Elina Alter is a writer, translator, and editor in New York. Her translations from Russian include Alla Gorbunova's It's the End of the World, My Love, and Oksana Vasyakina's Wound, as well as an upcoming collection by Gorbunova. 

Affiliation: Columbia

Josie Bettman is a choreographer and performing artist currently making zygote, a dance tracing an allegorical path from an incline emerging from a polluted water’s edge to the liminal and often treacherous shoreline that is the dancer’s life. The waterway in question is Newtown creek, the superfund site/former shipping canal running through North Brooklyn, NY. By superimposing narratives of manifestation, emergence, and continuance, the work catalogues parallel efforts to reckon with modernity and the way that it has contaminated our ways of life. We, the dancers, toil along the shore, making ourselves seen, step by step, bit by bit, resilient and responsive to conditions beyond our control. At Catwalk, proximity to the Hudson River will offer a means to home in on the specifics of the relationality between the performers’ bodies and the body of water that acts as a lodestar for this process. What can we, as dancers, learn from the intelligence of these waterways, their history and continued flow?

Affiliation: Vassar

Zhi Wei Hiu is an interdisciplinary artist based in NYC. Trained in analogue photography processes, they treat the practice of making and printing images as a sensuous process that places the body in correspondence with the materiality of the image. Using silver, wax, and glass, they explore alternative methods of image-making. They meticulously engage with the unique physical properties of each material, aiming to enhance the resonances that emerge from juxtaposing disparate materials, forms, and gestures. In their work, they seek to magnify and stabilize the resonances that arise when incongruous materials, forms, and gestures are delicately combined. While crafting objects for both personal adornment and spatial decoration, they contemplate the historical and cultural significance of ornamentation in relation to self-expression. They view ornamented objects as essential extensions of the body and layered vessels for conveying meaning.

https://www.zhi-wei.co/

Affiliation: Collaborator

Lavinia Eloise Bruce is a dance and sound artist based in New York. She has played, composed, danced, and/or choreographed in the work of Mark Dendy, Phoebe Berglund, Ballez, Kelly Nipper, and with fellow dance artist Josie Bettman in their choreographic duo SECT, inc., in venues such as Dixon Place, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Pageant, and Marsha P. Johnson State Park.

Affiliation: Collaborator

The Research Mattress is Judy Lieff, Maria Maciak, and Alice Xiaodi. Tang. Together, we explore technology’s relationship to its maternal. materials and the inclusion of non-human labor as critical to the liberation of all laborers.

As we move towards working with the soil and away from working the soil, we expand Marx’s anthropocentric theory of worker’s alienation to refute the commodified and “alienated labor” of flora, fauna, pets and microbiota. These more-than-humans have their intelligences denied and exploited to absorb our pollutants, lick our hands, and fatten our bellies.

At Catwalk, the Research Mattress trio will prototype the Kin Mound, a living mobile mound featuring our elders: moss, lichen and mycelium growing among memories and techno-waste, inviting multisensorial interactions. Its mobility represents migration as a method of species survival—a response to ecological collapse and geopolitical shifts in the Anthropocene. Through this work, we seek to counter approaches of 'using' materials by engaging in rituals of resistance, collaboration, and care with our flora and fauna kin. The Kin Mound is a provocation to consider labor as a critical part of multispecies justice.