All That You Touch, You Transform
Updates from DđTâs prolific past period and a little look at what's ahead
Dear loved ones,
In 1993, Octavia E. Butler published Parable of the Sower, a bleakly post-apocalyptic look at what looked like the far future. Itâs been a sci-fi favorite for decades and made its way onto the New York Times bestseller list during the pandemic. In Parable, Lauren Oya Olamina, a prescient teenager with hyper-empathy, bears witness to ever-worsening environmental, political, and social collapse. Amid the unfolding wreckage, she has visions of a new faith and begins to gather community around her. With her resourcefulness and creativity, Lauren represents a protean artist for an uncertain era. One of her core beliefs: âGod is Change.â
The novel starts on Saturday, July 20, 2024. Tomorrow. I get chills just typing this.
The future is now almost now.
I last wrote to you all in 2023, when things looked a little different. There have been some ups and a lot of downs across the globe. But in the background, here at DđT weâve been gathering with artists, therapists, and thinkers, organizing workshops to prototype emergent methods, and testing out new tools and formats in experimental public events. Through generous residencies at Canal Projects and The Clemente, weâve been able to make New York City our home base. The gift of space and time, along with the chance for conversations with our collaborators and companions, has helped us to clarify what weâre doing and why.Â
DđTâs work stems from a simple belief: that the arts can serve as an experimental space to support connection with oneself, others, and the planet as a whole. We are looking ahead to a future in which people have the resources needed to care for themselves, where mutual support and collaboration are part of everyoneâs skillset, and where even conflict can be a teacher. In this vision, the arts have an essential role to play as modes for healing in unfamiliar and unexpected ways. By transforming how we practice and experience art, DđT seeks to transform the world.
Just last week we staged our most ambitious public gathering to date: Ways of Showing Up, a two-day event at the legendary Performing Garage in NYCâs Soho. In collaboration with Epicenter NYC, a Queens-based community news outlet, DđTâs Sam Rauch and I planned an epic 13-hour program that included mindfulness, experimental group therapy, a lunchtime reading/writing group, a walking tour, a graphic design workshop, anarchic collective artmaking, a vocal conflict workshop, a participatory lecture-performance, and a collective mealâplus protest karaoke! A true feast for the senses and panoply of ways for different people to participate and connect.
As artist, choreographer, and DđT companion Andros Zins-Browne wrote afterwards:
It was a real joy, as always. Iâm amazed that youâre able to assemble these groups of curious people together. I think itâs really important for the field of art that laments its own soullessness, but then seems incapacitated to do much about it. And I think itâs important for fields of care and healing to be in touch with practices that have edge, that activate rather than passivize healing processes, that bring weirdness in as practical ally to health and wellbeing.Â
I could not imagine better praise. Thank you, Andros, for bringing your own unique brand of weirdness (and a great love for both chaotic vocalization and group karaoke!) to so many things weâve been organizing recently!
The multi-modal, long-form approach of Ways of Showing Up builds upon other major DđT projects such as our five-hour participatory event for Centre Pompidou and Villa Albertineâs Night of Ideas Jersey City 2024; the experimental symposium How can we gather now?, organized with Asad Raza for Washington Project for the Arts; a five-day workshop to share collaboration and transformation tools at Fusebox Festival 2023 in Austin; as well as the many reading groups, workshops, and public programs of our recent Groundwork residency at Canal Projects.Â
Our iterative processâworkshopping ideas and practices in publicâhas already begun to seed new methods. Since the Spring, DđT has convened a regular meet-up of artists-turned-therapists in New York City. As a result of these gatherings, weâre now inviting such hybrid practitioners to offer free, public sessions to test out new formats. Weâve already staged three such sessions: Reflecting Forward with artist-turned-clinical psychologist Tamara Sussman at Canal Projects; Un-familia-r with therapist, social worker, and policy maker Stephen Hanmer DâElĂa at The Clemente; and First Encounters with performance artist and psychoanalyst Aneta StojniÄ as part of Ways of Showing Up. Starting in the Fall, weâll be offering regular workshops like this at The Clemente for anyone who wants to participate. Itâs a chance for audiencesâas well as practitionersâto learn something.
This is just the start. In the Fall weâll launch some even bigger DđT projects, including a hybrid curriculum focused on creative collaboration and conflict, distributed across a host of public universities during the US election season. Weâre also beginning a long-term research project called âMuseum as Hospital? A Diagnosticâ together with other artists, curators, public health experts, entrepreneurs, and medical professionals. Our core inquiry: How can comparing these two types of public institutionsâeach focused on a kind of healingâhelp to identify systemic challenges and structural opportunities for the future?
The Financial Times recently connected DđTâs work with the long history of social practice art, which creates innovative forms of public engagement through artistic processes. Although it may seem smarmy to quote yourself in your own newsletter, Iâll go with it anyways:
â[Krishnamurthy] explains that people often assume transformation only counts when itâs on the scale of institutions or social structures. For him, it also happens in every conversation he has. âDOT is working to change the way that art and design are practiced so that the people it touches can transform the communities they are part of themselves,â Krishnamurthy says. âThis is how we see things spreading.ââ
After Un-familia-r, our kick-off event at The Clemente featuring experimental group exercises for connecting with others, one participant shared a reflection: âThe event was incredible. But itâs not reality. I canât go back to work on Monday and bring these ways of relating there.â
I took a deep breath. After a moment, I ventured: I hear your point, but I respectfully disagree.
My convictionâand the reason that Iâm doing any of thisâis that we are not just passive subjects, we are creating reality right now. We can choose the red pill or the blue pill. We need to shape the world we want to see, through our daily interactions and conversations and connections and creativity. The arts give us the space and toolsâas well a sense of freedom and challenge, bumpiness and play!âthat we need in order to find even better ways to engage this work of world-building together.
If you also share this belief, then I hope that youâll continue to participate in DđT however you can: by sharing this newsletter and encouraging friends & family to subscribe, by using the tools that we offer in your own everyday life, by reaching out to contribute feedback and new ideas, by coming to our events and learning with us, and by giving a tax-deductible donation to support our ongoing work.
No matter how you choose to be part of DđT, Iâm so thrilled and grateful to spend this time with you, to breathe this air with you, to touch and be touched. To look to the futures ahead as ones that we possess the power to shape. To create and share new beliefs, together.
So, till the next time, please take good care of yourselves and those around youâfriends and strangers alike. I look forward to seeing each of you soon, in one form or another.
Love,
Prem
P.S. Remember that even when times get tough, thereâs still karaoke!
You are such an inspiration!