Emily Johnson and Kai Recollet
Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter

November 21, 2024
6pm

Join us for a ceremonial fire centering Indigenous protocol and knowledge. Guest artists and organizers share stories and performances in honor and protection of the land, water, and air of Lenapehoking, the homelands of the Lenapeyok, where Abrons Arts Center is located.

Event Details

Image by Maria Baranova

Accessibility

Understanding Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter

Methodology

About Emily Johnson and Kai Recollet

Kai Recollet: 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.

Emily Johnson: Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. Emily belongs to the Yup'ik Nation, is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, Emily is based in Lenapehoking/NYC and Haudenosaunee lands. Since 1998, Emily's large-scale performance gatherings insist thrivance, radical reworlding, and just futures. Her gatherings function as portals and care processions, engaging audienceship within and through space, time, environment - interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, histories and role in building futures. 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.

Emily hosts monthly fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Kai Recollet. Emily was the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera 2018-2020. She was a lead organizer of First Nations Dialogues, a member of Creative Time’s inaugural Think Tank, a co-compiler of the documents, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and Notes for Equitable Funding and is currently co-lead for First Nations Performing Arts.

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.