied by Alam's blend of a recorded and live score. The experimental narrative film explores invisibility/hypervisibility, labor, and assimilation, recasting artist Mimi Bai’s clay and textile sculptures into shrouds for two ghosts, who deploy camouflage and bushcraft in a series of attempts to evade and outwit one another, all the while unraveling a hidden connection between them. The screening will be followed by a special performance by 

 to close out a night of apparitions, ancestors, and Diasporic imagining.

1:00 pm Doors Open
1:15 pm Opening Remarks by Manuela Moscoso
1:30 pm 

Amal Alhaag with Kwami Coleman and Negarra Kudumu: 

Dispossessed Notes on Dirty Work: Broadcasting rituals and strategies for ordinary shape-shifters

This radio show looks, feels and listens through the lens of science-fiction, music, static and poetry to the ways we can be in the present tense and work towards the urgent project of simultaneously interrogating systems of dispossessions and negation and actively listen to the Diasporic archive of the everyday. What does it mean to be sent by histories? Together, we listen through the ways existing in minor keys has brought forward radical and rascal thoughts, practices, movements and riots. 

 is an ongoing research project where the radio show is a social space for hanging out as a political practice.

Synthesis Genesis: Conjuring Black Algorithms

A talk and listening session focused on the sound art/multimedia/album project produced by Louis Chude-Sokei and iconic German electronic experimentalists, Mouse on Mars.

 braids together original musical composition, field recordings, interviews, readings, and autonomous sounding objects in order to hold space for erratic sonic encounter to arrive. Interweaving sonic events that run on clocks of their own, the performance is threaded together with a free-flowing interview between the performer and his father, tracing memories of Caribbean meteorology [ the hurricane ], aquatic revelry [ the swim ], and inter[species/generational] communication through wind [ the whistle ]. Through soft embrace of unpredictable cycles, 

 whisks past memories with present offerings to transmit yet-to-be-heard reverberations for curious listeners.

7:00 pm	Doors Open
7:05 pm	Opening Remarks by Manuela Moscoso
7:10 pm	

 is an ongoing time space for public online and offline discussions, performances, screenings and exhibitions with artists, filmmakers, theorists, and musicians. This iteration of 

(currently at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin)

with this event marking the New York launch of the publication (Archive Books, 2022) of the same name, which includes materials and graphics from The Otolith Group’s broader practice, including performance, lecture and research. 

Introduced by 

, the program will begin with a conversation among The Otolith Group, 

is a 12 part suite of sonic works played by DJ Black Helmet across multiple custom cut records (with his voice used as accent) featuring field recordings from a variety of Black spaces across America. 

 and Ramsey Lewis's song by the same name.


1:00 pm	Doors Open
1:10 pm	Opening Remarks by Manuela Moscoso
1:15 pm	

 - Collage And Sound Performance Workshop

Participants will be able to think critically about their personal love affair with themselves in relation to Black spiritual and political traditions inspired by "Love Letter to Me" by Keily Adams from 

. Participants will gain an understanding of how they can create a collage using self-love as a principle. This collage activity will be soundtracked by a listening experience inspired by southern tent revivals and Black spirituality to create a meditative space for Black folks to contemplate, create, relieve trauma, experience joy, and find strength on the road to resistance. Using an Akai beat machine we will play assorted music including Alice Coltrane, Black radical speech snippets, Voodoo prayers and chants, and drums. 

This is a ritual for connection where for a moment we honor the totality of ourselves, our bodies, the earth, our pleasure, and the eco-erotic with the utmost reverance. If we are coming together to ask, how do we dream not only about ourselves, Let this then be a space for excavating & unearthing & arriving at new possibilities.

Pedro Neves Marques will be reading a selection of poems from their 2020 collection 

 and new poetry from a book they are currently preparing. For the occasion, they selected poems bringing together feelings of love mediated by spirits, technology, and gender.

, a radical pedagogy for a decolonial ecology. Through embodiment and  dream-like experience we become many, transform into earth beings, become what we are: ancestral bodies, water bodies, bodies of mountains, of ice, of earth. This is a participatory proposal.


—Schedule is subject to change
—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 

 BALTIC Professor of Art, Northumbria University Newcastle UK; writer, organiser, Director of BxNU Institute. Phillips lectures and writes about the economic and social construction of public value within contemporary art, the manipulation of forms of participation and the potential of forms of political, architectural and social reorganization within artistic and curatorial culture.

Andrea Phillips

 is a researcher and co-founder of several initiatives, such as 

, a platform for experimental sonic, dialogic and visual culture. Alhaag develops ongoing experimental and collaborative research practice, public programs and projects on global spatial politics, archives, colonialism, counter-culture, oral histories and popular culture. She is based in Amsterdam.

Amal Alhaag

work embodies the political and social power of movement grounded in indigenous forms of knowledge and world making/maintaining. Piña is a plurifaceted artist working through choreographic and dance research, creating and curating educational frameworks, writing and editing publications around what she refers as endangered movement practices. Her work is presented inside performing and visual arts contexts. Piña is Chilean-Mexican-Austrian based in Vienna and Mexico City.

Amanda Piña

is a Queens based artist whose tactile club productions trace an arc across techno, bass, and diasporic influences. The release of the EP ‘Potential Energy’ on UK label Scuffed Recordings has marked the crescendo of a year-long wave of momentum for the artist whose latest work received critical praise from Mixmag, RA, DJ Mag, and the Lobster Theremin. In March 2022, Ayesha joined the highly regarded roster of residents at Nowadays. Her nights are widely known for their euphoric dance-floor moments and heavy bass sound.

Ayesha

(he/him) has been playing the jams outside for over 15 years. He currently has a weekly radio show on WFMU where he focuses on jams that are bountiful and righteou

from all parts of the world. He also self describes as “a guy who makes stuff,” producing objects and spaces specifically intended to welcome and serve communities the fine arts world often overlooks. He is based in New York.

DJ Black Helmet

  is an experimental art school teaching Black/PoC students and  allies to become radical agents of change. Based on our commitment to community building and our core principles of Black love, wellness, and self- determination, TBS’ mission is to extend the legacy of art in Black radical histories through innovative, multi-generational

workshops/programs, an annual festival, and our youth staffed art and design studio- TBS: Design Studio.With  this foundation we are now moving from the initial mobile model we developed in NYC towards building a 21st century schoolhouse that will serve as a community center in our co-founders birthplace  New Orleans. The Black Schoolhouse will create a home base and allow TBS to expand our work and deepen roots through long-term community engagements.

The Black School 

are two thirds of a trio that also includes percussionist Gerald Cleaver. The first (and eponymous) album was just released by Reading Group Records. Brandon is a New York-based composer and bassist working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise and new music. Fred is a New York-based educator and writer working in the blur of poetry and criticism.

Brandon López and Fred Moten

 (they/we) is a pleasure ceremonialist and cyber witch doing the magical work of integrating indigenous, ancestral, and emerging technologies. They often think about pleasure, the eco-erotic, and how to embody ways of being that move beyond binaries and reliance on techno-capitalist fixes. In fusing art and technology with the practice of witchcraft, they use rituals, movement, ceremony, and performance to unearth unspoken stories and fundamentally alter the world around us.

cy x

is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and director. Their work spans painting, musical albums, videos, and performance installation.  Don has shown and performed in spaces such as The Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and The Shed.

DonChristian Jones

 is a critic and curator living in New York City, and a founder and director of

, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York. His publications include

 From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games

 Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century

 From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader

Ed Halter

 is a musician, composer, producer, and musicologist specializing in improvised music. His research interests include experimental music history, jazz history, black music and the African Diaspora, the political economy of music, music technology, aesthetics, and cultural studies. Coleman is an assistant professor of music at the Gallatin School of New York University, and lives in New York City.

Kwami Coleman

artist, engineer, and musician that makes installations, performances, and sculptures for experiencing the world through sonic encounter. He surfaces resonant histories of past interactions inscribed in material and embedded in space, peeling back vibratory layers to reveal hidden memories and untold stories. He shares his tools and techniques through listening tours, workshops, and open-source hardware/software, proposing new sonic possibilities off the grid.

Johann Diedrick

work includes the award-winning, The Last Darky: Bert 

Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy and the African Diaspora

The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, 

recorded with electronica legends, Mouse on Mars. He teaches at Boston University, directs the African American Studies Program, and edits the iconic journal, 

He is founder of the sonic art and archival project, 

and co-curated Carnegie Hall's 2022 Festival of Afrofuturism.

Louis Chude-Sokei

 is researching a multiplicity of futurisms, past and present. With respect to the vicissitudes of globalization, he looks for the aesthetic registers of how time is reshaped, technically and conceptually, from one model of history to another. He is the co-editor of 

 (Merve Verlag, 2018) and currently pursues a PhD in Film & Visual Studies at Harvard University.

Mahan Moalemi

 is an interdisciplinary artist born in Xi’an, China, and based in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, installation, and film. Using the imagery of ghosts and camouflage, her work engages with ideas of labor, assimilation, invisibility/hyper-visibility, and survival as lived reality and fantasy.

Mimi Bai

 is a composer, sound artist and performer. Her work explores bodily perception of vibration, movement and time while foregrounding complex timbre relationships. She has created a body of work that encompasses interdisciplinary sound art, hybrid acoustic/electronic performance, improvisation, music composition, research, sound installations, listening, and interactive media. She creates instruments, three-dimensional scores, wearable computing, and sonifies the behavior of plants.

Miya Masaoka

 is an interlocutrice working at the intersection of art and healing with a focus on contemporary art from the Pacific Northwest, Africa, South Asia, and their respective diasporas. She is a priestess in the Brama Con Brama lineage of Palo Monte; a lay person in the Pimienta lineage of Lukumi; a practitioner of Muerterismo, Espiritismo Cruzado, Conjure, and alevel II Reiki practitioner. She resides in Seattle, WA where she focuses on client facing work in art and healing as a coach, teacher, content producer, contemporary art curator, independent scholar, and healer.

Negarra Kudumu

 was founded in 2002. Its work is research-based and spans the moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation. The Otolith Group incorporates filmmaking and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face.

The Otolith Group

 (they/them) is an artist, film director, and writer. Influenced by anthropology and feminist and queer historians of science, their work highlights the clash between disputing images of nature, technology and gender, with science fiction and speculative writing being key to imagining other futures. They have recently received the Ammodo Tiger Short Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, They co-founded the poetry press 

Pedro Neves Marques

 is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker working in narrative, documentary, and hybrid forms. He’s directed films and music videos for artists such as Josh Kline, Yung Jake, and DonChristian. His debut feature film 'Red, White & Wasted' (Tribeca 2019) is an observational documentary exploring race, politics, and class in America by following a Florida family obsessed with the off-road truck subculture of "mudding."

Sam B. Jones

 (Humeysha) is an artist and musician of Indian-Pakistani origin based in Brooklyn, NY. Described as “a unique intersection, merging the cinematic formality of Bollywood and geometric repetition of Islamic art,” Alam’s recording project Humeysha began while working as an oral historian for the 1947 Partition Archive. Alam’s practice extends his sonic vision into video, performance, and writing; a project in translation using contemporary pop forms, found sound, and oral history.

Zain Alam

is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist active in experimental, free improvised, contemporary classical, and avant-jazz music; she is known for having "reinvented the harp". Parkins performs on standard harps, several custom electric harps, piano, and accordion.

Zeena Parkins

Conjuring #2

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

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.


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

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.


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

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.


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


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 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.

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."

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

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.


: 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.


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.

1:00 pm	Doors Open
1:30 pm	Opening Remarks
1:45 pm	

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.

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.

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.

 are free and open to the public. We have limited capacity, so reservations are required.
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Amanda Piña, Betty Tchomanga, Grandma Baby Apothecary, June Jordan, Khari-Johnson Ricks, Marilyn Nance

Aldrin Valdez is a bakla writer and visual artist. They are the author of ESL or You Weren't Here (Nightboat Books, 2018), selected as a 2019 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Poetry. As for current plans, Aldrin is trying to take it easy, feel real, play video games, and tell their brain it's okay that it's still registering the year as 2020.

Aldrin Valdez

Annika Hansteen-Izora (she/they/he) is an artist, writer and designer. She/they/he explorers the intersections of design, radical Black imagination, art and technology to create ecosystems rooted in dreaming and care. Brooklyn, NY on unceded Lenape land. Annika has been exploring the topics of communal dreaming, digital gardens, creative ecosystems, queering friendship and communal care.She/they/he lives in Brooklyn unceded Lenape land.

Annika Hansteen-Izora

Camille Sapara Barton (they/them) is an artist and educator who explores creative interventions that sustain life.Rooted in Black Feminism, ecology and harm reduction, they use creativity as a means to grow the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. Embodiment, healing justice and drug policy are key threads within Barton’s work. Camille is currently the head of

, a temporary masters programme at Sandberg Institute. They are based in Amsterdam.

rary masters programme at Sandberg Institute. They are based in Amsterdam. DJ 

 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.

Camille Sapara Barton

is a collective supporting Indigenous artists expanding the form of film. We create and support work that is personal, proudly provocative and driven by strong, artistic voices. We celebrate this work and get it made, seen and shared.

Program

Current and uppcoming

Past

Conjuring #1

Conjuring #2

Conjuring #3