From Survival to Sanctuary | ARCHIVE + ACCESS / MOVING and BEING MOVED: Documentation as Radical Praxis

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | This second roundtable in the From Survival to Sanctuary series brings together interdisciplinary creative practitioners working in performance and media production for a conversation on documentation, publication, and the archive as modalities of liberatory politics.

In this conversation we’ll be diving into the evolving role of print, digital, and oral media-making, archiving, and storytelling as human technologies. Together, we’ll consider the capacity of creative expression as a tool of systemic transformation, and how the control of the means of its production, documentation, and dissemination continue to impact that collective work.

For this event, Public Action Fellow and artist-researcher Elæ Moss is joined by dancer/choreographer (and Dance MFA Fellow) Luciana Achugar, multiform conceptual artist Chloë Bass, and interdisciplinary choreographer and performer Arien Wilkerson for a discussion on how we encounter, teach, and work to build practices of radical documentation in our work.

We’re asking:

What happens when we consider the production and maintenance of a living archive—and access to this documentation—as essential tools of human meaning-making? Who gets to tell the story? And who hears it?
How is an artist-led practice of collective documentation and archiving a radical politics? What do artists gain through developing this praxis and supporting the archiving and dissemination of their and others’ work?
Why is this particularly critical for movement artists, social practitioners, and time-based creators, given the ephemeral nature of performance?

We hope you’ll join us for this evening, as well as the whole series, where we consider together what will it take to get us from a survival state to one where we believe sanctuary can truly be found—and built. More about the series on Instagram: @thetroublewithbartleby.

Collaborator Bios:

ELÆ MOSS (host, they/them) is a cell-cluster learning to person. They are comforted by nonlinear time. They always think of “Borges and I” when writing bios. Their ministry is to be a webmaster and system administrator, but not in the ways you might think: this is to say, a collector and spinner of story, a recorder, a mapper, and a builder of infrastructures and tools for future possibility. Elæ’s preferred medium is questions, and depending on these two (“who is it for?” and “what is it for?”) they work across text, image, sound, performance, institution, system, code, body, and whatever else might be necessary.

In the more official language you are looking for, Elæ is a queer nonbinary multimodal artist-researcher, curator, information worker, and producer committed to radical pedagogy and practice. They lead Autonomous Mechanics Studio and are the founder and creative director of The Operating System and Liminal Lab. Elæ is a Professor at Pratt Institute where they are the coordinator of the hybrid Architectural Humanities and Media Studies first year program. They are completing two years as a Public Action Fellow at Bennington College in the Spring of 2024. Elæ publishes, performs, and produces media and programming widely, and is currently dedicated to research on retrofitting radical faith institutions and other third spaces for liberatory future building.

CHLOË BASS (b. 1984, New York, NY, she/her) is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), followed by a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and recently concluded an investigation at the scale of the immediate family (Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place, 2018 - 2024). She will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on Since feeling is first (2023 – ongoing), a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law.

Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies: most recently, the 2022 - 2024 Kupferberg Arts Incubator residency, a 2022 - 2023 Silver Art Project residency, the 2022 Future Imagination Fund Fellowship at NYU Tisch College of the Arts, a 2020 – 2022 Faculty Fellowship for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center), and a 2020 – 2022 Lucas Art Fellowship at Montalvo Art Center. Previous honors include a grant from Art Matters, a residency at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at the Skirball Cultural Center, California African-American Museum / Art + Practice, Henry Art Gallery, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Forbes, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews among others. Her monograph was published by The Operating System in December 2018; her chapbook, #sky #nofilter, was published in November 2020 by DoubleCross Press. Her short-form writing has been published in Paletten, Hyperallergic, Arts.Black, and the Walker Reader. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice CUNY with Gregory Sholette, with whom she published the book Art and Social Action in 2018.

LUCIANA ACHUGAR (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. She is a two-time “Bessie” Award recipient, and one time nominee, a Guggenheim Fellow, Herb Alpert Award recipient, Creative Capital Grantee and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, amongst other accolades; most recently she received a 2022 USA Doris Duke Fellowship. She is currently an MFA Dance teaching fellow at Bennington College; continuing her research on the "Pleasure Practice" and "A Spell for Utopia"; which premiered in its first iteration in November 2021 at The Chocolate Factory Theater as a co-presentation with NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. In her work Theater is a space for Utopia; Utopia is a practice; practice is ritual; ritual is devotion and Dance is a devotional practice of being in pleasure.

ARIEN WILKERSON (they/them, she/her) is a choreographer, dancer, video maker, director, producer, and installation artist. Born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, Arien is Founder and Artistic Director of, TNMOT AZTRO, a collaborative multidisciplinary company working at the bridge of dance, performance art, installation, sculpture, and sound design for engagements in museums, galleries and site-specific locations. Under the alias Tnmot Aztro considers that the complexities within art derive from the alienation of objects, identities, the body, sounds, and humans and is rooted in repurposing and redefining meanings of "fine art" and its attachment to colonialism, white supremacy, and institutionalized racism. What is queer black "fine art"? Who has access to it? How does art become fine? Where is the "margin" marginalized, displaced, disproportioned? And what systems were put in place to keep black and brown queer folk out. Arien Wilkerson/Tnmot Aztro, sold out performances, online lectures and events have taken place at spaces such as The University of Pennsylvania, Yale School of Art, University of Connecticut, Judson Memorial Church, LGBT Center NYC, Rhode Island School of Design, Austin Arts Center at Trinity College, Real Art Ways, Wadsworth Atheneum, Vox Populi Gallery, Icebox Project Space, AS22O, SPACE Gallery, Wesleyan University, The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts, Slought Foundation, the Martin E. Segal Theater, CUNY. Wilkerson is a 2023-2024 iLab Artist in residence at University of the Arts and is fiscally sponsored by Headlong Dance Theater.

Instagram handles and hashtags: @thetroublewithbartleby, @the_operating_system, @achugarluciana, @publicinvestigator, @ariaztro

#FromSurvivalToSanctuary, #SpeculativeSolidarities, #YearOne, #ArchiveAndAccess, #MovingAndBeingMoved, #AutonomousMechanics, #PublicationAsPublicAction