asmr4apocalypse at Brooklyn Arts Exchange | December 7, 2023

In December 2023, an in-progress sharing of asmr4apocalypse was presented at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, supported by a Fall 2023 Space Grant. This dance and sonic performance is an exercise in collective imagination and visualization of the eventual geological break down of human-powered institutions that create on-going wars and global destruction. Mugwort bundles, an herb for dreaming, hang in the space to help audiences tap into collective visualization. Protest gesture is called on to honor the ongoing labor of activist movements to end war and genocide.

asmr4apocalypse at Aidekman Arts Center | October 11 2023

Tufts University’s Aidekman Arts Center presented asmr4apocalypse in a performance symposium, Break/Down, curated and organized by Mac Irvine. Other artists presented in the symposium were Kama La Mackerel and María Rivera-Felizardo (P1NKSTAR). 

For this iteration, I wild harvested mugwort, a medicinal herb that spurs dreaming, from sidewalks and highways in Lenapehoking/NYC and Patuxet/Medford, to aid in the collective composting-dreaming process that this work aims to spur. I ended the performance by offering branches of mugwort to witnesses and requesting collective dreams for a demilitarized future. I performed outdoors with Richard Hunt’s “Planar Mountain”, a sculpture that marks the relationship between rock formations and industrial materials and the symbiotic relationship between people and nature. I adorned Hunt’s sculpture in mugwort bundles for this performance that, framed in Geological Time Scale, considers the eventual return of metals, stone, oxygen and other natural elements currently trapped in military complexes like the Pentagon back to the ecosystems they were once extracted from.

asmr4apocalypse at Artists Space | May 2023

The first iteration of asmr4apocalypse was presented at Artists Space for the Segue Reading Series curated by Le’Andra LeSeur and David Lindsay. Set to soundscape composed by Daphne Silbiger, this solo performance offers a composting of institutions that feel too big to metabolize, military structures that feel too powerful to disintegrate. Partly an exercise in collective imagination, asmr4apocalypse proposes we collectively visualize – and whisper into being, manifest – the break down of human-powered institutions that create on-going wars and global destruction of livelihood.

Listen below to soundscape for the performance composed by Daphne Silbiger with narration by zavé martohardjono.