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This summer, we invite into our circle an acknowledgment of our ancestors and the stewards of our common land.

This summer, we will light a fire and begin a journey, guided by friends who use their magic to create a new rituals. Creating new worlds of mysterious charm and exciting illusions.

The shadows are what lingers after as we recall the trance-like visions in the nights’ forests.

ebb & flow is an installation and performance art project that studies water as an element of survival for individuals and the Earth at large. As water availability fluctuates, it might dictate settlement, warship and sustainability. Araujo and Kostic activate the space in a flow as water pendulums illuminate the crises that might result due to water contamination and shortages.

ARANTXA ARAUJO [MEXICO/USA]

My practice is about enlightenment. Through thorough research, both scientific and philosophical, I construct multidisciplinary projects that expand our awareness about aspects of the physical, the affective, the cognitive and the spiritual. These projects aim to become embodied meditations on healing trauma, learning how to listen and recognize, and increasing the understanding of our past and present by accessing heightened states of consciousness. The participatory and meditative aspect of these installations and performances allows us to break free from the efficiencies of our minds and see things with a new perspective. In hopes of establishing new modes of consciousness that enable balance, blissful presence. Self-care whilst making informed choices results in positive personal and social change.

Arantxa Araujo (she/they) is a Mexican artist with a background in neuroscience. Her work is essentially multidisciplinary, feminist, meditative and rooted in bio-behavioral research and technology. Explorations of gender constructions, performativity and identity, and the politics of migration are seen and experienced in her installations, which include new media, video, sound, photography, mapping, light, and performance. Her work has been shown in the Brooklyn Museum, at the Radical Women LatinAmerican Art Exhibit, Grace Exhibition Space, Glasshouse Gallery, The Queens Museum, Art in Odd Places in NYC; RAW during Miami Art Week; Illuminus Festival in Boston, and SPACE Gallery and Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh; in Mexico, at Monumento a la Revolución and La Explanada del MUAC, during the Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro; also participated in Nuit Blanche Festival in Saskatoon, Canada.

Araujo is a Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art awardee, BAC and LMCC grantee and has received support through numerous residencies and fellowships including Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship, Creative Capital taller, ITP Camp and EMERGENYC. Araujo was awarded a full scholarship from Mexican Government Institution CONACYT. She holds an MA in Motor Learning and Control from Teachers College, Columbia University and a BA in Theater Studies from Emerson College.              // @ArantxaAraujo //arantxaaraujo.com

SARA KOSTIÇ [SERBIA/USA]

In my work, I incorporate the physical, social, and political context of the emotional and physical body. It is a statement of unheard voices, that struggle, accept and change.The way we are shaping the space, and its borders, space is shaping us, our way of perceiving the limits, togetherness, and loneliness. The body in space is not passive in spite of the limitation. The body has its own voice, and in time it changes our perception of space. My work explores automatism by which we react and fears that guide us.

- It is an old road, never even bothered to be asphalted. Dust is everywhere, and it goes on into two paths illuminated by the cloudy sky. It says, left – Sugar Town, right – Box Town. I go left because it just has more sense to me, I learned it that way, left comes first.

Sara Kostić is an interdisciplinary artist who creates in the field of performance,visual arts, and architecture. She received an M.A. in Architecture Design from BelgradeUniversity. She was involved in an alternative dance scene in Belgrade (Stanica), performance art program (PerformanceHUB), and is an alumna of EmergeNYC. In her work, she incorporates various phenomenology related to the social, political, and physical body, questioning the transformative relations between borders and possibilities. She is actively involved in the international performance art scene, she performed at MoCA Belgrade (Serbia), Venice International Performance Art Week (Italy), Biennale in Mardin (Turkey), Grace Exhibition Space (New York), and others. She is holding guest lectures and workshops with a focus on site-specific performance, and how architecture or space limitation shapes the concept, RUFA (Rome, Italy), Magacin (Belgrade, Serbia), and others.  // @arbor_sara //sarakostic.com

Performance Art by: SARA COWDELL and Film Screening of RECKONING by A. Romania and S. L Smith
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9:00 PM SARA COWDELL HOUSE OF MADNESSI [NEW ZEALAND/AUSTRALIA]

Houses of Madness is the second in a series of works in homage to my great aunt. This work investigates the ongoing tensions of performing normality and internal experiences of intrusive and obsessive thoughts. -You built a house in your mind, for only you and your madness - but now you have a house for your body, one that is built with wood, it has a door that opens to meadow, and windows with no pains. In this house maybe something new, mad and shared can emerge.

Sara Cowdell is a New Zealand performance artist and curator based in Melbourne, Australia. In her curatorial practice Sara explores and expands on traditional art boundaries with an overarching ethos based on experimental, site-specific and socially engaged practices. In her own work she uses embodied storytelling, ritual, costume, and dance to create impactful performances. Sara continues to attempt to capture the unsaid, the obsessive and the bizarre emotions that sit within us all. She screams the words you keep trying to swallow because they feel so unbearably uncomfortable in your mouth.  // www.saracowdell.com // www.performanceartweekaotearoa.com// 

10:00 pm Film Screening -RECKONING- by Alex Romania and Stacy Smith

ALEX ROMANIA [BROOKLYN, NY]

Alex Romania makes multidisciplinary work at the crux of expansive task and deteriorating form, investigating bodies of cultural debris amidst the invisible everyday and toxic ingestions, consuming, purging, and breaking apart. Romania’s work delves into spaces of the unimaginable, staring into the unknown to consider a crude and splendid humanity, embracing the unruly to liberate the governed body.

STACY LYNN SMITH [BROOKLYN, NY] 

Stacy Lynn Smith is a neurodivergent, biracial/Black dancer/performance artist with specialization in butoh, contemporary dance and experimental theater, creating work through a unique lens of “other”. Smith enjoys collaborating as performer/improviser, director and choreographer across disciplines and genres with an array of talented artists including: rhythmanalyst, DeForrest Brown Jr., vocal/performance artist, Anna Homler, choreographer/founder of New Dance Alliance, Karen Bernard, experimental theater company, Saints of an Unnamed Country, surfer/fashion designer, Thaddeus O’Neil and director/filmmaker, Josephine Decker. Member of artist/activist cohort, Body Politic.

ANNA LAURA HAFNER [NY]

Anna Laura Hafner returns to the world of performance with a special ritual honoring their homeland, the Catskills, and its creatures, through a slow, light-filled visual fantasy touching upon what it means to feel “at home” and connected to land that is actively becoming gentrified and developed. This ritual intends to bring light to loss of habitat and the current housing crisis of the Hudson Valley with hopes to initiate healing for all its inhabitants.

Anna Laura Hafner (they/them or she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer inspired by magic, mysticism, and nature as they intersect with modern society. They are from Woodstock NY and they currently live in Mexico City. Anna comes from a long line of Woodstock artists, raised with traditional techniques of plein air and observation from the Woodstock School of Art and infused with inspiration from the Maverick Arts Colony and NYC underground performance art. // www.annalaurahafner.com

Friday, July 22 - 4:00 pm 

THE INSTITUTE FOR CULTURAL ACTIVISM (JOHN HALPERN & EMILY HARRIS)

"APOCALYPSE" - MULTI MEDIA INSTALLATION

Saturday, August 23 - 5:00 pm

C😃LT [NY/MA]

COLT invites you to take a Sonic Walk through the trails at Rosekill, to follow and stray from sounds sent to surrounding acres. An invitation to witness the prism of space - to wander from the source as landscape shifts from setting to vocalist, dwell in the great echo bounding through the trees.

Saturday, August 23 - 10:00 pm

MARNI KOTAK [NY]

In my work, I aim to convey the authentic experience of my life as it is being lived, simultaneously engaging with audience members who become active participants in the actual events unfolding. By inviting the public to momentous occasions such as the birth of my son (The Birth of Baby X, 2011), to recontextualizing parenthood as performance art (Raising Baby X, ongoing), to re-enacting my grandfather's funeral and the loss of my virginity, I am saying that human life itself the most valuable work of art, and that our most intriguing performances exist in our real life activities, rituals and accomplishments.

These "Found Performances", as I call them, take place when we are not necessarily aware that we are performing, when we are so engaged in the present moment that we transcend the issues of spectacle that have come to dominate much of contemporary society, and hold onto what is real. In the era of virtual sharing and reality TV, I share my actual experiences through my performances, and make them into art, honoring the cultural value and significance of everyday life.

UPSTATE ART WEEKEND: www.upstateartweekend.org

SATURDAY, JULY 30 - PERFORMANCE by CHARLES DENNIS [NY]

Charles Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist who works with the disciplines of dance, installation, performance art, photography and video art.

Charles Dennis was born and raised in New York City. He is a graduate of Poly Prep in Brooklyn, attended Drew University and received a B.A. in interdisciplinary arts from Empire State College.

Charles began his career in the arts in 1971 when he left college to join theater director Robert Wilson’s theater collective, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. He went on to perform in many legendary early Wilson works including the original 1976 production of “Einstein on the Beach”.

In 1977 Charles began creating his own form of “physical theater”, combining dance, spoken word and visual art and media with his first solo work “Chaol Canyon” presented at the 112 Greene Street Gallery in New York City. Two years later, living in the East Village, Charles co-founded Performance Space 122, in an abandoned public-school building. P.S. 122 is now one of this country’s most active presenters of new dance and performance art. He co-directed the space from 1980-83 and was deeply involved with the organization for 25 years as a founding artist, performer and board member. He created and performed numerous interdisciplinary solo and group performances at P.S. 122 and other venues from 1980-2000. His 1994 inter-generational, community-oriented dance theater work “Full House” toured nationally using community performers of all ages from each city where it was performed. In this work performers assembled the frame of a house onstage while segments of dance, storytelling and video were offered. In 1999 he began experimenting with wireless video feeds in his solo “Mr. Remote” which toured nationally and was praised by the New York Times…. “Closer to club art than art video the piece has the dynamic energy of dance itself, a rare thing in videodance. And Mr. Dennis plays with real, imagined, and video time with quietly dazzling wit and comfortable humanity.” To date Charles has created over 50 performances and installations that have been presented in art and community centers, galleries, and theaters worldwide.

Saturday, August 6 -- FIRE SHADOWS: Myth, Magic Ritual -- GUERILLA THEATER & GINO ROMERO

GUERILLA THEATER [BROOKLYN, NY]
"Like any birth, we arrive in a gruesome but hopeful state. A roiling alchemy of total art combining both new and old modes of expression. The public square is our natural home, without which the tension between creator and unsuspecting pedestrian is lost - hence the term "guerrilla." The real war is won or lost in the agora, not the white cube."
GINO ROMERO [VENEZUELA/NYC]
Historically, the outskirts of society have meant home for many members of the Queer community. Through the process of ritual, language, and tradition, a new world of solace for Queer and deviant identities prevailed the attempts of erasure from patriarchal and colonial aspects of mainstream society.
During the 70s and 80s, the rapid proliferation of Queer culture received recognition through media and mainstream society. Well-known aspects of this cultural boom include ballroom culture and dance, as well as new slang and language that was exercised within the community. Alongside these well-known aspects of Queerness, there are also practices to help members make sense of and honor the line between life and death. As a result, Romero became particularly interested in mourning rituals practiced in Queer culture, as it acts as a tangible gateway toward spirituality.
Inspired by “Ephemera as Evidence” by José Esteban Muñoz, this body of work incorporates aspects of Venezuelan spiritual practice with Queer archival and mourning practices to imagine what a Queer-centered practice can look like. How can we as Queer people honor our ancestors? How can we petition them for guidance? What does Queer as ritual look like?
Gino is a queer and trans-first-generation Venezuelan-American. Their work primarily deals with the decolonization of archives through community intervention and personal narrative. This body of work explores the Queer experience through a diasporic lens. Using aspects of rituals that are native to Venezuela in tandem with community archiving, they create a space for collective healing and memory. Oftentimes in archives, cultural materials are removed from all context, with this work, they create a living archive that is built for and by its users and contextualized within a cultural language of Queerness, spiritual practice, and historical ephemera.

Friday, August 12 & Saturday, August 14 -- SPACE OPERA - Children's Musical by Andrea Maddox 

Sunday, August 14 -- 4:00 to 6:00 pm AN/AESTHETICS - Sculpture Garden Opening & Multi-Media Event. Assembled by Michael Asbill, Jeff Benjamin, Lital Dotan, Marielena Ferrer and Emilie Houssart. 

Saturday, August 20 -- FIRE SHADOWS: Myth, Magic Ritual -- RONIT LEVIN DELGADO + MATTHEW GIOIA

Saturday, August 27 -- FIRE SHADOWS: Myth, Magic Ritual -- LITAL DOTAN + DEEP POND