togetherfire

October 28, 2023

On Oct 28, 2023 homeLA presented togetherfire with artists with artists Crystal Sepúlveda, Justin Morris, Ray Anthony Barrett, María Regina Firmino-Castillo, Tohil (Fidel Brito Bernal), Nohely Gomez, Latipa, Camilo Ontiveros, Estrellx Supernova/EHQS, taisha paggett, and meital yaniv.

togetherfire, curated and hosted by taisha paggett and meital yaniv, contemplated home as a hearth, an archetype of fire, and an alchemist of private and social realities.  It took place at paggett and yaniv’s abode located on the home and gathering place of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Serrano, Luiseno, colonially known as Riverside, CA.  This indoor/outdoor event took place during a full moon and at a time when the veil separating the worlds is its thinnest. 

Set beyond the county line, togetherfire was a special event that de-centered the geographical boundaries of the LA Art world to foreground the work of performing and visual artists who contribute to the vitality of our arts and culture while living, working, and contributing to the arts and culture in and across the Inland Empire. As such, togetherfire was an occasion that obfuscated boundaries and welcomed audiences to come experience site-specific work by artists at their home.  It was an invitation to draw closer, linger, and participate as togetherfire unfolded over the course of four hours in a gathering of dance, writing, nourishment, and performance encounters that offered the fire as spiritual, physical, political, and ancestral sustenance and contemplation with the following offerings.

Dancer and choreographer Crystal Sepúlveda performed on the outdoor patio and among the plantlife of the garden to a score and immersive sound installation by Latipa and Camilo Ontiveros. Embodying a score that centers stories of displaced people, Sepúlveda explored movement practices that withstand and brace for the impact of colonialism, specifically the people and land impacted by environmental injustices in the Inland Empire. Her questions draw on the efforts made by climate scientists, policy-makers, and activists pushing for climate mitigation and adaptation, and writer Vinita Srivastava’s powerful words, “Instead of calling people resilient, let’s instead look at solutions for those things we should not have to be resilient for.” 

Visual artist and chef Ray Anthony Barrett nourished guests, cooking over live fire in an intimate performance that embodies his assertion that communities are built through communion, and as such, gastronomy is inherently a social practice. For togetherfire, Barrett prepared a site-specific ephemeral sculpture––a dish featuring ingredients from Southern California’s Fall harvest and inspired by the hosts garden. Guests were invited to bring their own spoon to participate.

Transdisciplinary artist, Justin Morris, in collaboration with a written score provided by Estrellx Supernova/EHQS, combined elements of soft sculpture, movement tasks, and verbalizations that center the theme of etching. The theme of etching was in response to Estrellx Supernova/EHQS’s central catalysts for the mover to communicate both verbally and non-verbally as a process of digesting and deepening that which is known, unknown, hard to digest, and hard to utter. Morris responded to this provocation by questioning how words, text, and the moving body’s labor—both during and before the performance of the practice—can etch (make hollow, mark upon/within/around, dig, etc) into space and be in discovery of the power of impermanence and that which resides. This took Morris and others on a journey through several rooms within the house that have their own history of etchings.

During the twilight, María Regina Firmino-Castillo & Tohil (Fidel Brito Bernal) engaged in High sea, high c Listens for the ocean: gathering fire, joining twilights, freeing stones, uncovering sky, hearing earth…. This was not a performance. Instead, it was “an experiment in crepuscular corpo/poiesis” happening “between earth and sky, and in the shadows of togetherfire,” wherein Firmino and Tohil, responding to their own score, “edged spatiotemporal dimensions and sound the depths above and below” to connect the land upon which the home resides to past, present, and future twilights. Collaborators included ocean and river waters,  13 stones,  11 co-conspirators of twilights past, and every being present.

Interspersed throughout the event, artists Nohely Gomez, taisha paggett, and meital yaniv offered a multi-part movement and video work titled, \sweet/suites\sweets/ for \7/ directions.  For this work, Gomez, paggett and yaniv performed seven “mini duets of tenderness” in seven directions, traversing the margins of the space, place, and home, exploring how they “taste the fire and prayers of another” as togetherfire’s hosts, curators, and contributing artists. 

About Crystal Sepúlveda
Crystal Sepúlveda is an interdisciplinary dance artist based in Riverside, CA. She works collaboratively and across disciplines to compose works for live performance, site-based projects, and installation. Notable collaborative projects include Bodyscape (2015), the river knows (2016), and Ch’u Mayaa (2017).

About Justin Morris
Justin Morris (they/them, fluctuating pronouns) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Southern California. They began cultivating their practice at a young age at family functions and have continued to tie and ground their work in black and queer aesthetics, playfulness, and ratchedry. Justin has performed/collaborated in performances and dance-based works with artists Jay Carlon, Sue Roginski and Kirsten Johansen, Bernard Brown, Kevin Williamson, Alex Shilling, Colleen Thomas, visual artist David Lamelas, Rebecca Bryant, Rosa Rodriguez-Fraiser, and Summation Dance Company. Justin holds a BFA from CSU Long Beach’s Department of Dance, a MFA from UC Riverside, and is teaching Artist for Conga Kids and an adjunct faculty member with the Fine Arts and Humanities department of Compton College.

About María Regina Firmino-Castillo
María Regina Firmino-Castillo uses words, objects, light, sounds, and movement to ask questions, to think, to feel, to experiment, and to dialogue. As an artist, researcher, writer, and educator, she likes to juxtapose and transgress in an attempt to conjure. She works in a way that is conceptually and geographically nomadic, tracing nonlinear paths between areas of study and praxis, while following relational connections across borders. Born in Guatemala of a mother from the border with El Salvador and an Italian father, she wonders about forgotten, or perhaps abandoned, ancestors (who perhaps wonder about her, too). In these lands, and beyond, she is grateful for her inherited and chosen kin, with whom she is queerly enfolded. As a faculty member in the Dance Department at the University of California-Riverside, she researches the body as a material site of ontological production, destruction, and transformation, especially in the context of colonialism and its ongoing repercussions in Guatemala and Mexico. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, her research, and the courses she teaches, critically engage with dance and performance studies, Indigenous and Latinx studies, Black critical theory, and gender studies, but through a transdisciplinary approach that works against colonial taxonomies of knowledge and being. https://dance.ucr.edu/faculty/maria-firmino-castillo/

About Tohil (Fidel Brito Bernal)
Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal is an Ixil Maya artist, from Naab’a’ (Nebaj), El Quiché (Tu Tx’ich), Iximulew (Guatemala), currently living on land long cared for by Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples. Art has been the nexus to his ancestors and community in Guatemala and it is also a medium of camaraderie with others in the shared struggle to survive. His work explores alternate temporalities through Mayan philosophies of time, space, and being through images, sculpture, texts, and performance to interrupt imposed colonial structures of time and relation while experimenting with alternative connections between cosmos and earth and among earth-beings on a living planet. He studied archaeology at the University of San Carlos, in Guatemala, and visual art in Guatemala, México, and Cuba.https://tohilfidelbrito.wordpress.com/

About Ray Anthony Barrett
Ray Anthony Barrett, is a visual artist and chef, living and working in Los Angeles, California. Since 2018, Mr. Barrett’s pop-up, CINQVÉ, has been devoted to tracing the evolution of Soul Food from California to its West African origins. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, an ongoing project commissioned by Active Cultures, interrogates the legacy of White Supremacy, its imperialist visions of manifest destiny and its influence on climate change through the lens of food justice. His projects have been featured at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Underground Museum, Dak’Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale in Dakar Senegal, and his work has been profiled in Hyperallergic, Compound Butter, and the Los Angeles Times.

About taisha paggett
taisha paggett: as in taishaciara mildred mcghee paggett. i am the continuation of Cheryl Yvone McGhee and Arveal Paggett Jr and all my relatives who’ve held me. i respectfully reside on home and gathering lands of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseno, and Serrano, colonially called Riverside, CA. i am a Black, queer, gender-nonconforming living entity. my background roots itself in dance, politico-somatic presencing, improvisation, and performative installation. words too. i think of dance, choreography, and its methodologies as something to be broken open, utilized, breathed into, and as a lens and lung through which to engage ideas. i dream of being a garden(er). i'm here to learn new ways to meet myself, my creative process, and my work with rigor, curiosity, and care. 

About meital yaniv 
meital yaniv (b. 1984, Tel-Aviv, israel) is learning how to be in a human form. they do things with words, with moving n still images, with threads, with bodies in front of bodies, with the Earth. they are a death doula tending to a prayer for the liberation of the land of Palestine and the lands of our bodies. they are learning to listen to the Waters, birdsongs, caretakers, and ancestors as they walk as a guest on the home and gathering place of the Cahuilla-ʔívil̃uwenetem Meytémak, Tongva-Kizh Nation, Luiseño-Payómkawichum, and Serrano-Yuhaaviatam/Maarenga'yam. 

About Nohely Gomez
Nohely Gomez (she/elle/he) is a brown, queer, dance camera, movement, & performance artist. Nohely submerges in the art of dance corporeally moving, touring, and queering what it means to be of this time. Their recent works study the connections between the internal and external, the visibility, and tangibility of materiality. Learning, unlearning, and redefining what notions and ideologies of movement and the body connote. Through lens, with words, and existing sounds, Nohely finds accessible ways to play, unearthing multiplicity in the art of storytelling. Ella con fuerza (she with strength) trusts to reveal and grounds to dismantle and heal.

About Estrellx Supernova / EHQS
Estrellx Supernova embodies a they/them energetics and is an Afro-Guatemalan-American  choreographer, performer, curator, and writer. Choreographically, Estrellx integrates club spaces as sites of generative dissonance and asks, "Are we celebrating or mourning or both? What do you really want and how exactly do you want it? How can quantum entanglement support us with co-creating alternative and equitable futures?" They implement task as meditation, Qi Energetics, divination, subtle Butoh energy, and eco-drag into their ritualistic performative language. They are currently in the process of distilling their research into a tarot deck called El Tarot de Quebrantamiento, which they are aiming to officially publish by Fall 2025.  Estrellx has recently received a New Jersey Individual Artist Fellowship Award (2023), Djerassi Residency (2022), Creative Capital Award (2020), San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Individual Artist Grant Award (2019), Princess Grace in Choreography Award (2019), an Impulstanz danceWEB Scholarship (2019), a National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures (NALAC) Individual Artist Grant (2019). @estrellx_supernova 

About Latipa
Latipa is a Pilipinx (Maguindanao/Pangasinan) artist, filmmaker, writer, and Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside.  Her interdisciplinary praxis works toward community healing and empowerment through radical media forms and memory work.  For the past twenty-five years she has developed large-scale media installations, experimental documentary films, artist's books, expanded cinema performances, boundary-crossing writing, and intergenerational popular education initiatives.  Latipa's ongoing political education grows out of a deep commitment to seeking relation and living across difference so that vibrant languages of memory and transformation may be seeded and nurtured for the past, present, and future.  She is the founder of the Memory and Resistance Laboratory, a collective initiative to evolve accountable, nurturing, and politically uncompromising media practice across all stages of development, production, postproduction, and distribution. She is also the co-founder of the Communities of Memory publishing imprint which offers a platform for community organizers and engaged artists to share their work in book form.

About Camilo Ontiveros
Camilo Ontiveros is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist who has sustained an interrogation of migration, value, law, politics, and economy across the Americas for the past two decades. Born in Rosario, Sinaloa, México, Ontiveros immigrated to Southern California in 1993. In the early 2000's, Ontiveros was part of a vibrant cultural scene between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico. He co-founded Lui Velazquez, an artist's run space next to the San Isidro border crossing that was a vital hub for cultural production and international artistic exchange in the region. During this period, he also initiated bold public projects such as CAUTION (2005) which intervened in freeway signage on the U.S. side of the border.

Ontiveros’ work is at the forefront of cultural discussions concerning migration. His practice bears witness to lives upended by deportation, creates space to process and mourn immigrant lives, and forces cultural institutions to reckon with the borders they themselves maintain.

“togetherfire” is supported through the generous support of our donors.   homeLA is fiscally sponsored by Fulcrum Arts.