Living into the New Year
greetings and upcoming events in 2025
Hello! Time for one more substack post before the year closes. I wanted to start with the video to welcome and contextualize a bit before letting you know about some upcoming events.
After sharing this video, an artist friend responded with some reflections:
Joe: Creativity or the need to create is fascinating. There are endless motivations and some are the complete opposites of others. You have a very philosophical and intellectual approach. You glean what you can from the intellect and then make the art. It seems your questioning comes before the act.
Krista: I actually don’t think there is a before. I could make art before I could think philosophically but asking how does this work is what led my baby fingers to smear, drag, scrape, and drag, to pick up a crayon and learn the world. We are not a body first and then a world*, we are always co emerging. The need to create is gut level and my guts are made of questions and the desire to go beyond the known.
We always happen in the middle. Not first a thought, then an action, then a result, but a middling, “we” the result of a pull that captures, for an instant, how the thought was already action- like, how the body was always also a world. Not first a body, then a world, but a worlding through which bodyings emerge. —Erin Manning, For a Pragmatics of the Useless
Through the flow of uncapturable life we call creativity, our sense of beginnings and ends can touch, fold and layer as we become porous to processes and agencies operating outside of human perceptual frameworks. One of the beautiful unfoldments of this past year has been getting to know the work of philosopher and artist Erin Manning, whose writing languages this sense of withness I am gesturing towards in my response to my friend’s thoughtful reflections. I had an opportunity to explore this further in conversation with Erin via the emergence network, which you can read here: Being-with the Monster
My online classes are another place where I invite people to explore these kinds of questions and co-emergences with me. Offered as a drop-in session every Friday, I guide participants through a series of warm-ups, exercises, and prompts as forms of inquiry into sensation, sense perception, and mark-making. No prior drawing experience required: Friday Drop-In Class
And, here are some events coming up in early 2025:
GROUP EXHIBITION
January 4 - February 8, 2025 at Peep Space: “The Great Indoors,” curated by Yeon Ji Yoo and Rachel Sydlowski. Participating artists include: Elizabeth Castaldo, Krista Dragomer, Matthew William Robinson, Rachel Sydlowski, Erin Treacy, Natalie Collette Wood, Yeon Ji Yoo.
A PARTICIPATORY MONTHLY SERIES
January 12, 2025 at The Francis Kite Club: “To Live as These Animals” is a seasonal monthly series created by Krista Dragomer. The theme for the January event is: buried rivers. What does it mean to live on top of buried rivers? How might we feel those waters from this place, this building, this bar? How are those spectral waters directing the flows of our bodies right now? How did we come to see ourselves as inhabitants of dry land when we are bodies of wetness living on a wet planet? How might a sensing into wetness offer a proposition for living “as these animals”?
Krista will be behind the bar monthly from January through March, not slinging drinks (there will be real, skilled bartenders for that!) but slinging words and ideas that invite participants to travel into worlds of sensory exploration through reading, sensing and sounding, drawing, deviating, and playing together.
About The Bartenders-In-Residence Series
Laura Hanna invites artists, activists, disaffected + affected academics, witches, organizers, musicians, dissidents, historians, liars, philosophers, comedians, storytellers, diviners, speechwriters, unruly diplomats, and those who fall in between to host a night at The Kite, from behind the bar.
The Francis Kite Club: To Live As These Animals
IN-PERSON RETREAT
March 29 – April 1, 2025 at The Garrison Institute: The in-person retreat will involve guidance and teaching sessions with Dr. Akomolafe, Dancing with Mountains Artist-in-Residence Krista Dragomer, shared readings, sessions for mapping together, exercises in drawing together, the making of incomplete ‘mbaris’, and side-events with Ayin Press.
*note I am only co-facilitating the in-person retreat, not the online sessions
Thank you to all of you for your time and attention. I’ll be posting again in early January with some reflections on the year, more on my upcoming event at The Francis Kite Club, and some other thoughts on how we might live into this next year together. Much love to you as we all step through the calendar portal into whatever lies ahead.