Elegies is a microfestival of artwork including installations, performances, and audio work created by the first-year MA students in Human Rights & the Arts as part of The Politics of Interactive Live Art course taught by Tania El Khoury.
In this guided walk, the audience is invited near the Mahicannituck River to conduct a scientific investigation on a newly emerging parasitic arachnid. The Asian Longhorned Ticks – defined as an invasive species by the U.S. Department of Agriculture – are on the rise. Tick Drag complicates standardized ideas of invasive species in the context of settler colonies, dissolving binaries that obscure deeper structures of harm and domination.
Opus 1: because we are afraid is a duet for a cello and a heart, based on the Arabic nursery Yalla tnam [Come on, sleep], recomposed in the form of a funeral march. It is an intimate concert performed by the artist, an amateur musician, for one audience member at a time. The tempo of the performed piece is dictated by the audience member’s heart rate at the time of the performance.
Negative Exposure is an immersive installation using visual memory as a primary medium to engage visitors in examining what is seen, unseen, and erased within media representations of war. Moving through a space where images are suggested rather than displayed, the audience confronts an experience of memory reconstruction and self-reflection on the societal impulse to turn away from certain political realities. As viewers navigate altered objects, projected prompts, and contact sheets, the installation challenges visual culture’s fragile, transient nature and asks us to witness the unseen.
Learning Isabel or “everything I cannot tell you” is an interactive audiovisual installation that investigates intergenerational memory recollection as a space of struggle, particularly for queer youth growing up in Catholic family households. The piece delves into the artist’s relationship with his religious grandmother, Maria Isabel, as a means to assert the tension between a desire for identification and the refusal to assimilate into catholic heteronormativity. Curiosity and concealment overlap as Isabel’s personal memories, prompted by the encounter with old family photographs, are met with the artist’s own recollections of his unspoken queer childhood.
Capitalism and “yard waste” continue to keep many of us from feeling safe here. Leaves, essential components of ecological cycles, are removed from their place of origin—pushed out, collected, and transported elsewhere. This displacement fuels a system of extractive landscaping reliant on fossil fuels and human labor. Along the Mahicannituck River, the aesthetics of the empire remain entrenched, enforcing control over “nature” and turning it into a cooperative, tidy subject for human convenience.
Ecosystem Plot Twists are actions that divest from settler colonial landscaping practices and embrace decomposition and play as a form of resistance. Through playful interventions and intentional neglect, this project envisions a return of land to the forest, undoing the separation of leaves and soil from their natural processes.
Through My Window is an interactive audio installation using everyday soundscapes collected from various locations in the Hudson Valley, accompanied by a narration on navigating trauma-triggering soundscapes. The audience is invited to listen to the audio through headphones while observing the outside scenery through a window. This work considers how we engage with sound in our daily lives—whether through urban noise, media, or sounds we often overlook—in order to become more aware of the psychological and emotional effects of sound on people who live with war trauma.
Interwoven is a community gathering inviting the audience to practice handweaving, one of humanity’s earliest technologies. During the gathering, participants will be informed about the basics of handweaving and invited to collectively create handwoven objects using looms and various materials. This gathering utilizes handwork and weaving as a community-building practice. Interwoven revolves around the politics of touch, handwork, and communal labor.
Developed in conversation and with support of Hand to Mouth Weavers, Red Hook.
LILA is a performance that reclaims the act of crying as a source of collective strength. By evoking ancestral mourning rituals and the primordial connection to water, the desire is to braid a space where vulnerability and communal grief are embraced. The audience is invited into a ritual that the artist can or cannot recall. What can be offered against the weight of anger, trauma, sadness, and despair? Together we will prepare the space where one can honor and celebrate those who few can still see; the dead.