asmr4apocalypse

three dancers face left and right surrounded by audiences

Catch asmr4apocalypse at the something fierce festival November 22 & 23!

Flux IV 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City, NY 11101
Festival hours: November 22-23, 12-9 PM
Exhibition opening: November 22, 5-9pm
Performance: November 23, 5:30pm 

Check out the something fierce festival line up. My sound installation, asmr4apocalypse, will exhibit in the festival and be on view both days of the festival from 12-9pm. And on November 23 at 5:30pm, I will perform asmr4apocalypse with dance artist Stacy Lynn Smith and sound artist Mike Clemow. 

 


 

 

asmr4apocalypse is an installation that uses sound, meditation, sculpture, and performance to decompose empire. After developing it as a short solo dance performance, asmr4apocalypse is growing into a sound installation accompanied by trio performances and ritual activations.

 

Now on view: asmr4apocalypse in TIME SIGNATURE

June 4-22, 2025
WSA | 180 Maiden Lane NYC
Visit Wednesdays to Sundays from 12–7pm
Stop by ritual gatherings June 18 4-7 & June 21 3-6pm

For DEMO2025, I have installed the next iteration of asmr4apocalypse in Time Signature, the NEW INC Extended Realities showcase on view at WSA from June 4-22. asmr4apocalypse will offer meditative soundscape suggesting a somatic connection to the “deep time” of geological change, orienting viewers away from the pace of human institutions. Accompanied by sculptures made from branches dipped in bioplastics and biomaterial concrete, and a video of performance rooted in intimacy with the land, this soundscape encourages slowness and rest.

Stop by on June 18 anytime between 4-7pm & June 21 anytime between 3-6pm for walk throughs with me. I will offer mugwort, dream medicine, to visitors to aid collective dreaming of post-colonial futures.

 

A. Installation

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A rest space with a green wall, a pebbled foam floor mat, large cushions that look like boulders, a TV monitor on the ground, and branches hanging from the green wall and a metal grid in front of a wall of windows

 

 


This project has had several in-progress performances both as a solo dance piece and trio  dance and ritual work. Documentation of past in-progress iterations:

asmr4apocalypse trio at Vox Populi

April 26, 2025

N. Sculpture

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Fallen branches collected by zavé are turned into sculptures with candied sugar. Photographer Mike Clemow

Audiences entered Vox Populi, which featured installed biomaterial sculptures by Cecilia McKinnon and zavé martohardjono. In a pre-show ritual, performers Amalia Colon-Nava, Mel Krodman, and zavé offered edible mugwort jellies to attendees. Both the mugwort jellies and the dried mugwort bundles adorning the sculptures and pedestals help lucid dreaming. Relaxing into a meditative spatialized soundtrack that plays on four speakers in the room, and taking in performance, audiences visualize geological futures in which a monumental disaster-producing military office complex we all know falls apart and disintegrates back into the earth. 

Originally a solo dance work, this rendition of asmr4apocalypse shared new choreographic research cultivated in classes and workshops led by zavé in Spring 2025 in Philadelphia with support from the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the Penn Museum and Leah Stein Dance Studios.

 


asmr4apocalypse solo excerpt 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.

Photo by Logan Zemetres

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asmr4apocalypse solo 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 solo 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.

• May 17, 2023

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