Context Clues Workshops
Leslie Lohman Museum
New York, NY, April 2024
In collaboration with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, this trans-led workshop series invited attendees to the exhibition I’m a thousand different people-Every one is real to think through the relationships the objects in the exhibition have to cultural communities, and collectively imagine shifts in awareness towards practices that nurture creativity and people.
By weaving together practices of community, care, and activation, the Museum became a site for reconsidering and reimagining possibilities for music, sound, conversation, and experimental art in support of trans and queer community. How do we center queer creation and creative world-building? How is a collection of materials a conduit for memories, embodiment, and care?
Context Clues took place over three sessions led by collaborative pairs of trans and non-binary artists:
Saturday, April 13, 4-6pm – devynn emory & SJ Norman
Sunday, April 14, 4-6pm – Crystal Peñalosa & Cy X
Wednesday, April 24, 6-8pm – Aristilde Kirby & Aviva Silverman
Context Clues was produced with support from Incite, an Institute at Columbia University dedicated to producing and moving knowledge to action.
Context Clues Workshop #1 - Unmooring and flooring with dads
Transbrotherhood team SJ Norman and devynn emory brought a workshop of clearing, ruminating, slithering and body mapping utilizing the tools of intuitive drawing, movement scoring and orating. unwinding what is prescriptive, this bent time together invited attendees to come with all that they are.
Context Clues Workshop #2 - Bodies, Vaults, Vibrations
Crystal Peñalosa and Cy X presented a guided participatory experience to explore surrounding context and where it exists in the body through movement, gesture, and sensation. They created a soft, fluid, playful encounter at the Museum. Together attendees explored the thousands of possibilities of how a body can inhabit this space - a museum, a resting place, a tomb, an altar, a cemetery, a cruising space?
Participants were guided and invited to draw inspiration from the many overlapping contexts: the museum as a whole, the two current exhibitions, New York City, Wooster and Grand, stolen land. The Leslie-Lohman Museum is a space that is a steward for the queer community and holds that physicality in temporal frames or oceanic washes. The objects have been created within a context, they are then recontextualized in concept and then physically appear in space for a short time.
Major themes of this event were encouraging participants to:
Dream beyond the existing context, know what’s possible, how you might embody that, and then translate that experience of dreaming back to the present.
Experience the fullness to see all parts of the body, give up a sense of control and embrace the vulnerability of not knowing what will happen.
Flourish within one’s body and needs.
These themes helped participants practice being present, building on existing connections with the body and forging new ones.
Context Clues Workshop #3 - Assembly of Latent Perceivers
For the final event in the Context Clues series, Aristilde Kirby and Aviva Silverman invited attendees to explore personal / political polarities of extreme autonomy and radical interdependence through sound, somatic exercises & group discussion.
S/HE IS HER/E
Another call of prayers for sacred hearts. Still wild, still unholy, still being. Towards the budding of the self unto others, to reverse me as a balm with sarcophagal caress, like the butterfly. Mummified by ash & coalesced by the brain’s slime, roots bonding in plasma like the tendrils of basket-stars. To memorialize & to be remembered, to expand the trace as a somatic ritual. There is more than one of all of us. How a garden path sentence raises hair like the nape of a newborn.