Collapsed Architecture (1975) by Alvin Baltrop. Courtesy the artists.
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This program is co-presented off-site with The Invisible Dog Art Center
As part of the research for their performance work The Dumps, and as an extension of their Technical Residency at CPR and co-presented with The Invisible Dog Art Center, Simone Aughterlony and Jen Rosenblit organize In Our Decline, a symposium aroused by an urgent and necessary un-doing of things – aging, un-worlding, decay, ruination, and collapse.
The day-long symposium features performative activations, visual art offerings, and public conversation and engagement with a range of artists, curators, and scholars including A.K. Burns, Jack Halberstam, Ryan McNamara, Felipe Ribeiro, and Avgi Saketopoulou, and more to-be-announced, along with performances by lab participants who will join Rosenblit and Aughterlony in their research, including Effie Bowen, devynn emory, Raja Feather Kelly, Stephen Morrison, Connor Voss, Joseph Wegmann, and Colin Self.
This program is an extension of a Spring 2025 Technical Residency with Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony in March 2025.
Accessibility note: The Invisible Dog Art Center can be accessed via a ramp upon request. Please note the restroom is not ADA accessible.
SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE
12–12:45 PM | Caroline Dionne and Felipe Ribeiro
Caroline Dionne and Felipe Ribeiro share research and conversation.
Caroline Dionne: In Plain View
Caroline Dionne offers insights from In Plain View, a reflection on the transformation of Freshkills from landfill to landscape, where she explores the convergence of contemporary art and environmental awareness, emphasizing the fragile balance between nature and human impact. Through a series of immersive works, Dionne encourages the audience to contemplate on community, aging, decay, and ruin through the environmental repercussions of modern society.
Felipe Ribeiro: Revolving Actions
Undoing becomes the operative concept for Revolving Actions, a series of site-specific performances developed since 2018. The actions happen in three historical sites, equidistant 1000 kilometers from one another, which mark a triangle in the map of Brazil. At first, studies of movements and compositions of soils subjects the performer’s body to enduring situations of physical instability, which then expands into a non-leading power of agency.
1–2 PM | Jack Halberstam: Unworlding: Anarchitecture After Everything
Empires have often been described in terms of a rise and a fall, a glorious era and an ignominious defeat. This way of describing power, inevitably, allows for mythologies of a once great era that was here but has now gone…but could rise again. In this talk, Unworlding: Anarchitecture After Everything, Jack Halberstam will push back on the model of rising and falling and stay with decline, collapse, ruination. The answer to ruination, moreover, lies less in repair and more in destitution. He will offer a destituting logic for trans bodies, for city spaces and for political futures. We will not look back longingly for a time past but nor will we scan ahead for a better future. Instead, through art works focused on unbuilding, unmaking and precarity, we can think together about our decline and how to embrace it.
2–2:15 PM | 1st Laboratory Performative Activation
Effie Bowen, Stephen Morrison, Joseph Wegmann, Raja Feather Kelly, Connor Voss, devynn emory, simone aughterlony, Jen Rosenblit, and Colin Self.
2:45–3:30 PM | A.K. Burns: What is Perverse is Liquid
What is Perverse is Liquid explores metaphors, qualities, and properties of water such as transmission, transformation, liquid assets, leaks, and water’s essential role in the cycle of life and death. The work is structured as a series of interfaces including peepholes, portholes, computer screens, and other visual “leaks.”
3:30–4 PM | Ryan McNamara: live ruination choreo
A live time lapse. The artist uses everything available; a history of past works, the laboratory artists, the panelists, the theories, the space, microphones, chairs and the public to speculate on aughterlony and Rosenblit`s yet-to-be-made performance, The Dumps. Considering ruins and wreckage this entertaining offering rearranges the room, disorients our focus and leaves us to reflect on what we are left with, our inheritance and our accumulation.
4–5 PM | Avgi Saketopoulou: On the militancy of resisting the reparative: wound and confusional aesthetics
What does it take to make a determined and clear turn towards the anti-reparative? What resources are available to us for such a move, and what are the stakes of adopting a traumatophilic approach to what has already been broken in us and in the world? Drawing on Carolina Mendonça’s performance Zones of Resplendence, Saketopoulou discusses dispossession not as liability but as opening up to the birthing of collectives that do not labor towards the healing of wounds but towards a certain kind of militancy. Key to this militancy is an aesthetic of confusion, which works by frustrating the impulse to grasp what's enigmatic about our wounds and our response to them. Confusional aesthetics are central to art we may think of as ethically sadistic, art that engages us by drawing us into the wound.
5–5:15 PM | 2nd Laboratory Performative Activation
Effie Bowen, Stephen Morrison, Joseph Wegmann, Raja Feather Kelly, Connor Voss, devynn emory, simone aughterlony, Jen Rosenblit, and Colin Self.
5:15–6 PM | Roundtable and open mics with symposium participants and the public
ABOUT THE DUMPS
The Dumps is an extensive research and performance project by Simone Aughterlony and Jen Rosenblit that confronts architectural ruination against a backdrop of the capitalist drive for renewal. Departing from Jack Halberstam’s theory around Un-Worlding and The Aesthetics of Collapse, the project considers an erotics associated with abandoned architecture, often flagging or gesturing toward decline. What is it that gets lost and who do we lose amidst a constant drive to rebuild and refurbish? Is it love for or fear of ruins that determine the drive for futurity based on ownership, heated floors, privatized and insulated views, and the eventual promise of accumulated abundance?
By way of weathered, eroded, collapsing and abandoned architectures, the work refocuses erotics, sex, and sexuality as a public affair. The Dumps is not a site to disregard but an abundance of situations to be reckoned with. In the end, The Dumps might evict us, liberate us, even emancipate us from the promise of progress, not through clarity but through the aesthetics of confusion.
Through the creation of the work, Rosenblit and Aughterlony will host gatherings for local artists in each city where they are in residence, methodically articulating a further unwinding, undoing, aging, and decay associated with the research proposition itself and in resistance to further world-making. Acknowledging that the proposition of collapse is riddled with contradiction amidst the effort to speculate on futurity, in this context, to undo, we must first do, build, arrange, and organize as a way to initiate a focus towards the un-worlding and take stock of all that we have inherited.
IN OUR DECLINE
In Our Decline is a symposium taking place in NYC, nestled between residencies in Brooklyn at The Invisible Dog Art Center and CPR – Center for Performance Research, and positioned site-specifically in the well visited, dwelled, lingered, preserved, and beloved Invisible Dog Art Center, its industrial space, and the vertical stacking of a constantly eroding New York City. With the imminent closing of this community space at 51 Bergen Street, the work also takes on a necessary speculation of demolition in relation to this community space, excavating a promise of collision as being and getting in the way of progress.
Inviting a local network of artists and thinkers, this gathering contemplates and complicates the process of performance making. The symposium seeks to focus without centralizing or, more importantly, without further marginalizing, bodies and communities historically associated with abandoned or deemed-unlivable spaces. In actively inviting the public to tend to the impulse of traumatophilia, the gathering arouses potential and incites a curiosity for the role of rot when acknowledging these ruins that continue to hold us, our fairy tales and our myths, managing to make us distinct from the rubble itself, and considering the wreckage, the weathered, and the decayed as available remnants for a collision with the future, a biased archive of the past, and a sobering recognition for where we are now.
CREDITS
In Our Decline is co-presented by The Invisible Dog Art Center and CPR – Center for Performance Research, both in Brooklyn, NY. Presented in collaboration with Swissnex in Boston and New York with the support of Presence Switzerland, Pro Helvetia Global Travel Grant, Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, and Imbricated Real.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jen Rosenblit makes performances based in Berlin after over a decade of working in NYC. Rosenblit invests in the problems that arise inside agendas of being together, often chipping away inside seemingly impossible spaces. Rosenblit hosts complex narratives of intimacy and autonomy, allowing for content to be emergent rather than determined as the body negotiates repetition, disruption, meaning and memory as we encounter others. Rosenblit’s performance work departs from preciousness and sentimentality in hopes of locating a more potent relevance for how we read and relate to constellations of things happening over time. Reaching for a heightened subtlety of experience by engaging sensation with visual information, the multiplicity of the body as an experiential culture unfolds. Rosenblit builds space for the viewer to experience indentation, for eyes that find molding and packaging, or the revealing and concealing of information to suggest utility as the poetic. The work exists out of bounds, off center, aligning itself to phenomenology rather than images. This research takes time, to perceive things, to relate and re-relate to all things as mattering. Rosenblit is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2014 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, a 2023 La Becque (Vevey, CH) artist in residence, and currently teaches at Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin. Rosenblit has collaborated with artists including Simone Aughterlony, Miguel Gutierrez, A.K. Burns, and Philipp Gehmacher in various capacities via performer, writer, creator, and director.
Simone Aughterlony is an independent artist based in Zurich and Berlin, working predominantly in dance, performance, and visual art contexts. They have been devising queer-spirited choreographic works over the last sixteen years. Engaging with alternative forms of kinship inside their process, new constellations emerge as possibilities for reconfiguring a culture of togetherness that fosters both familiar and unknown quantities. Their works playfully compose with representation and its saturation, seeping into and embracing the phenomenology of mis-recognition and the absurd. Aughterlony approaches art making as a practice where they navigate the contradiction between the domination of desire alongside the agency of all elements. They regularly teach at academic institutions such as ZHdK - Zurich University of the Arts, Manufacture in Lausanne, and DAS Art Amsterdam, amongst others, as well as devising and facilitating laboratory formats and frames for sharing and producing knowledge. In 2020 together with Marc Streit they founded Imbricated Real, an independent structure for contemporary art practice.https://www.aughterlony.com
Avgi Saketopoulou is a Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst practicing in NYC. She serves on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and her publications have received numerous prizes. Her interview on psychoanalysis is in the permanent holdings of the Freud Museum (Vienna) and her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) braids psychoanalysis with performance studies, philosophy, and queer of color critique to explore consent’s erotics, the vicissitudes of overwhelm, and the aesthetics of repetition. She is co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Gender Without Identity (UIT Press, 2023), and in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche (UIT Press, 2023). She is currently working on her next book project provisionally titled The Offer of Sadism. Her love of psychoanalysis and of queers is rivaled only by her love of motorcycles. www.avgisaketopoulou.com
A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, working at the nexus of language and materiality. Burns utilizes sculpture, video, installation, writing, and performance—troubling systems that assign value with criticality and humor. A solo survey exhibition in 2023 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio is currently on view at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA. Along with exhibiting internationally, Burns was awarded the 2023 Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin; a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship; a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Art; and a 2016 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University. A.K. Burns is currently an Associate Professor and MFA Co-Director at Hunter College, CUNY, Department of Art and Art History. akburns.net/about-contact/
Caroline Dionne is a scholar and educator with a background in art and architecture criticism and curation. She is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Design Practice and Curatorial Studies at Parsons School of Design at The New School. Her research sits at the intersection of literature, language theory, philosophy, and architecture, and investigates the role of language and the politics of place in design. Her recent book, Design Theory, Language and Architectural Space in Lewis Carroll (Routledge, 2023), proposes design theories of the emergent based on a close reading of the complete works of the nineteenth century writer and mathematician. Other publications can be found in Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (Bloomsbury, 2020), Reading Architecture: Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience (Routledge, 2018), OASE 96 Social Poetics: The Architecture of Use and Appropriation (NAI, 2016), and Architecture's Appeal (Routledge, 2015). www.newschool.edu/parsons/faculty/Caroline-Dionne/
Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke UP, 2020). Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a book titled Anarchitecture After Everything, which will be published by MIT Press in 2026. Halberstam was recently named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. english.columbia.edu/content/jack-halberstam
Felipe Ribeiro (born 1977, Rio de Janeiro, BR) is a visual artist and independent curator, currently based in Switzerland. He’s a visiting researcher at HKB - Bern University of Arts, he has been a visiting scholar in the Transdisciplinarity Master’s program at ZHdK - Zurich University of the Arts since 2022, where he teaches performance art, decoloniality, and global south perspectives. Ribeiro is also an Associate Professor in the Graduate Programs of Dance Studies and Performing Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His academic background includes a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies from NYU, and a PhD in Visual Arts from Rio de Janeiro State University, partially completed at NYU’s Performance Studies Department. His research, “Revolving Actions,” merges durational performance, image-making, and land art, stemming from his early work in experimental filmmaking. Ribeiro’s performances have been featured in major festivals across South America, as well as in Hamburg, Zurich, and Lisbon. From 2009 to 2013, he developed Trilogy of the Image, a series of staged works combining video, essayist texts, and performance. In 2018, he had his first solo exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, and in 2022, he presented [not] here, a duo exhibition at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in collaboration with Swiss artist Sarah Burger. His collaborative projects include artists such as Simone Aughterlony, Eleonora Fabião, Denise Stutz, and Vinicius Arneiro. Felipe Ribeiro is also a founding member and artistic director of Atos de Fala, an international festival dedicated to speech acts and performance, which has been held annually in Rio de Janeiro since 2011. In 2019, the festival collaborated with zurich moves! festival, supported by Pro Helvetia and Swissnex Brazil and co-curated and co-produced with Marc Streit, Head of Arts and Creative industries at Swissnex in Boston and New York. In addition to his curatorial and performance work, Ribeiro is the author of Ruminations: Performance Art in Between Pleasure and Resistance, published in Brazil in 2022 and soon to be re-released in Portugal.
Ryan McNamara is a Brooklyn-based artist who works in performance, video, photography, drawing, and sculpture. His work has been featured at MoMA PS1, The Guggenheim Museum (New York), Dallas Symphony Orchestra, ICA Boston, Perez Art Museum (Miami), ICA London, The Garage (Moscow), The Power Plant (Toronto), Athens Biennale, and The High Line (New York). He teaches performance in the Hunter College MFA program, and his work is included in the collections of Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum in New York.www.ryanmcnamara.com