No kidding! This is a moment of crisis! But …

What if the end of the world as we know it is not something that takes place somewhere in time or begins at a certain place? What if the end of the world as we know it is just right there, anywhere, and everywhere, as a hidden dimension?

The Metaphysics of the Elements supports poethical reading as a practice because it gathers and nurtures tools, practices, and propositions that already enact or help in the imagining and enacting of terrestrial existence otherwise than what has prevailed in the past 500 years or so.

In this iteration of The Studio, where the hidden dimension is accessed, we experiment with reading as a correspondence of the element Air. On Reading (Air) elaborates on the capacities attributed to matter when considered through Air. But here materiality is considered in terms of aesthesis, that is, re/de/composition in the intellectual register, in which the abstract (figural and formal) is inseparable from the concrete (actual and material), because indistinguishable when one attends to deep implicancy as the key to existential conditions.

Key here is the correspondence between Air and Aesthesis, as the latter is here employed because — unlike aesthetic, which already obtains the experience (feeling of pleasure) of the beautiful as purely mental — it conveys the inseparability of the corporeal and mental feelings. As we may have the chance to observe/experience, it is not uncommon to have goosebumps while reading the Tarot!

During this reading session the various significations of Air (the invisible, the atmosphere, public exposure, a mode or manner, expression and movement, will guide us to appreciation of existence as implicancy, as when/as each participant enjoys the collaborative modality that is poethical reading. By that I mean, reading as also experimenting with how every time anyone reads that person is reading with all those who have read, are readings as well as will read, with the same figures and format (the Tarot) in a moment of crisis.

ACCESS NOTES:
Entry: Late entry is not guaranteed. There are stairs or ramp access to an open door marked with The Kitchen's name, behind which there is an elevator accessible to the public. The elevator enters directly into the loft. Seating: This program is seated via foldable, cushioned chairs in the loft space, as well as intermittent seating via couches, gallery benches, and floor cushions. We are happy to accommodate and adjust for individuals who require wheelchair access upon request. Duration: The program run-time is about 1.5 hours total. Restrooms: Our restrooms are gender neutral. An ADA bathroom is available for our guest use in the courtyard, just one door down at Greenwich House Center for Older Adults. Please visit the facilities before entering the elevator to the loft. Exits: The space can be exited via elevator or stairs that take you to Bank street.

Photo: Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (still), 2023. Courtesy of the artists.

Bilnaes’s latest musical release, Only sounds that tremble through us is part of the ongoing project from Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth. The album Only sounds that tremble through us is a double LP. The first record features a full album of compositions by Abbas and Abou-Rahme, developed as part of the project between 2022 and 2024, while the second record is an album made up of commissioned compositions by Hiro Kone, Drew McDowall, Makimakkuk, Julmud, Haykal, SCRAAATCH, Muqata’a, Freddie June, and DJ Haram in conversation with the project. 

The wider project begins with a collection of online recordings of unknown figures (mostly from Palestine, Iraq, and Syria) performing through song, music, and dance either in the intimacy of their homes, or on a street, in a square, at a wedding or on a beach having just found refuge. May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth examines the place and significance of voice in the form of song and oral poetry, and body in the form of dance and gesture as a political act of embodiment and becoming in a moment marked by various forms of violence against entire living fabrics. The project repositions these moments as a material witness inscribed through body, movement, rhythm, and voice to the destruction of everyday life that is occurring or has occurred. Equally, it is also one of the most critical ways in which these fractured communities are resisting their own erasure and laying claim to space, self, and community once more. 

For the School for Temporary Liveness, Bilna’es will host a listening session to the two sides of the LP, with the presence of the contributing musicians DJ Haram, SCRAAATCH, Drew McDowall, Hiro Kone, Haykal, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, and interlocutor Fred Moten. The session will reflect on the politics of sound and the aesthetics of sampling and borrowing as materialized and conceptualized in the project, inviting participants to spend time in prolonged, collective study with the album, listening and reflecting with the artists who have had an extensive engagement with the wider project.

ACCESS NOTES:
Please note: This listening session may include loud sounds. Earplugs are available at the door. Entry: Late entry is permitted at any time dependent on capacity. There are stairs or ramp access to an open door marked with The Kitchen's name, behind which there is an elevator accessible to the public. The elevator enters directly into the loft. Duration: The program run-time is about two hours total. Audiences are welcome to come and go. Seating: This program is seated via foldable, cushioned chairs in the loft space, as well as intermittent seating via couches, gallery benches, and floor cushions. We are happy to accommodate and adjust for individuals who require wheelchair access upon request. Restrooms: Our restrooms are gender neutral. An ADA bathroom is available for our guest use in the courtyard, just one door down at Greenwich House Center for Older Adults. Please visit the facilities before entering the elevator to the loft. Exits: The space can be exited via elevator or stairs that take you to Bank street.

Photo: Courtesy of the artists.

After Hours Film School presents a screening program about rehearsal, improvisation, and musical and embodied interpretation as forms of collective study and assembly. Thinking with cinema as a medium that registers bodies in motion and records their sonic traces—jamming, walking, dancing, coalescing, waving an arm through the screen as the saxophone breathes out—the program asks: how can cinema choreograph its own movements and figurations of the social?

After Hours Film School is a semi-monthly workshop and screening 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. The series is curated by Kirsten Gill and Rachel Valinsky at Wendy’s Subway.

Program
+ The Otolith Group, People to be Resembling, 2012. HD video, color, sound, 21:42 min. 
+ Phill Niblock, The Magic Sun, 1966. 16mm transferred to digital, b & w, sound, 16:44 min.
+ Kevin Jerome Everson, If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move, 2023. Color, sound, 12:19 min.
+ Sky Hopinka, Subterranean Moon, 2024. HD video, color, stereo, 29:45 min.

Runtime: 68 minutes

The Otolith Group, People to be Resembling, 2012. HD video, color, sound, 21:42 min. 
Courtesy of the artists and Lux, London

People to be Resembling can be described as a five-sided portrait of the methodologies of the post-free jazz, pre-world music trio Codona, founded by multi-instrumentalists Collin Walcott, Don Cherry, and Nana Vasconcelos in 1978. Consisting of stills by renowned photographers Roberto Masotti and Isio Saba, newly filmed and archival footage and original music performed by musician Charles Hayward, People to be Resembling reimagines the poetics of permutation that informed the sonic geography of the first Codona album recorded with ECM in September 1978. It returns to this moment in order to redream the recording process at Tonstudio Bauer as a meditation upon the relations between visual anthropology, anti-colonial choreography, nuclear annihilation, and Weltmusik. In its arrangement of positive and negative with color, black and white, still and moving imagery, The Otolith Group's People to be Resembling stages an experiment in mnemonic cohabitation inspired by the visionary music of Codona.

The Otolith Group was founded in 2002 by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Its work is research-based and spans the moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation. It incorporates film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face. Approaching curation as an artistic practice of building intergenerational and cross-cultural platforms, the collective has been influential in critically introducing particular works of artists such as Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Anand Patwardhan, Etel Adnan, Black Audio Film Collective, Sue Clayton, Mani Kaul, Peter Watkins, and Chimurenga in the UK, US, Europe, and Lebanon.

Phill Niblock, The Magic Sun, 1966. 16mm transferred to digital, b&w, sound, 16:44 min.
Courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

Composer, photographer, and filmmaker Phill Niblock's immaculate experimental film, The Magic Sun, features a soundtrack by bandleader and extraterrestrial Sun Ra and the members of his Solar Arkestra, and is composed of rare moving footage of the band in this era. Shot in the mid-sixties, when the Arkestra was based in New York, this film was produced using a unique black and white negative process (with no internegative) and ultra-tight close-ups on the moving hands and mouths of the musicians that grow increasingly frenetic as the images seamlessly turn from negative to positive. The result is a virtually abstract music film, edited with pinpoint precision, that emphasizes the independence of image and sound, save a single magical moment of synchronization at the film's end. 

Phill Niblock (1933–2024, USA) was an artist whose fifty-year career spanned minimalist and experimental music, film, and photography. Since 1985, he served as director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a branch in Ghent, Belgium, and as curator of the foundation’s record label, XI. Known for his thick, loud drones of music, Niblock’s signature sound is filled with microtones of instrumental timberres that generate many other tones in the performance space. In 2013, his diverse artistic career was the subject of a retrospective realized in partnership between Circuit (Contemporary Art Centre Lausanne) and Musée de l’Elysée. The following year Niblock was honored with the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award.

Kevin Jerome Everson, If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move, 2023. Color, sound, 12:19 min
Courtesy of the artist, trilobite-arts DAC, and Picture Palace Pictures

John Cage’s renowned composition receives a compelling remix while, in the recording studio of Jermaine "Country Blakk" Brown in Columbus, Mississippi, Derek “Dripp” Whitfield Jr. and Taymond “ChoSkii” Hughes of the group BmE lay down a new track, in the studio of  Interpolating the worlds of hip-hop and mid-century experimental music, Kevin Jerome Everson’s If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move both documents the labor process of the recording studio and subtly alludes to the filmmaker’s own work of structural assemblage.

Featuring:
Derek "Dripp" Whitfield Jr. 
Taymond "ChoSkii" Hughes
with
Jermaine "Country Blakk" Brown
Director/Camera/Editor: Kevin Jerome Everson
Producers: Kevin Jerome Everson, Madeleine Molyneaux
Editor: Kevin Jerome Everson
Sound: Derek Whitfield Sr.

Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965 Mansfield, Ohio; lives and works in Charlottesville, VA) is the Commonwealth and Ruffin Foundation Distinguished Professor of Studio Art and Director of Studio Arts at the University of Virginia. His art practice encompasses photography, printmaking, sculpture, and film—with twelve features and over three hundred solo and collaborative short-form works to date. He has been recognized with the Guggenheim Fellowship, Rome Prize, Alpert Award, Heinz Award, and Berlin Prize, and with commissions and grants from Ford Foundation/Just Films, Knight Foundation, and Creative Capital. His work screens and exhibits internationally at festivals, cinemas, museums, and biennials, and has been the subject of retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Cinéma du Réel/Centre Pompidou; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; and the Harvard Film Archive.

Sky Hopinka, Subterranean Moon, 2024. HD video, color, stereo, 29:45 min.
Courtesy of the artist

A long take of scenes from a powwow outside of Seattle, organized by Hopinka for his upcoming feature film, Powwow People. Deftly emceed by Ruben Little Head, the film guides the viewer and the audience through a 30-minute-long take of a Northern Traditional dance special. For Hopinka, the movement of his embodied camera is a vehicle for relating to and listening to the beings and ancestors who haven't been repatriated by museums and institutions, all the while questioning different forms of confinement they must contend with.

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington, and Palm Springs, California. In Portland, Oregon he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and nonfiction forms of media. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018–2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Herb Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2021 Forge Project Fellow. He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography, the 2023 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel, and is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. Sky currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is an assistant professor in the department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

ACCESS NOTES:
Entry: Please arrive on time to ensure minimal disruption of the filmic presentations. Late entry is not guaranteed. There are stairs or ramp access to an open door marked with The Kitchen's name, behind which there is an elevator accessible to the public. The elevator enters directly into the loft. Seating: This program is seated via foldable, cushioned chairs in the loft space. We are happy to accommodate and adjust for individuals who require wheelchair access upon request. Duration: The program run-time is about 1.5 hours total. Restrooms: Our restrooms are gender neutral. An ADA bathroom is available for our guest use in the courtyard, just one door down at Greenwich House Center for Older Adults. Please visit the facilities before entering the elevator to the loft. Exits: The space can be exited via elevator or stairs that take you to Bank street.  

Photo: The Otolith Group, People to be Resembling, 2012.

PRACTICE!

PROGRESSION of research PRACTICES
my PEOPLE miller, lemon, tanaka, zollar
POST-modern PRACTITIONERS
POP, dip and spin
i come from a line of PREACHERS
speaking in POETICS
repeating with PLAIN LANGUAGE
“…a PHYSICAL LANGUAGE for the human condition”
how do you PLACE it in the body?
what are PRACTICES that allow it to emerge in the body?
PRINCIPLES
PLACE POLITICS in the body
notice how PERSONAL PHILOSOPHIES emerge as we try on
a PEDAGOGY of call and response
POLYATTENTION
PHYSICALITY
PLAY with PARTS of our PERSON
PROPOSITIONS
PERCEIVE
PERIPHERAL what’s around the body
PUPIL where’s the center
POSTERIOR what’s behind us
falling PRACTICE
PROTESTS and PERMUTATIONS of gravity
PERSISTENCE with redirections
acts of PASSIVE resistance
PLAN, PRECARIOUS our choices in dealing with force
PATTERNS of POSITIONALITY
the cultures PROMINENT in the PLACE
POV
PARALLEL-PERPENDICULAR trajectories
PERSISTENCE in PROCESS
PLEASURE-PAIN PRINCIPLES edges of experience to create the appetite for furthering
PSSY / PNK tactics, who to take out
POWER ability to direct or influence the behavior of others/self in the course of events
PARADIGM shift-a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions
observer/PARTICIPANT watch/do

This class inquiry is grounded in my extensive investigation into structures and tactics for training the body to go to the edge of the physical experience.
We’ll practice the extreme moment, movement.
Within reason. Within range. Within context.

ACCESS NOTES:
Please note: This is a physical class that involves moving in space with other bodies and sound. It will encourage going to extreme physical limits, with options to move at your own pace, to step back, rest, and observe. Entry: Please arrive on time so participants can engage in the full range of the workshop. Space is limited. Late entry is not guaranteed. Duration: The program run-time is about 1.5 hours total. Restrooms: Our restrooms are gender neutral. An ADA bathroom is available for our guest use in the courtyard, just one door down at Greenwich House Center for Older Adults. Please visit the facilities before entering the elevator to the loft. Exits: The space can be exited via elevator or stairs that take you to Bank street. 

Photo: Darrell Jones with Ralph Lemon. Courtesy of the artist.

after everything is extracted 
بعد ما استخرج كل شيء
in the lack
بالنقص
in the negative
بالناقص
in zero
بالصفر
in sub in minus in debt
بالأدنى بالسالب بالديْن

This workshop session will highlight themes engaged by Bilna’es as an adisciplinary publishing platform supporting artistic communities in Palestine and beyond. Through collective reading and discussion led by members of Bilna’es and extended collaborators, participants in the workshop session will explore themes of indebtedness and colonial debt and the politics of refusal through the ongoing prisoners’ struggle in Palestine, with a focus on prison literature and art.

Recommended Prior Reading:
Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear, Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt
Nasser Abourahme, “Every Wound Has a Tale” Consciousness Against the Logic of the Prison

ACCESS NOTES:
Entry: Please arrive on time so participants can engage in the full range of the workshop. Space is limited. Participatory engagement is encouraged. Late entry is not guaranteed. There are stairs or ramp access to an open door marked with The Kitchen's name, behind which there is an elevator accessible to the public. The elevator enters directly into the loft. Duration: The program run-time is about two hours total. Seating: This program is seated via foldable, cushioned chairs in the loft space, as well as intermittent seating via couches, gallery benches, and floor cushions. We are happy to accommodate and adjust for individuals who require wheelchair access upon request. Restrooms: Our restrooms are gender neutral. An ADA bathroom is available for our guest use in the courtyard, just one door down at Greenwich House Center for Older Adults. Please visit the facilities before entering the elevator to the loft. Exits: The space can be exited via elevator or stairs that take you to Bank street.

Photo: Courtesy of the artists.

Bailes is an experiment in transmission and opening up a dance performance to let a new constellation find its rhythm. Bailes means ‘dances’, but more like La Macarena and salsa than Trio A and Swan Lake. Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen will work with New York based artist Malcolm-x Betts art for ten days leading up to School for Temporary Liveness, transmitting conversations, practices and materials that emerged previously from a series of intimate collaborations, each addressing problems of ‘the family.’ Living within zona de juego, all are invited along for this transmission to linger, rephrase, and situate anew these problematic bailes. 

This experiment is part of a long term research project under the title Domestic Anarchism. Its materials and practices have been developed in a series of collaborations with HaYoung, Alissa Šnaider, Paolo Gile, Emma Daniel, Lisa Schåman and Lauren Bakst.

ACCESS NOTES:
Entry: Entry is permitted at any time dependent on capacity. There are stairs or ramp access to an open door marked with The Kitchen's name, behind which there is an elevator accessible to the public. The elevator enters directly into the loft. Restrooms: Our restrooms are gender neutral. An ADA bathroom is available for our guest use in the courtyard, just one door down at Greenwich House Center for Older Adults. Please visit the facilities before entering the elevator to the loft. Duration: The program run-time is about two hours total. Exits: The space can be exited via elevator or stairs that take you to Bank street.

Photo: Emma Daniel, Andrea Zavala Folache, and Adriano Wilfert Jensen in Domestic Anarchism (2025). Courtesy of the artists.

In this collective reading and writing session, participants are invited to engage with the publications collected in the inseparable assembly Reading Room. A series of prompts will guide us through experiments in translating form, time, movement, and genre to the page.

ACCESS NOTES:
Entry: Entry is permitted at any time dependent on capacity. There are stairs or ramp access to an open door marked with The Kitchen's name, behind which there is an elevator accessible to the public. The elevator enters directly into the loft. Restrooms: Our restrooms are gender neutral. An ADA bathroom is available for our guest use in the courtyard, just one door down at Greenwich House Center for Older Adults. Please visit the facilities before entering the elevator to the loft. Duration: The program run-time is about two hours total. Exits: The space can be exited via elevator or stairs that take you to Bank street.

Photo: Wendy's Subway Reading Room at the Brooklyn Academy of Museum, BAM Fisher, Brooklyn, New York, September 2017–January 2018. Photo by Object Studies.

The second session of The Studio is limited to 20 participants.

No kidding! This is a moment of crisis! But …

What if the end of the world as we know it is not something that takes place somewhere in time or begins at a certain place? What if the end of the world as we know it is just right there, anywhere, and everywhere, as a hidden dimension?

The Metaphysics of the Elements supports poethical reading as a practice because it gathers and nurtures tools, practices, and propositions that already enact or help in the imagining and enacting of terrestrial existence otherwise than what has prevailed in the past 500 years or so.

In this iteration of The Studio, where the hidden dimension is accessed, we experiment with reading as a correspondence of the element Air. On Reading (Air) elaborates on the capacities attributed to matter when considered through Air. But here materiality is considered in terms of aesthesis, that is, re/de/composition in the intellectual register, in which the abstract (figural and formal) is inseparable from the concrete (actual and material), because indistinguishable when one attends to deep implicancy as the key to existential conditions.

Key here is the correspondence between Air and Aesthesis, as the latter is here employed because — unlike aesthetic, which already obtains the experience (feeling of pleasure) of the beautiful as purely mental — it conveys the inseparability of the corporeal and mental feelings. As we may have the chance to observe/experience, it is not uncommon to have goosebumps while reading the Tarot!

During this reading session the various significations of Air (the invisible, the atmosphere, public exposure, a mode or manner, expression and movement, will guide us to appreciation of existence as implicancy, as when/as each participant enjoys the collaborative modality that is poethical reading. By that I mean, reading as also experimenting with how every time anyone reads that person is reading with all those who have read, are readings as well as will read, with the same figures and format (the Tarot) in a moment of crisis.

ACCESS NOTES:
Entry: Please arrive on time so participants can engage in the full range of the workshop. Space is limited. Late entry is not permitted. There are stairs or ramp access to an open door marked with The Kitchen's name, behind which there is an elevator accessible to the public. The elevator enters directly into the loft. Seating: This program is seated via foldable, cushioned chairs in the loft space. We are happy to accommodate and adjust for individuals who require wheelchair access upon request. Duration: The program run-time is about two hours total. Restrooms: Our restrooms are gender neutral. An ADA bathroom is available for our guest use in the courtyard, just one door down at Greenwich House Center for Older Adults. Please visit the facilities before entering the elevator to the loft. Exits: The space can be exited via elevator or stairs that take you to Bank street.

Photo: Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (still), 2023. Courtesy of the artists.

PRACTICE!

PROGRESSION of research PRACTICES
my PEOPLE miller, lemon, tanaka, zollar
POST-modern PRACTITIONERS
POP, dip and spin
i come from a line of PREACHERS
speaking in POETICS
repeating with PLAIN LANGUAGE
“…a PHYSICAL LANGUAGE for the human condition”
how do you PLACE it in the body?
what are PRACTICES that allow it to emerge in the body?
PRINCIPLES
PLACE POLITICS in the body
notice how PERSONAL PHILOSOPHIES emerge as we try on
a PEDAGOGY of call and response
POLYATTENTION
PHYSICALITY
PLAY with PARTS of our PERSON
PROPOSITIONS
PERCEIVE
PERIPHERAL what’s around the body
PUPIL where’s the center
POSTERIOR what’s behind us
falling PRACTICE
PROTESTS and PERMUTATIONS of gravity
PERSISTENCE with redirections
acts of PASSIVE resistance
PLAN, PRECARIOUS our choices in dealing with force
PATTERNS of POSITIONALITY
the cultures PROMINENT in the PLACE
POV
PARALLEL-PERPENDICULAR trajectories
PERSISTENCE in PROCESS
PLEASURE-PAIN PRINCIPLES edges of experience to create the appetite for furthering
PSSY / PNK tactics, who to take out
POWER ability to direct or influence the behavior of others/self in the course of events
PARADIGM shift-a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions
observer/PARTICIPANT watch/do

This class inquiry is grounded in my extensive investigation into structures and tactics for training the body to go to the edge of the physical experience.
We’ll practice the extreme moment, movement.
Within reason. Within range. Within context.

ACCESS NOTES:
Please note: This is a physical class that involves moving in space with other bodies and sound. It will encourage going to extreme physical limits, with options to move at your own pace, to step back, rest, and observe. Entry: Please arrive on time so participants can engage in the full range of the workshop. Space is limited. Late entry is not guaranteed. Duration: The program run-time is about 1.5 hours total. Restrooms: Our restrooms are gender neutral. An ADA bathroom is available for our guest use in the courtyard, just one door down at Greenwich House Center for Older Adults. Please visit the facilities before entering the elevator to the loft. Exits: The space can be exited via elevator or stairs that take you to Bank street.

Photo: Darrell Jones with Ralph Lemon. Courtesy of the artist.