ITINERANT, New York City’s annual Performance Art Festival, continues with its 2017 program at SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK on Sunday, May 14th, 3:00 - 8:00 pm. The festival (May 13th to May 21st) had its opening reception at Last Frontier NYC (May 13th) and will continue presenting performances and public interventions in different venues in the city: The Bronx Museum of the Arts (May 15th), Panoply Performance Laboratory (May 16th), Grace Exhibition Space (May 19th), and Flushing Meadows Park (Closing event, Sunday, May 21st, 2:00 - 7:00 pm).
This year's program, organized and curated independently by interdisciplinary artist Hector Canonge, focuses on works that treat notions of human displacement, pilgrimage, physical dislocations, psychological migrations, and corporeal transformations. ITINERANT 2017 will feature performance art works by local, national and international artists coming from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America.
Participating Artists at Socrates Sculpture Park: Wild Torus (United States), Alejandro Chellet (Mexico), Rosary Solimanto (United States), Milton Afanador Alvarado (Colombia), Colleen Itani (United States), Jill McDermid and Erik Hokanson (United States), Maritea Daehlin (Mexico / Norway), John Chiaromonte (United States), and Leah Aron (United States).
ITINERANT was created in 2010 by artist Hector Canonge. The initiative was a small platform for Contemporary Performance Art, and had its origins in the monthly series A-Lab Forum that Canonge organized at Crossing Art Gallery in Flushing, Queens. Following the growing interest in Live Art, and the need to present performance in the borough, ITINERANT was launched in 2011 under the auspices of QMAD, Queens Media Arts Development. In 2012, ITINERANT was recognized by the City of New York as the first Performance Art festival taking place in the five boroughs (Queens, Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island) that make the metropolitan region. Following the large scale venture in NYC, Canonge journeyed through Europe and Latin America creating, in 2013, the Spanish edition of the festival and calling it Encuentro ITINERANTe with public presentations in various cities in the Southern Hemisphere.
Participating Artists at Socrates Sculpture Park:
Wild Torus (United States), “Dancing on the Edge of the Abyss”
Wild Torus (WT) is Mág Ne Tá and Vlady Voz Tokk--2 individuals acting as one. WT aims to create a shared, collective experience with audiences, utilizing a combination of digital and physical means to commemorate traumatic and mystical events that occur in the universe. WT formed in NYC 2012, during Superstorm Sandy. Vlady Voz Tokk (then Mike Berlant, b 1979, Moscow, USSR) was co-curating an art exhibition at the Broome Street Gallery in Soho. The exhibition was titled Bak’tun 13 after the Mayan apocalypse. Mág Ne Tá (then Amy Mathis, b 1988, Virginia, USA) was included in the exhibition. The day after the opening, Superstorm Sandy cut out power to the exhibition and all of lower Manhattan. When the electricity came back on after a week, it was the last day of the exhibition. Berlant and Mathis gathered their artist friends from Brooklyn and went to the gallery to throw a celebration. It was then they realized that artistic collaboration and live performance that interacted with the audience was crucial to their practice. Since then, WT has performed and curated throughout North America, South America, Europe, and China. From 2014 to 2016, WT founded and directed a space in Brooklyn, NYC, called Torus__porta. After the space closed, WT began a mobile curatorial platform called Wild Embeddings. Berlant is of Russian and Jewish descent, while Mathis is both Norwegian and Italian. Berlant received his MFA from Syracuse University in 2011 and Mathis received hers from Pratt Institute in 2013.
Alejandro Chellet (Mexico), “The Wall”
Alejandro Chellet is a multidisciplinary artist and a social practitioner on cultural and permacultural networks. He interacts around the world with individuals and collectives in alternative communities like squats, ecologists, artists hubs, activists, gallerists, cultural entrepreneurs and shamans. His work is about the misplaced core principles of coexistence; the loss of connection with Nature cycles; the political and environmental context of urban societies. Working with: the audience, public space, architecture and performance, he focuses on raising awareness about how our bodies belong to Gaia, a broader organism, a planetary ecosystem providing everyone with a body made of water, earth, living minerals and powered by sunlight. Has shown in cities like New York, London, Sao Paulo and, Mexico City. In 2015 he produced a urban intervention exhibited at Museo Universitario del Chopo funded by ADIDAS BORDER grant in Mexico City. In 2016: he participated in Olivar Foundation residency in Catalunya, curated by Pilar Parcerisas, funded by Sabadell Bank and the Private Museum of Singapore. he also produced a urban intervention for Mikser Festival as resident of G12 Hub program in Belgrade, Serbia; curated by Marta Jovanovic, and performed in NYC for: LiVEART.US, curated by Hector Canonge for the Queens Museum; The Food Show at Local Project; Animamus Art Salon at Chinatown Soup Gallery and Pulsar Space. He also performed at the Art Life Institute in Kingston, NY, USA and exhibited at Casa Del Lago in Mexico City curated by Tania Ragasol & Felipe Zúñiga.
Rosary Solimanto (United States), “Weight”
Rosary Solimanto is best known for her interdisciplinary activist based work which explores the objectification she faces battling multiple sclerosis. She encourages discourse on disABILITY identity to unfold to empower the disABLED. Solimanto is an emerging artist who has exhibited in New York City, New Jersey, North Carolina, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Hudson Valley, Connecticut, Minnesota, Germany, Toronto and Spain. She performed in the O + Festival in Kingston, NY, The International Human Rights Arts Festival in New York City, Itinerant Festival at the Bronx Museum, durational performance for 12 hours at Nuit Blanche Festival in Toronto, exhibited at The Hyde Museum in upstate, New York, selected participant for Museo de Almeria in Spain and The New Museum of Networked Art. Awards include Parnassus Award in Fine Arts at Adirondack, New York; Kulakoff Award at Albany, New York; Art Garden Community Supported Art Award at Arts Unbound, City of Orange, New Jersey and the Sojourner Truth Fellowship at New Paltz, New York. Born in New York, Solimanto has received her BA in English Literature and Fine Arts, from SUNY Albany in 2013, and received her MFA in 2015 from SUNY New Paltz. She currently lives and works in Jersey City area.
Milton Afanador Alvarado (Colombia), “Zapatos de Cemento”
Milton Afanador Alvarado was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia. He holds a Masters or Fine Arts from Universidad Industrial de Santander. His thesis, “100% American” was nominated and won the De Greiff Otto Award for best project. In 2006, he participated in the 40 National Salon of Artists and in the 11th Regional Lounge in preparation for a scholarship in Mexico. Motivated by this experience, he did studies in Media and Technologies in Argentina. As member of the collective “Por Ahora,” he organized programs and exhibitions in Santander, Colombia. In 2012, he joined the collective "SEU2," and received a grant to travel to the festival of performance art Zone-action"in Argentina. He received the grant from the Departmental Program for Artistic in Santander and participated in the "Festepe", Festival of theater and performance of Chancay- Peru (2013). He took part in the "Atos em ações International Festival of Performance and INTERVENÇÕES", Brazil, 2013 and in "EPI, International Performance Independent", Chile. In 2016, he participated in the "II Biennale of Arts of Bucaramanga." The same year he began to serve as university chair. In 2017 he was selected as a fellow by the South Goethe Institute, International Academy of Performing Arts.
Colleen Itani (United States), “Artificial Picnic”
Colleen Itani is a Florida based artist exploring the absurd through personal and public spheres and questions of power and questionable structures. Through performance and drawing she investigates society and ownership in various spheres with attention paid to how innate structures within the facets of daily life feed into the absurd (as defined by Camus). Her use of emotive mark making and non-linear text pieces in her work emphasize a desire to push boundaries through assertion; this is complimented by her candid and at times intimate performance work, sometimes engaging the audience, and at other times being watched. She has a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in International Studies. Colleen is currently pursuing her MFA at Florida State University.
Jill McDermid and Erik Hokanson (United States)
Jill McDermid is a multimedia artist and curator working in performance, sound, video and installation. Her works are autobiographical, using elements of where she is using components of her life as inspiration for her work, with the belief that the personal is political. During the early 200s she created a series of works entitled American Woman Parts 1-8 exploring the American psyche, from a woman's perspective, while traveling to various countries and encountering various perspectives n American foreign policies. Her recent work is taking on a wider perspective related to our relationship with Nature, exploring the resurgence of civilizations, their varying knowledge and their effects upon the earth. Erik Hokanson states” The most common, stable, and reliable states of the universe are the qualities of darkness and cold. We live in a very unusual condition of relative warmth and light. We are living here (earth) -humans, spiders, grass, fish, carrots, bacteria, mice, viruses. We are all related. We need to eat each other. It is the price of peace, beauty, security, humor, love, and hope. Our bodies, like those of all other organisms here, are communities of cells working together essentially for their own preservation. We will all become food for something someday. The sun will make our place food for itself someday. I do not know what will eat the sun. Then it will likely become cold and dark. I take comfort in this. I like natural states.”
Maritea Daehlin (Mexico / Norway), “I Want To Be Traditional”
Maritea Daehlin is an artist that is interested in human behaviours, emotions, rituals and encounters. Her devised theatre performances and interactive live works are minimal, playful, non-linear and absurd. Both her solo and collaborative work leave an open space for the audience to make up their own points of view, letting their emotions being touched and the freedom to not have to understand everything. She holds a BA (First Class HONS) in Devised Theatre with Digital Arts at Dartington College of Arts in England and an MA in Psychodrama at Escuela Mexicana de Psicodra ma and Casa Luz. She also studied acting at Nordic Black Express in Norway. She has one foot in Mexico and one in Norway, with two hands to move freely without borders. Maritea also organises projects involving other artists under the name of TRENZA NEGRA and leads workshops at various locations and institutions. Maritea Daehlin’s trip to NYC was supported by Performing Arts Hub Norway and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
John Chiaromonte (United States), “Anima Loci-Spirit of Place”
John Chiaromonte’s performative/spiritual practice is rooted in silence, stillness and solitude walked out through rituals/actions within the landscape. In the early morning, he stands at the entrance to a 100’ diameter stone labyrinth he built on his property. He bows, rings the bell and slowly walks to the center of the labyrinth, sits in zazen, then walk sout. This “spiritual” practice allows him to address our individual and collective wounds and create through his performance’s “thin places” (Anima Loci-the soul place). In his words: “Our actions enshrine the anima loci, bringing the unseen into physical presence.”, “Celtic Sacred Landscapes”, Niegel Pennick, pg. 13 His process for developing new work is straight forward. To him “During those moments that are not “art” related such wading streams reading the water for prime lies holding trout or bombing mountain roads on my longboard this is when ideas for a piece come to me. From those brief moments of clarity studio time involves creating drawing for movements and the placement objects within the performance environment. Shaping movement into liturgical (the work of the people) actions. Hopefully drawing the audience/viewer/participant into themselves… exposing our common wounds.”
Leah Aron (United States), “Salt of the Earth”
Leah Aron is a New York-based performance artist interested in methods and aesthetics that are not traditionally associated with standards of perfection. The calamity of being female saturates her work. Her main goal in performance is “to achieve altered states of consciousness, exploring the polarity of embodied experience from exhaustion to exhilaration, pain to pleasure.” Aron’s body is her medium, often incorporating duration, repetition, movement, and stillness. She has worked closely with Karen Finley, Linda Montano, and Marina Abramovic. Finding inspiration in her self-described surreal perception of moving through the world, she stages acts of desire and repulsion that unmask the power and trauma of identity.