Amant
Brooklyn, NY
As the inaugural Associate Director of Residencies and Curator of Public Programs at Amant in Brooklyn, I conceived and managed several initiatives for a multidisciplinary research-oriented residency program, as well as for the institution’s public programs. I designed programs that, by using different formats, introduced an audience to non-hierarchical and open-ended ways of learning from artists through the body, the mind, the heart, and the immediate surroundings. My focus, overall, was to explore how different types of creative practices can lead to a wide range of forms of knowledge- and community-building.
Open Exchange
In contrast to the standardized formats of scholarship-centered events and auditorium seating, the Open Exchange series offered a platform for audience members and special guests to sit together in a non-hierarchical way (a circle, a square…) and engage in an open dialogue. With this program, I aimed to prioritize and open a space for narratives and knowledge that are collectively formed and shared via storytelling, music listening parties, Indigenous talking circles, sonic experiences, spiritual teaching, healing sessions, etc.
Guests included Candice Hopkins, Laura Ortman, Music Research Strategies, Raven Chacon, Cecilia Vicuña, Ricardo Gallo and Carla Macchiavello.
Brooklyn Through the Eyes of Artists
Brooklyn Through the Eyes of Artists invited artists based in New York to choose a specific location in Brooklyn and lead a unique guided visit of the site, informed by their own questions and interests. Guest artists were encouraged to experiment with the format and style of their guided visits while unveiling the innumerable worlds and stories Brooklyn has to offer. Carlos Motta led Bodies of Waters Rising, a one-hour visit to the Brooklyn waterfront, where he shared a fictional story about a 19th-century sailor whose ghost looms over the waters telling speculative stories about early queer life and future climate destruction in New York City.
Show Tell Toast
During the Fall, Winter, and Spring residency seasons, artists-in-residence offered a Show & Tell presentation about their research while at Amant or invited someone relevant to their current interests. This informal gathering was an opportunity to introduce the residents to local artists and the New York arts community at large.
Artists-in-residence included Isshaq Albarbary, José Antonio Vega Macotela, Niloufar Emamifar, Phedra Deonarine, Azza El Siddique, Tania Candiani, and Taylor Le Melle.
Special thanks to all the artists and guests who were part of Amant‘s program, and the team at Amant.
In this Open Exchange, musicians Laura Ortman and Music Research Strategies joined curator and writer Candice Hopkins and musician and composer Raven Chacon on the world premiere performance of Dispatch. They presented an open dialogue of spoken elements, sound, and non-verbal language.
Dispatch is either a transcription of events around the 2016 DAPL encroachment at Standing Rock, a prompt for an ecological oral future, or a critique of the privilege of meditative Deep Listening. The score can be realized as a performance, a series of imagined events, or as a response of direct action. The players, the prompts, and the schematics are derived from an analysis of the surface dynamics and organization of Water Protectors in defense of Standing Rock during the #noDAPL movement, not glossing over the miscommunication, profiteering, and injustices. In an increasingly fractured society, new paths and new formations are needed to refocus our attention in an attempt to find truth. Participating in this score may produce sonic or visual artifacts, these are as important as the actions.
This Open Exchange took the shape of a three-way conversation between artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña, musician Ricardo Gallo, and art historian Carla Macchiavello. They wove together an improvisation in sound, no-language, thoughts, and words. While they have overlapped creatively in multiple ways over the past decade, this auspicious meeting brought these three artists and thinkers together as collaborators. Their many shared stories in their common paths of living and working in New York, Colombia, and Chile sheds light on a quest for communal knowledge that is at the heart of Andean cultures and that may provide a key for action in the face of current ecological and social crises. In the spirit of open exchange, this event was an invitation to dialogue and listening.
Cecilia Vicuña, Ricardo Gallo and Carla Macchiavello.
For this Brooklyn Through the Eyes of Artists, Carlos Motta organized an hour-long visit to the Brooklyn waterfront to share a performative reading of Bodies of Water Rising, a speculative fiction story of Ole’s ghost. Carlos conjured the character of Ole, a gay man and 19th-century sailor who landed in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to touch upon the immigrant experience in New York. Ole’s story also resonated with Carlos’s personal experience a gay immigrant in New York in the 1990s. On the waterfront of Brooklyn, Ole discovered sexual freedom and liveliness, but also precarious labor conditions and exploitation. Over the course of the walk and narration, Carlos’s and Ole’s voices became one as they discussesd censorship, gentrification, and climate change.
Inspired in part by Grada Kilomba’s concept of “becoming the subject” and the notion of activating one’s own agency through self-actualization and self-determination, dance artists Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener led an embodied workshop and informal demonstration. Drawn from their ongoing improvisational practice, Desire Lines, this 90-minute process provided joy and rest, discursive pathways and non-hierarchical structures, collaboration and ways of self-organizing.
How can we activate aspects of ourselves that exist at the margins, at places of possibility and discovery? We tune our individual attention towards a receptive state of being for a deeper understanding of our internal landscapes and our shared, external environment. Through simple observations, spontaneous choice-making, and layering of memories, we allow emergent structures to create a collective subject.
Etcetera. 💬