DATES / TIMES
S/Kin takes place September 23—December 20, 2021 / Northern Hemisphere: Fall Equinox to Winter Solstice / Southern Hemisphere: Spring Equinox to Summer Solstice. All programming can be accessed at https://www.knowledgeofwounds.com/skin
ACCESSIBILITY
All events will be streamed with captioning. Within one week after each live event Auslan, ASL, and voice descriptions will be available for on-demand viewing in our archive. Upon request, events will be live interpreted. For any questions regarding accessibility contact: info@knowledgeofwounds.com.
S/Kin
(Global)
Knowledge of Wounds
Co-Curated by S.J Norman and Joseph M. Pierce
DESCRIPTION
Knowledge of Wounds (K.o.W) continues to evolve as a mercurial presenting platform and trans-hemispheric network of First Nations and diasporic artists and cultural workers. K.o.W centers Indigenous bodies as ongoing sites of queer and ancestral kinstillation, and honors the world-making medicine of bodies that know rupture, the many lineages of threshold-dwellers engaged in collective dreaming of sovereign futures, and the nurturance of Indigiqueer joy, beauty, and survivance.
Building on the relationships fostered through the inaugural gathering, we have expanded the program to become a global convergence in partnership with six organizations: Performance Space New York (NY), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PDX), the Momentary (AR), Ballroom Marfa (TX), Performance Space Sydney (NSW, Australia), and Blakdance (Australia).
Foregrounding Indigenous principles of seasonal movement, ceremonial time, and celestial alignment, K.o.W 2021-22 will unfold as a series of digital events over the course of an entire solar year, beginning on the 2021 June Solstice. Honoring Indigenous time and space in the spirit of the Wiradjuri term Yindyamarra (the qualities of respect, slowness, growth in accordance with organic cycles), individual events will be announced throughout the year as the program evolves.
The 2021-22 Knowledge of Wounds program revolves around four themes: Breath, S/kin, Blood, and Bone. These elemental components resonate with solar and lunar cycles, honoring Indigenous rhythms and temporalities. Each quarter interweaves four modes of dialogic engagement: 1) a bodymind-centered praxis; 2) a four-week course; 3) a keynote address/conversation; 4) a roundtable discussion.
K.o.W focuses on the intersections of Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and the body. By centering praxes of mutual care, sovereignty, and accessibility, this program asks how we can engage diverse forms of embodiment, techniques, and forms that honor our wounds as points of entry to other selves and other worlds.
In lighting this fire, we honor our entwined ancestral lineages of blood, practice, struggle, and affinity. We humbly honor those who have preceded us, those who are yet to come, and the continuity of Indigenous cultural brilliance in which our work finds its anchor. This is a space held by and for Indigenous peoples, though we welcome all who arrive in the spirit of good relations.
ABOUT K.o.W
Knowledge of Wounds unfolds as a series of readings, meetings, discussions, and performances, and is not limited to any one type of knowledge or mode of expression. It is a ceremony, a gathering space, a fire, a calling to vibrate in good relations across Indigenous time and space, an evolving vessel for the exchange and cultivation of Indigiqueer knowledge, art, action, and medicine. At the heart of our curatorial vision is the conviction that to gather as queer, trans, and two-spirit Indigenous kin, in good relations, means centering our own forms of knowledge production, our own vibrations and beings-with. Thus, we refuse the limitations imposed on our bodies by colonialism, normative taxonomies, and epistemologies, and instead dwell in (and as) liminal thinkers and practitioners.
Our liminality is flesh and our flesh is liminal. Our knowledges are wounds and our wounds are knowledge. Ancestral time and Indigenous futurity—ancestral futurity—is our mode of engagement with the interstitial possibilities of gathering and envisioning together.
Because our futures are enactments of Indigenous praxis, queer, and two-spirit conjurings, our praxis is embodied but not limited to the body. Our bodies are sovereign and co-corporeal. In co-corporeality we gather and thus name our ethical commitments to each other, our fleshly joinings. Which is also to say: our gathering is an ethical, artistic, and communal commitment to Indigeneity, to becomings, and to desiring beyond, across, the limits of colonial normativity.
As such, our work is informed by our respective practices as Indigenous people in the broader fields of art, scholarship, and cultural production. Our collaboration draws on our individual experiences and research, and Knowledge of Wounds opens space for the trans-disciplinary imbrication of the histories, experiences, and desires that we each contribute as curators, and which is in constant dialogue with the artists and participants that gather with us, and communities to which we belong.
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S.J Norman, Co-Curator
S.J Norman (b. 1984) is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer. His career has so far spanned 18 years and has embraced a diversity of disciplines and formal outcomes, including solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video, and sound. He is a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Since 2006 he has lived and worked between Australia, Germany, the UK, and the land known to many as Turtle Island.
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Joseph M. Pierce, Co-Curator
Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
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Chloe Alexandra Thompson, Designer and Digital Producer
Thompson is an interdisciplinary artist, technologist, arts-worker, and member of Beaver Lake Cree Nation. She is presently located in Lenapehoking.
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Carlee Smith, Producer
Smith is an arts worker, organizer, and community member of Indigenous descent from Muisca lands and is currently located on the unceded land of Multnomah, Wasco, Kathlamet, Cowlitz, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other Indigenous peoples.
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Performance Space New York, New York, New York
Performance Space New York is situated on the Lenape island of Manhahtaan (Mannahatta) and more broadly in Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland.
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Performance Space Australia, Sydney, Australia
Performance Space acknowledges the Gadigal people of the land we work on as the traditional custodians of this place we now call Sydney.
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PICA, Portland, Oregon
PICA is situated on the traditional and unceded lands of the Multnomah, Wasco, Kathlamet, Cowlitz, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other Indigenous peoples.
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Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas
Ballroom Marfa is situated on land affiliated with the Jumanos, Lipan Apache, and Mescalero Apache peoples.
The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas
The Momentary, a satellite of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, is a settler and guest in the Northwest Arkansas region acknowledging the Caddo, Quapaw, and Osage as well as the many Indigenous caretakers of the land and water.
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Blakdance, Brisbane, Australia
BlakDance is based on Turrbal and Yuggera Country in Meanjin (Brisbane) at the Judith Wright Centre.
SPONSORSHIP
K.o.W is a global convergence in partnership with six organizations: Performance Space New York (NY), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PDX), the Momentary (AR), Ballroom Marfa (TX), and Performance Space Sydney (NSW, Australia), and Blakdance (Australia).