Bilna'es, nora chipaumire, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Juliana Huxtable, Darrell Jones, Julie Tolentino, Wendy’s Subway, Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen

In performance: nora chipaumire • Juliana Huxtable • Julie Tolentino

keywords: affinity, atmosphere, commemoration, commons, energy, erotics, flesh-body, freedom, friendship, giving-receiving, loss, materiality, mortality, (non)knowledge, observation, research, revolution, service, speculation, survival, unstable archives

In practice: Bilna’es • Denise Ferreira da Silva • Darrell Jones

keywords: air, becoming, black feminist poethics, crisis, dancing, disorder, difference without separability, gravity, hijacking, improvisation, negation, participant, periphery, permutation, praxis, refuge, refusal, rhythm, un-languageable

In process: Wendy’s Subway • Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen

keywords: attention, collectivity, complicity, conviviality, elsewhere, dispersal, interdependence, movement, methodology, play, rehearsal, scoring, time, tempo, transmission, translation

In performance, we gather in proximity to the works and lifeworlds of nora chipaumire, Juliana Huxtable, and Julie Tolentino. Each artist offers performances that differently inhabit and refract liveness as a proposition, need, and horizon. Their works sharpen, tear, and cut into the multiplicities and densities that charge the present, the excessive and playful art of the edit, the instability and difference that emerges in the archival encounter. chipaumire’s acontinua - an obituary, a manual for a life lived chasing LIFE is a revolutionary meditation that iterates across two nights, channeling the maximal into the distilled and back again. Juliana Huxtable extends her lush interspecies, intra-animating poetics into a shifting environment of language, light, and sound for GFP (GREEN FLUORESCENT PROTEIN). Building on their archiving-performance project The Sky Remains the Same, Julie Tolentino gives group form to Lovett/Codagnone’s 1999/2005 duet CLOSER, attuning us to the urgent task of keeping the impossible record.

In practice, we read, listen, dance, talk, wonder, and dream with Bilna’es, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Darrell Jones. Expanded listening and study sessions with the adisciplinary platform Bilna’es dwell in the resounding anticolonial multitude of life-lived in the negative. Poethical readings of the Tarot led by Denise Ferreira da Silva challenge the inherited philosophical and epistemological traditions that constitute the political-architecture of the present, welcoming our capacities for “existence as implicancy.” The physical-poetic-philosophical is alive in Darrell Jones’ practice sessions that invite participants toward extremes and edges, finding non-redemptive ways of moving the body through intensity.

In process, we promiscuously accumulate, collide and (dis)arrange matters and materials in the Wendy’s Subway’s Reading Room, inseparable assembly, and in the zona de juego, a manifestation of Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen’s project Domestic Anarchism. inseparable assembly constellates a collection of texts that prompt connections and webs of thought. Through a screening program with the After Hours Film School, inseparable assembly attends to the many valences of rehearsal. Domestic Anarchism: zona de juego makes a place for ambient conviviality and cohabitation. Emerging from a series of intimate collaborations that blur living and making, the zona de juego and its companion session bailes with Malcolm-x Betts shapeshift between dancing, mark-making, ingesting, and reflecting.

STL, Vol. 4 swarms improvisationally against attempts at institutional, disciplinary, and repressive enclosure. We’ve already been swarming. Our movement is the dissonant counter-sway, a hesitant social dance within a para-site containing and scattering our immeasurable para-fictions. We gather cause we want to and we have to. STL is open to all — we are all students.

Come fantasize, disrupt, and unwork the school, the scene, the scheme…

— Lauren Bakst & Niall Jones

PROGRAM

View the full program and schedule on temporaryliveness.org.

The School for Temporary Liveness reimagines performance through the poetic frame of a school. STL asks: What if we approach performances as invitations to enter into study? Inversely, if we imagine the whole operation of a school as a performance, how does that change the ways we teach and learn, or what we think of as knowledge?

When approached as a form that bears the excesses, instabilities, and ruptures of social life, performance—like school—can be an excuse for taking part in dissonant communion. Amid crumbling and defunct infrastructures for assembly, STL Vol. 4 proposes a para-site for renewal, refuge, and possibility.

Following three prior presentations in Philadelphia in 2019, 2020, and 2023, STL Vol. 4, presented in New York City for the first time and dually broadcasted live on Montez Press Radio, creates a site for emergent and collective study, mobilizing formats for practice, action, and reflection over three days.The School for Temporary Liveness Vol. 4 is organized by guest curators Lauren Bakst and Niall Jones, with Matthew Lyons and Angelique Rosales Salgado, The Kitchen. Production by David Riley, Production & Exhibitions Manager, and Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor, The Kitchen.

PARTICIPANTS

Bilna'es is an adisciplinary platform that seeks to find new models for artists to redistribute resources and support one another in the production and circulation of work. It functions as a publishing space with releases ranging from music to video games, web projects, publications, performances, installations, and other yet-to-be-developed forms.

nora chipaumire was born in 1965 in what was then known as Umtali, Rhodesia (now Mutare, Zimbabwe). She is a product of colonial education for black native Africans – known as group B schooling. She studied law at the University of Zimbabwe and dance at Mills College in Oakland, California. As African knowledge acquisition does not come with baccalaureates it is impossible to quantify what the African body holds. chipaumire acknowledges these knowledges in addition to the western forms branded into her.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is an artist and philosopher. She is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities and Co-Director of the Critical Racial & Anti-Colonial Study Co-Laboratory at New York University and adjunct professor at the Monash University School of Art, Architecture, and Design (Australia). Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on themes and questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), The Impagavel Divide (Workshop of Political Imagination and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg / MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her artwork includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) and Ancestral Claims/Ancestral Clouds (2023) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational artistic practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has performed shows and lectures in important artistic spaces, such as the Pompidou Centre (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (São Paulo), Guggenheim (New York) and MoMa (New York). She also wrote and created for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016; 2023 Venice Biennale, 2017 and Documenta 14, São Paulo Biennale, 2023) and published in art spaces such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst and E-Flux.

Juliana Huxtable is a writer, artist and musician living and working Between New York and Berlin. She has had solo exhibitions at Reena Spaulings, New York, Project Native Informant, in London, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. Her work has been exhibited and collected at The Guggenheim, The New Museum, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The ICA London. Her forthcoming poetry collection will be published with Wonder Press in 2025. Her first collection of texts, Mucus In my Pineal Gland, was co-published by Wonder Press and Capricious in 2017, and she co-wrote Life: A Novel with Hannah Black, which was published in 2018 with Buchhandlung Walther König.

Darrell Jones is a performer, educator, researcher, and choreographer. He has performed extensively across the United States and globally, in all kinds of venues, including Links Hall in Chicago, Danspace Project, Dance Box – Kobe, Japan, and the Venice Biennale. He maintains long-term collaborative relationships with Bebe Miller Company and Ralph Lemon. Additional foundational experiences have included working with Min Tanaka, Ronald K. Brown, Kokuma Dance Theatre (Birmingham, UK), and Urban Bush Women. Jones is a two-time Bessie Award recipient and has received grants and awards including the 3Arts Award, Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the MAP Fund and a Walder Foundation Platform Award. He is a tenured faculty member at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago where he teaches classes in physical practice, performance, and improvisational techniques. He holds an MFA in Dance from Florida State University.

Julie Tolentino (b. 1964, San Francisco; lives and works in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree) led queer club spaces, including Clit Club, Tattooed Love Child, and Dagger, and was a member of ACT UP New York, Art Positive, and the House of Color collective. Exhibitions and performances have been held at SPACES, Cleveland (2024); Brown University, Providence (2024); Commonwealth and Council (2024, 2019, 2013); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Aspen Art Museum (2020); Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, New York (2020); Performance Space New York (2019); Participant Inc, New York (2019, 2005); The Kitchen, New York (2019, 2001); EFA Project Space, New York (2019); 6th Annual Thessaloniki Biennale (2018); The Lab, San Francisco (2018); and New Museum, New York (2013), Performa, New York (2013, 2005). Tolentino is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2025), Foundation for Contemporary Art Creative Research Grant (2025), MacDowell Fellowship (2026), Joyce Foundation Award (2023), Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Grant (2022), Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2021), Queer|Art|Prize for Sustained Achievement (2020), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Performance Award (2019), Fulcrum Arts Artist Honor (2019), Pieter Performance Dancemakers Grant (2018), Art Matters Foundation Award (2015, 2010), and CHIME Mentorship Award with J. Kidd (2012) and Doran George (2010). Tolentino has participated in residencies at Herb Alpert/Ucross (2021); MacDowell (2020); BOFFO, Fire Island (2018); Hope Mohr Bridge Project Community Engagement (2017-18); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2013-14); and PACT Zollverein, Essen (2012). Tolentino received an MFA from University of California, Riverside (2020) and is Faculty and Program Co-Director of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts.

Wendy’s Subway is a reading room, writing space, and independent publisher in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We support emerging artists and writers in making experimental, urgent work and create alternative modes for learning and thinking in community. Wendy’s Subway is dedicated to encouraging creative, critical, and discursive engagement with arts and literature. inseparable assembly is curated by Marian Chudnovsky, Juwon Jun, and Rachel Valinsky for Wendy’s Subway. After Hours Film School is a semi-monthly workshop and screening series devoted to new currents in cinematic practice. The series invites moving-image makers to share new work or work-in-progress and engage around methodology, production, and key questions animating their work. After Hours is organized by Kirsten Gill and Rachel Valinsky.

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are artistic collaborators and the main caretakers of Penélope (b. 2021). Andrea and Adriano work through dance as an expanded set of practices and tools for knowledge exchange that can be used to sense and make sense with the audience. Their work questions the distribution of care and solidarity beyond ‘the family’ and considers how such a distribution could inform dance practice. They were fellows at the Jan van Eyck Academie 2023-2024, and have presented their work across Europe. Their separate artistic practices are still present, but since the last three years, it’s all a bit tangled up.

TEAM

Lauren Bakst (Curator) dreamt up the School for Temporary Liveness in Philadelphia with Donna Faye Burchfield in 2018. Since then she has been iterating and devising the School across various contexts with friends and accomplices. Lauren is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus in Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation project considers the rendering of lesbian sex and erotics in minor archives of performance, film, and scenes of social life from the 1970s to the present. She was a 2023-24 Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellow in Lesbian Studies at Yale University. Lauren’s article, “Erotic City: Slipping into the Clit Club’s Lesbian Surround,” is forthcoming in a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review. Her performance works have been presented by The Kitchen, Danspace Project, the Chocolate Factory, Pioneer Works, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, SculptureCenter, and the Drawing Center, among other spaces. Lauren’s chapbook, more problems with form or, desire notes or, still woman, was published by Wendy's Subway. She regularly teaches seminars in dance and performance studies, contemporary art, and gender & sexuality studies and has previously taught at The Cooper Union, University of the Arts, University of Pennsylvania, and Rutgers University. Lauren is devoted to the lifeworlds of experimental performance.

Sarai Frazier (Lighting Supervisor), @s.arai__ is a Bessie nominated lighting designer, technical producer, and artist born and raised in New York City. Her work spans performance art exploring the presence of black, disappearing, and isolated bodies through light. She is currently curating a series of workshops at Performance Space New York for technicians that emphasizes community, collaboration, and professional development, with a particular focus on sharing resources to marginalized communities.

Niall Jones (Curator) is an artist, performer and teacher based in New York City. Niall constructs immersive, liminal sites that attend to sensual, collective registers of fiction, dis/order, dis/placement and in/completeness. And he dances through a constellation of curiosities, obsessions and practices destabilized by performance, sound, text, photography and video.

Maurina Lioce (Stage Manager) has worked in NYC with Half Straddle, Adrienne Truscott, Alex Tatarsky, Sibyl Kempson, Jim Findlay, David Byrne, Andrew Ondrejcak, Mike Iveson, Erin Markey, Suzanne Bocanegra, and Young Jean Lee. She is also the Associate Artistic Director and Stage Manager for Elevator Repair Service Theater Company. She loves working at The Kitchen (most recently with Dance and Process 2024) and is excited to return for this program.

Matthew Lyons (Curator) has organized numerous exhibitions and performance projects at The Kitchen with a wide range of artists since 2005. In 2024, he curated the exhibition Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery, an official collateral event of the Venice Biennial. His writing has appeared in Mousse Magazine, Movement Research Performance Journal, and Document Journal, among others.

Devanté Melton (Floral Design) is a Detroit-born visual artist and set designer living in Brooklyn, New York. This artist transforms spaces into whimsical landscapes. He manipulates objects & organic material to evoke a sense of childlike wonder. Devanté’s work leans towards the fantastical & aims to spark imagination and rekindle the magic of the natural world.

Montez Press Radio is an experimental broadcasting and performance platform founded in 2018, with the goal of fostering greater experimentation and conversation between artists, writers, and thinkers through the medium of radio. This platform invites different corners of the art world to interact with each other in person and on air—a place where media finally meets flesh. Montez Press Radio is drawn to art that exists in the unexpected, the authenticity of sharing without a script, the sounds of ideas in the making, conversation that forgets there’s an audience. All of its in-studio broadcasts are free and open to the public. Montez Press Radio’s archive is an ongoing auditory document of Montez Press Radio’s existence. It is not designed to reflect the ingenuity of postproduction, but rather serves as a catalogue of rough cuts which contain all the small glitches, false starts, and awkward silences that are intrinsic to our process of live recording and running an event space. Montez Press Radio is as much a radio broadcast as it is a reflection of particular moments in time.

David Riley (Production & Exhibitions Manager) is a producer, curator, and multimedia artist who works across video, performance, and installation. At The Kitchen he has overseen exhibitions by Lisa Alvarado and Harmony Holiday, and performances by JJJJJerome Ellis and Joy Guidry. From 2018-2023, he worked at The Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU. As producer, he contributed to exhibitions by Morgan Bassichis, Naima Green, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Rashid Johnson, and many others. As curator of performance, he organized the performance residency Test Pattern, which invited artists such as Holland Andrews, Anh Vo, Brontez Purnell, and Moor Mother to use the ICA Auditorium as a TV production studio; and ICA Live, which featured musicians Angel Bat Dawid, Lucrecia Dalt, Nadah El Shazly, and Aja Monet. As a freelance video producer, he has collaborated with a long list of artists, arts organizations, and music labels, including Holly Herndon, Mika Tajima, Mexican Summer, and MOCA TV. He has performed or exhibited at MoMA/PS1, The New Museum, The Museum of Arts and Design, Recess, and Basilica Hudson.

Angelique Rosales Salgado (Assistant Curator) (Ciudad de México, México) is a curator and writer based in New York City. Their curatorial, research, and creative practice is grounded in queer study, and focuses on performance, experimental dance, collective work, and time-based media. They have curated, produced, co-organized, and supported numerous exhibitions, commissions, live works, online programs, and artistic projects. Their written work has been published by Jupiter Magazine, BOFFO, Mousse Magazine, Performance Space New York, Institute for Studies in Latin America (ISLAA), LGDR, Kitchen Magazine, and Studio Magazine. Select projects include PROTECT THE PEACE: we, INSURGENT (2024, The Kitchen), JJJJJerome Ellis: Aster of Ceremonies (2024, The Kitchen), NIC Kay: The last gasp of the angry yt man (2024, Dia Chelsea), and Christelle Oyiri: OBLIMEMBER (2023, The Kitchen, Video Viewing Room); recent exhibitions are Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art (2024-2025, The Kitchen, with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit), Harmony Holiday: BLACK BACKSTAGE (2024, The Kitchen), and Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: Filling Station (2023, The Kitchen). Currently, they are assistant curator at The Kitchen, and have held curatorial positions at Pioneer Works, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Tassja Walker (Production Supervisor) is a cultural worker and organizer born and raised in New York City. They are currently Production Supervisor at The Kitchen, where they work collaboratively with artists to assist in materializing their creative projects into shared works.

Kyla Arsadjaja and Bryant Wells are the graphic design team for STL Vol. 4.