Responsive Witnessing: Emily Johnson, Karyn Recollet, Joseph M. Pierce & Camille Usher

Presented here is a rebroadcast of a responsive witnessing event produced through the STTLMNT Digital Occupation project. This is a conversation between Karyn Recollet, Emily Johnson, Joseph M. Pierce and Camille Georgeson-Usher. You are invited to first Watch the recording of the filmed performance, The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better, Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s), Emily Johnson's Collaboration with Jeffrey Gibson, presented at Socrates Sculpture Park, NY, September 16, 2020, and which this Responsive Witnessing conversation is in relationship with. Visit www.sttlmnt.org/projects/emily-johnson to view the performance and learn more about the artists featured in this conversation and the work of STTLMNT.

WATCH Emily Johnson's Collaboration with Jeffrey Gibson at Socrates "The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better, Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s)"

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About the artists in this conversation:

Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an activist for justice, sovereignty and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, she is based in New York City. Originally from Alaska, Emily is of the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and installations, engaging audiences within and through space, time, and environment—interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, history and role in community. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.

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.

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.

On Location: Artists Christine Howard Sandoval and Cannupa Hanska Luger respond to The Diker Collection at The Met

This episode of Broken Boxes Podcast presents a live stream recording by artists Christine Howard Sandoval and Cannupa Hanska Luger as they visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibit: Art of Native America, The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection on October 7th, 2018. The two artists engaged in a live stream critique and shared the experience on social media as it was unfolding. Onsite at the Met the two artists were joined by the guest curators from the Nelson Atkins Museum Gaylord Torrence and Marjorie Alexander along with the Met's director of public programs Mari Robles.

In reflecting on the experience in her social media post about the experience, Christine Howard Sandoval explains, “The museum mobilized responsively and the conversation about how the museum is FOR THE FIRST TIME starting to engage with Indigenous art is raw and honest. They have so much work to do as the major museum of art in the country!”  

Broken Boxes would like to acknowledge this is an audio recording of a live feed video of an experience viewing an exhibition, so it may feel a bit hard to follow along, but if you are up to it, it may be worth the journey. You can view the video live stream HERE.

Here is the audio recording of Artists Christine Howard Sandoval and Cannupa Hanska Luger live stream at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibit: Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection:

Subscribe to Broken Boxes Podcast on iTunes HERE to stream and download this episode

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More About The Artists Engaging In This Action:

Christine Howard Sandoval is an Obispeño Chumash and Hispanic artist based in New York. She is a multimedia artist who challenges the boundaries of representation, access, and habitation through the use of performance, video, and sculpture. Sandoval makes work about contested places such as the historic Native and Hispanic waterways of northern New Mexico; the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site in New York; and an interfacing suburban-wildland in Colorado.

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multi-disciplinary artist of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian descent. Through monumental installations that incorporate ceramics, video, sound, fiber, steel, and cut-paper, Luger interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about 21st century Indigeneity. Using social collaboration and in response to timely and site-specific issues, Luger produces multi-pronged projects which often times presents a call to action, provoking diverse publics to engage with Indigenous peoples and values apart from the lens of colonial social structuring. Luger lectures and participates in residencies around the globe and his work is collected internationally.

More About The Exhibition:

Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection

Exhibition overview sourced from the Met’s website: This landmark exhibition in the Museum's American Wing showcases 116 masterworks representing the achievements of artists from more than fifty cultures across North America. Ranging in date from the second to the early twentieth century, the diverse works are promised gifts, donations, and loans to The Met from the pioneering collectors Charles and Valerie Diker. Long considered to be the most significant holdings of historical Native American art in private hands, the Diker Collection has particular strengths in sculpture from British Columbia and Alaska, California baskets, pottery from southwestern pueblos, Plains drawings and regalia, and rare accessories from the eastern Woodlands.

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A note from the producer about this episode:

Broken Boxes Podcast has had the immense privilege to interview over 70 artists over the past 3 years. As the producer and creator of Broken Boxes, this project has been so dear to my heart and I am truly humbled and grateful for all of the incredible people who have taken the time to be vulnerable and share their stories on the platform of this podcast. This episode will mark a 6 month break I will initiate in the project, so I can regroup and take time and space to gather more interviews, edit them, upgrade equipment and connect with more artists and movements in a way that feels authentic and respectful. On a personal note, as a mother of two young children, I have just began approaching ‘unschooling’ or kind of like life schooling, focusing on some really intense life choices, allowing my children to love learning and be able to navigate the world in a way which respects them, and this journey is radical, scary and my partner and I are really excited to focus on our children a bit more holistically, which seems to be quiet a strong way to walk the walk in caring for our future and how we hope it to perpetuate. For this episode I was going to make a collection from all of the interviews I have done to date, I began, and got to about episode 30, when I realized there is no clear way to edit down the content of each episode, each artist is speaking in such a long format, and unapologetic way, sharing such important and critical information, I just could not edit the episodes down into soundbites, and it was making me feel horrible to try. (If you need to catch up on all the past episodes, you can do so in the Archive section.) And so, I chose not to do that for this episode. For this episode, before I take a nice break in publishing work, stories, interviews, conversations on this platform, I am grateful to share with you a pretty special recording of a live feed from earlier this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I felt sharing this live feed broadcast would be a wonderful segway into the more in depth concentrated content I hope to begin intercepting into this project. I hope to find a way to follow more closely with a project or approach an artist is examining and present a more journalistic approach to the story and concepts. This will take time and travel and equipment upgrades. And so this break will allow me space to find these tools and refresh this work. I do feel this project is critical, it is an archive of existence, but this project breaks the colonial lens which the stories of my peers are often times focused through. And so I would like to continue it, but I would like to step it up many notches.

I also wanted to put out there that if you are a person of color, and Indigenous person, a queer, trans, two spirit, gender non-conforming person, an activist or feminist person who centers people of color in your work, and have content you need a platform to put it out on, email me! While I am on this break of producing, I would love to allow this airwaves space to be utilized by anyone who needs it and has the skills and energy to edit together an episode to share information. If you need this access and want to share something on Broke Boxes, I can put up your content on the podcast for you anytime over the next 6 months (through say April 2019), email me at brokenboxespodcast@gmail.com and I can fill you in on the logistics of how I could support this. I am In gratitude and solidarity with all the artists and activists whom I have had the privilege to engage in this project and with all the listeners who I may never meet, I believe in you, and I believe in us.  

Gratitude and solidarity, Aloha malama pono!

Conversation with 2018 R.I.S.E. Fellowship recipients Katherine Paul, Whess Harman and fabian romero

R.I.S.E. congratulates the phenomenal and empowering work of the R.I.S.E. Artist + Poet 2018 Fellowship Recipients. 

In this episode BBP sits down with R.I.S.E. founder/director Demian DinéYazhi´ to find out exactly what is was like to launch  R.I.S.E. Fellowship, the first of its kind, which centers Indigenous Queer, Gender Gradient/Non-Conforming, Trans, and/or Two Spirit artists and poets. We talk about the many reasons for creating this fellowship through R.I.S.E. and go into the process of putting out the call, reviewing applicants, and creating long term community relationships with all artists and poets who applied, including but not limited to the recipients. We also get into conversation with R.I.S.E. Fellowship lead recipient artist Katherine Paul / Black Belt Eagle Scout (Swinomish Indian Tribal Community / Iñupiat NANA Shareholder), and additional R.I.S.E. Fellowship recipients Whess Harman (Lake Babine Nation) and fabian romero (Purepecha) who all share about their practices and explain what it means to them to have been selected as a 2018 R.I.S.E. Fellow.

Here is the conversation with R.I.S.E founder/director Demian DinéYazhi´, and 2018 fellows Katherine Paul, Whess Harman and fabian romero

This conversation was hosted by Ginger Dunnill of Broken Boxes Podcast

All music featured on this podcast by 2018 R.I.S.E. Fellow Katherine Paul aka Black Belt Eagle Scout

Subscribe to Broken Boxes Podcast on iTunes HERE to stream and download this episode

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More about R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment and the 2018 R.I.S.E. Fellowship:

R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment is an Indigenous led artist/activist initiative amplifying Indigenous Queer, Trans, Gender Non-Conforming/Gradient, Two-Spirit, and Matriarchal voices that challenge and actively decolonize heteropatriarchal and settler colonial sociopolitical structures.

For its inaugural fellowship, R.I.S.E. is honored to celebrate the critical work of three Indigenous Queer, Gender Gradient/Non-Conforming, Trans, and/or Two-Spirit artists. The award of a $1,000 unrestricted Artist Fellowship is presented to R.I.S.E. Fellowship lead recipient artist Katherine Paul / Black Belt Eagle Scout (Swinomish Indian Tribal Community / Iñupiat NANA Shareholder), and thanks to a generous donation, R.I.S.E. is also able to offer two additional $500 fellowships recognizing the invaluable work of Whess Harman (Lake Babine Nation) and fabian romero (Purepecha).

This year, our artistic panel of three Indigenous artists and organizers gathered to carefully select the 2018 Fellows, facilitated by R.I.S.E. founder/director Demian DinéYazhi´: Hank Cooper (Arts Program Manager at Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center), Kevin Holden (artist and co-director of LOCUSTS zine), and Ginger Dunnill (founder of Broken Boxes Podcast, founding member of Winter Count Collective, and Indigenous Goddess Gang and Dear Patriarchy contributor).

On behalf of the judges, R.I.S.E. congratulates the rigorous, crucial, and compelling work of the R.I.S.E. Fellowship Recipients who exemplified all the criteria and objectives highlighted in the Fellowship. R.I.S.E. would like to thank the all the applicants who applied to this year's Fellowship and additionally honor all the time and energy put into their application, but more importantly the passion and dedication each artist and poet brings to their art and community. We would like to also address three honorable mentions for this year's cycle: Cleo Keahna (White Earth Ojibwe, Meskwaki, Blackfeet, Sioux), AuMAR (Edo (Nigeria) & Bassa (Cameroun)), and Dåkot-ta Alcantara-Camacho (Matao). We encourage all applicants to apply to next year's Fellowship and invite you to join us in celebrating this year's Fellows and the numerous applicants whose work is equally empowering and of critical importance! 

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2018 R.I.S.E. FELLOWS

R.I.S.E. Fellowship Lead Recipient Artist:
Katherine Paul/Black Belt Eagle Scout

Black Belt Eagle Scout/ Katherine Paul Image credit: Indira Valey, Tender Heart Productions

“Having this identity—radical indigenous queer feminist—keeps me going. My music and my identity come from the same foundation of being a Native woman.”

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R.I.S.E. Fellowship Additional Recipient Artists:
Whess Harman and fabian romero

 

Whess Harman

Photo credit: Bailee Johnson

Whess Harman is a mixed-race, trans/non-binary artist, born in prince rupert, BC in 1990 and is a member of the Lake Babine Nation. Their work uses multi-media strategies in print, text and illustration to address issues of representation and memory. Whess completed a BFA at emily carr university in 2014 and have attended residencies at the banff art centre and the plug-in institute of contemporary art.

Warning Whess Harman, 2016

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fabian romero

Photo credit: Eric Morales

fabian romero (Purepécha) is a two-spirit poet, filmmaker, artist and P.h.D. student in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. fabian’s academic and artistic interests integrate settler colonialism, performance, Latin American, race and gender studies with storytelling and poetry. Public Scholarship and Chicana studies also inform their work. Their work centers Purépecha people from Michoacán, Mexico to Seattle, Washington and beyond.

My performance art, poetry and experimental film/digital poetry engages the topics of race, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, nationalism, and borders. I am interested in creating work that speaks back to the archive- a western concept of legitimate knowledge and something constructed from the destruction of many Native peoples teachings. In an attempt to disrupt the normalization of settler colonialism I write about the experiences and stories that exist outside of the imaginary of the settler such as the reality that urban and Native people in diaspora exist. My work refuses to forget the circumstances that brought us to the ahistorical settler present that treats the past is a blank slate to be rewritten and retold to benefit the settler.

 fabianromero.com

Reminders Words by Fabian Romero, Illustration by TextaQueen 2013

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R.I.S.E. Fellowship Applicant Honorable Mentions:

AuMAR -Edo (Nigeria) & Bassa (Cameroun)
Cleo Keahna -White Earth Ojibwe, Meskwaki, Blackfeet, Sioux
Dåkot-ta Alcantara-Camacho -Matao

Conversation with Artist Patricia Vázquez Gómez

In this episode we speak to multi-disciplinary and social practice artist Patricia Vázquez Gómez. Patricia breaks down how she uses art as a tool for investigation and to create situations which uncover tensions between visibility and invisibility. She reflects on her relationships with various resistance movements in Mexico and how she strives to remain accountable as she walks into a movement or resistance situation as an artist, navigating the work and privilege of the role in artist as 'activist'. Patricia also touches on her relationship to her queer identity, indigenous sexuality, along with the the importance of artists ethics, political awareness, and how critical it is to be accountable to what is driving you as an artist.

Patricia Vázquez Gómez works and lives between Portland and Mexico City. Her practice includes a range of media, from painting and murals to video and socially engaged art projects, and it is deeply informed by her experiences working in the immigrant rights and other social justice movements in the US, and by the zapatismo and indigenous movements in Mexico, both in content and in the methodologies she uses.

This conversation was hosted by Ginger Dunnill of Broken Boxes Podcast

Shared Wisdom. Social Practice work of Patricia Vázquez Gómez

"I think that when we are doing work about other people's trauma, we have to be very careful about how we are doing that... I don't think we should not do the work, but I think there are ways in which we can do this type of work that is responsible and sensitive. I also believe that there are no formulas for doing any kind of work in the most perfect or ethical way, all we have is our values and our sense of what's responsible and what's respectful" -Patricia Vázquez Gómez

Conversation with Queer Nature founders Pınar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd and So Sinopoulos-Lloyd

In this episode we get into conversation with Queer Nature founders. Queer Nature is a Colorado-based project that creates a decolonially-informed queer futurism through earth-based skills. Queer Nature envisions and implements ecological relationship as a vital and often overlooked part of the healing and wholing of populations who have been systemically silenced and marginalized, such as the LGBTQ2+ population, and especially trans and queer people of color and two-spirit folks. 

This conversation was hosted by Ginger Dunnill of Broken Boxes Podcast

Sophia ("So") Sinopoulos-Lloyd and Pınar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd

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More about Queer Nature:

Queer Nature bow drill workshop

Queer Nature is a Colorado-based project that creates a decolonially-informed queer futurism through earth-based skills. Queer Nature recognizes that many people, including LGBTQ2+ people and womxn, have historically not had easy access to the culture of outdoor recreation on Turtle Island. Pursuits like hunting, fishing, camping, and tactical or survival skills have been very difficult to access or relate to for anyone who didn't grow up hunting, in Boy Scouts, or in the military. Additionally, LGBTQ2+ community has historically formed in urban America—in places like bars and clubs—the wilderness has not necessarily been a welcoming place for us. To create a space for women and LGBTQ2+ people to access their natural human right to these skills is a revolutionary act in today's world. This program envisions and implements ecological relationship as a vital and often overlooked part of the healing and wholing of populations who have been systemically silenced and marginalized, such as the LGBTQ2+ population, and especially trans and queer people of color and two-spirit folks. Ecological literacy is deep relationship building with living and non-living earth systems through ancestral-futurist resilience skills including naturalist knowledge, so-called ‘survival’ skills, natural crafts, and local cultural/natural history.

Queer Nature Founders:

Pınar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd

Pınar Ates Sinopoulos-Lloyd (they/them/theirs) has always been allured by how the natural world mirrors one’s internal landscape. Enchanted by the liminal, Pınar is a nonbinary QTPOC (Queer & Trans Person of Color) with Huanca, Turkish and Chinese lineages. They along with their spouse, So, co-founded Queer Nature, a project bringing earth-based queer community through ancestral skills, nature-connection and vision fast guiding. In addition to offering LGBTQ2+ specific programming, Pınar is a consultant, presenter and speaker at universities and conferences, program designer and facilitator in collaboration with non-profits and a canoe guide. As an indigenous nonbinary outdoor leader, their inspiration is envisioning decolonially-informed queer futurism through interspecies accountability and remediating the myth of human exceptionalism. As a survival skills instructor, one of their core missions is to uplift and amplify the brilliant “survival skills” that BIPOC, LGBTQ2+ and other intersectional oppressed populations already have in their resilient bodies and stories of survivance. Their relationship with queerness, neurodivergence, indigeneity and belonging guided their work in developing Queer Ecopsychology through studies at Prescott College, Wilderness Awareness School, School of Lost Borders, Animas Valley Institute, Naropa University and Esalen Institute. Their undergraduate work was in applied ecopsychology with a somatic and depth approach through a decolonial and queer lens. Currently enrolled at the University of Vermont, they are working on their degree in Master of Science in Natural Resources with a Concentration in Leadership for Sustainability. 

Sophia ("So") Sinopoulos-Lloyd

Sophia ("So") Sinopoulos-Lloyd is a queer Greek-American who grew up in the northern hardwood forests of central Vermont. So’s initiation to the transformative power of the natural world came when they went on a summer backpacking intensive at age 16, and later continued when they worked as a seasonal shepherd and cheese-making assistant throughout college and sheep began to teach them new things about belonging, awareness, and community. Inspired by the resilience and hardiness of these beings, So went on to do immersive studies in ancestral earth-based skills and natural science, and also completed an MA that focused on relationships between religion and ecology in the Eastern Mediterranean. Much of So's work is animated by a study of how personhood and a sense of belonging are interwoven with geography and can be further informed by intimate knowledge of place through naturalist study. Along with their spouse Pinar, So develops and runs LGBTQ2+ nature-based programming for Women’s Wilderness in Colorado. Pinar and So’s organization, Queer Nature, is devoted to creating empowering and accessible spaces where LGBTQ2+, non-binary, and two-spirit people can learn various ancestral earth-based skills. Some things that So is most passionate about teaching and learning are survival skills, wildlife tracking, and wilderness emergency medicine. So still hopes to one day be as cool and skilled as sheep are.