Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is an ongoing collaboration between choreographer, writer, and organizer Emily Johnson and scholar, artist, and writer Kai Recollet. Coming into its eighth year, this season’s Kinstillatory fires organize us around extended time—with one another, with sound, provocation, action.

These kinstillatory fires centering anti-colonial Indigenous, feminist, and gender-expansive care ethics and practices are hosted, held, and lightly curated by Johnson and Recollet, along with invited guests and community partners. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as we articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. It is a place to bring practices, grammars, and needs forward and through the portals that fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now and into the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. A provocation, and an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.

This season, gestures toward our abundant futures guide the thinking as we gather toward necessary making, skill-sharing, body, and land/attention with artists Nathan Young, Marcela Torres, Maria Bauman, and IV Castellanos.

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter will take place outside at Abrons Arts Center, located at 466 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Lenapehoking. The fire gatherings are free and open to all. To make a reservation, see links below.

2025 Kinstillatory Fires

Thursday, March 6, 6-8pm
With Nathan Young

Nathan Young (born 1975, Tahlequah, OK) is an artist, scholar, and curator working in an expanded practice that incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially engaged art, and experimental music. Young’s work often draws upon the spiritual and the political to complicate and subvert notions of the sublime. He co-founded the artists collective Postcommodity and holds an MFA in music/sound from Bard College’s Milton Avery School of the Arts. Young is a PhD candidate in the University of Oklahoma’s innovative Native American Art History Doctoral program where his scholarship is focused on Indigenous sonic agency. He is the founder and curator of The Intertribal Noise Symposium Series, Tulsa Noise, Tulsa Noisefest and the Peyote Tapes record label. Young’s work has been supported by The Native Arts + Culture Foundation, The Terra Foundation for the Arts, The Thoma Foundation, Creative Capital, The Tulsa Artist Fellowship, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Carnegie Mellon Foundation as well as the Tribeca Film Institute and the Sundance Institute. Young is an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians and is also a direct descendent of the Pawnee Nation and Kiowa Tribe. He formerly served as an elected member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians Tribal Council. He is the 2024-2025 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award.

March 6: https://www.abronsartscenter.org/programs/kinstillatory-mappings-in-light-and-dark-matter-2025a

Thursday, April 17, 6-8pm
With Marcela Torres

Marcela Torres is an artist, organizer, and educator who uses strength-building exercises and community rituals, to propose forms of reparations. They were born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and residing nomadically between Chicago, IL and Brooklyn, NY. Their physical research builds on methods of transcendental rituals, racial struggles within the United States and contemporary Latinx diaspora.

April 17: https://www.abronsartscenter.org/programs/kinstillatory-mappings-in-light-and-dark-matter-2025b

Thursday, May 22, 6-8pm
With Maria Bauman

Maria Bauman (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, FL, now based in Brooklyn, NY. Bauman makes bold and honest artworks for her company, MBDance, based on physical and emotional power, insistence on equity, and experiments with intimacy. She is also co-founder of ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity) and a core trainer with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. Bauman has recently been recognized for choreography and dancing with two Bessie Awards, an Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellowship, and two Maggie Allessee National Choreographic Center residencies. She is currently the 2024-25 Alvin Ailey Artist-in-Residence, a Mertz-Gilmore/NYFA dance award recipient, and the Queer Art Exchange Network ambassador artist on behalf of BAAD!

May 22: https://www.abronsartscenter.org/programs/kinstillatory-mappings-in-light-and-dark-matter-2025c

Thursday, June 26, 6-8pm
With IV Castellanos

IV Castellanos is a Mx Indigenous Bolivian/American, an abstract performance artist, sculptor, land defender and water protector in training. Their practice prioritizes skill sharing and creating space for Queer, Trans* and diasporic Indigenous communities and people of color. They create stand-alone sculptures, wall works installations, wearables, and objects for performance. Their studio practice involves a convergence of techniques to create sculptures that highlight labor and effort as meaningful actions. They received the Braiding Seeds Fellowship (2023), an IndieSpace grant (2023), City Arts Corps grant (2021), Franklin Furnace Fund grant (2019), The manage the Land Back Hub Brooklyn for artists and activists along with Build And Reworld Now, in collaboration with choreographer/multidisciplinary artist Emily Johnson of the Yup’ik Nation, which is a space to make, rest, and reflect, situated on Haudenosaunee lands. Continuous projects include the Performance Art Delivery Service and editing books to the correct pronouns of the reader as ongoing forms of resistance and care.

June 26: https://www.abronsartscenter.org/programs/kinstillatory-mappings-in-light-and-dark-matter-2025d

About Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter
“Definition: Kinstillatory describes a) a choreography of relationality with land, ancestors (including future ancestors and more-than-human kin) and possibilities; and b) a technology to spatially orient a collective to think, dream, and activate community futures through forms of dance, song, feasting, and witnessing.” (Recollet and Johnson, 2019)

Methodology
“Our techniques and intentions center Indigenous protocol and knowledge; some of which are learnt and some of which come from our particular ways of being together as collaborators. We transmute through our own Indigenous research and processes. We enact ceremony through this research and these processes and we work beyond definitive borders of discipline, colonial geography, and time. Decolonial practices of embodiment—including space and time travel—are part of our work, our sharing, and our making as we build connections to ground, to ancestors, to future, all of which becomes boundless up to sky. We accept a radical relationship to futurity including a deep connection to past and ancestry as well as generations not yet born. We manifest what we know and what we know is possible.”

“Our techniques (in dance, writing, theory, teaching, activism) work to counter perceived invisibility and erasure; in the continuance of aesthetic, tradition, and ceremony; through research and process as ceremony; as radical decolonial love.”

“The technology of the Kinstillatory fire is activated over time via the fire’s ability to continually return. Ongoing presence is vital.” (Recollet and Johnson, 2019)

Further writing on the Kinstillatory: Kindling and Other Radical Relationalities

Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is a project of Emily Johnson / Catalyst. For more information, visit http://www.catalystdance.com.

Emily Johnson / Catalyst’s ongoing programs are made possible with the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, along with Catalyst’s generous individual donors.

Catalyst is powered by the Producer Hub. Our official hotel is the Public New York.

About Abrons Arts Center
Abrons Arts Center is a home for contemporary interdisciplinary arts in Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhood. A core program of the Henry Street Settlement, Abrons believes that access to the arts is essential for a thriving city. Through performance presentations, exhibitions, education programs, and residencies, Abrons mobilizes communities with the transformative power of art.