Notes on Territory is adapted from a performance-lecture and installation for the study of containment architecture and embodied resistance. It considers recurring motifs in the development of the modern prison, exploring how those same motifs are repurposed in bodies and movements of people in prison as freedom practices.

Notes for a novel or perhaps a play or score or guide or a creative reimagining/retelling of a re-performance in which two bodies navigate the pleasures and perils of human intimacy, both romantic and platonic. Or as it is commonly referred to by those who have survived it:

A practice of experimental graphic scoring for performance explores the ambiguity and transformation at the conflation of boundaries between dance/performance and photography. Within the score, fragments of the moving gestural body are photographed and then placed upon the page in relation to and modified by lines. Naomi Elena Ramírez (b. Hermosillo, Mexico) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses visual art, video art, and performance, and the process by which the different mediums can inform each other. Her work has been presented by A.I.R. Gallery, the Institute of (Im)Possible Subjects, Movement Research at the Judson Church, DoublePlus at Gibney Dance, The Bronx Latin American Art Biennial, Nurture Art Gallery, BRIC Contemporary Arts online exhibitions, Wallplay Gallery, and The Situation Room, LA.

In its persistent indirections, its tendency to both shape and ornament social space, gossip (chatting, girl talk) can be sculptural. Sometimes, coalescing around a particular figure, a Harvey Weinstein or a David France, the power of this chatter becomes partially institutionally “visible,” although often it recedes from display. Works by Carolyn Lazard, Wu Tsang, Jessica Vaughn, and Hannah Black make use of the sculptural power of chat, and its specific evasion of a certain mode of political speech.

Acoustic Sound Blankets are sculptural costumes/sound blankets that censor my body mass, replacing it with forms such as sound, song, and/or silhouette.

(If) You Make Your Own Story is a collage created from the series o.T. (Incipient Futures). o.T. is a study of the future through embodiment, alliance, and community.

A limited rumination on the practice of swaddling in relation to my general infatuation with death—as release, the only actual possibility of freedom for the spirit, allure of the unknown, comfort of inevitability, caring for others, catharsis of mourning, the possibilities in endings, generative destruction… keyon gaskin prefers not to contextualize their art with their credentials.

What does it mean to go from being a grown woman to a baby crone? Who will guide you without white Western pessimism or cynicism?

Kia Labeija was born and raised in the heart of New York City’s theatre district, Hellz Kitchen. Her multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections of community, politics, fine arts, and activism. Her digital portraits offer theatrical and cinematic re-imaginings of nonfictional events. As a member of the iconic House of Labeija and an active member of NYC’s ballroom scene, she offers the art of Voguing as both a performance and community-based practice. Labeija speaks publicly on the subject of HIV/AIDS as an advocate for the underrepresented living with HIV, including long-term survivors, women, minorities, and children born with the virus.

Who Knows (2014) is an installation comprising 12 pairs of colored neon phrases, modeled on the declension of the verb “to know” which moves though a simple set of variations and reversals. Like much of Etchells’s work Who Knows reveals a fascination with rules and systems in language and in culture, especially in the way these structures are both productive and constraining. The work’s repetition and recombination of individual phrases — “I know,” “You know,” “We know,” “They know”— produces a playful paranoia, nodding to the prescient topics of state and corporate surveillance, snooping and data-harvesting. Who Knows was first shown at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, as part of a collaboration with the PuSh Festival.

Maya Rao’s performance of Walk at Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union’s protest against the assault on the autonomy of the university created a space of intimate-public community. The JNUSU protest challenged the arrest of the Students’ Union president and the witch-hunt targeting members of the JNU community as “antinationals.”

Xandra Ibarra is an Oakland-based performance artist from the El Paso/Juarez border who performs under the alias of La Chica Boom. She uses hyperbolized modes of racialization and sexualization to test the boundaries between her own body and coloniality, compulsory whiteness, and Mexicanidad. Her practice integrates performance, sex acts, and burlesque with video, photography, and objects. Her work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Popa Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Joe’s Pub (NYC), PPOW Gallery (NYC), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and The Burlesque Hall of Fame (Las Vegas), to name a few. She was awarded the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Award, ReGen Artist Fund, Theater Bay Area Grant, and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award.

Mark So lives in Los Angeles. His work is preoccupied with the materiality of language, exploring situations of ordinary literacy via simple means of recording/transcription/reading and changing experiences of silence. His many pieces (300 alone involve John Ashbery’s poems) take form as scores, tapes, performances, and other more obscure manifestations. So recently released New complaints. New rewards , a book/DVD he coauthored with Stuart Krimko, through his DEATH-SPIRAL publishing initiative ( DEATH-SPIRAL.net ). “The Recital” from Three Poems. © 1972, 1997, 2008, by John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of John Ashbery .

Kader Attia lives and works in Berlin and Algiers. His first solo exhibition was held in 1996 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2003, he gained international recognition at the 50th Venice Biennale. In 2014, he was awarded the Berlin Art Prize: Jubilee Foundation 1848/1948. Recent exhibitions include Culture, Another Nature Repaired (solo show), Middelheim Museum, Antwerp; Contre Nature (solo show), Beirut Art Center; Continuum of Repair: The Light of Jacob’s Ladder (solo show), Whitechapel Gallery, London; Repair. 5 Acts (solo show), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Construire, Déconstruire, Reconstruire: Le Corps Utopique (solo show), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Biennale of Dakar; dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel; Performing Histories (1) at MoMA, New York; and Contested Terrains , Tate Modern, London.

taisha paggett’s work includes individual and collaborative investigations for the stage, gallery, and public sphere, which question the body, agency, and the phenomenology of race and gender. Her work has been presented widely, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, Danspace Project, and the Whitney Museum (NY); Defibrillator (Chicago); The Off Center (SF); Public Fiction and LACE (LA); and BAK (Utrecht). She has worked with David Roussève, Stanley Love Performance Group, Fiona Dolenga, Vic Marks, Kelly Nipper, Meg Wolfe, Ultra-red, and with Ashley Hunt on their project On Movement, Thought and Politics . paggett is on the dance faculty at UC Riverside, and is co-instigator of itch dance journal.

Stefan Kaegi produces documentary theatre plays and performances for public spaces. He is currently adapting his audio tour for 50 headphones, Remote X , for cities such as Santiago de Chile and St. Petersburg and is performing research on Volkswagen factories in China. Based in Berlin, Kaegi coproduces works with Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel under the label Rimini Protokoll. Using research, public auditions, and conceptual processes, they give voice to “experts” who are not trained actors but have something to tell. Recent works include the multiplayer video piece Situation Rooms, 100% Paris with 100 local citizens onstage, and Lagos Business Angels with Nigerian business people.