Inspired by Cabrini’s ongoing research and writing on unbeing, refusal, and opacity under occupation, the Refusal of (Pre)occupations functions autonomously, treating language as dynamic material rather than simply a message. How does thought behave when it is spatialized, distributed across life, and subjected to manipulation and delay? What emerges is not resolution or recognition, but rather exposure to the conditions under which the right to opacity, as writer Édouard Glissant defines it, is the right to relation without transparency: to gather among one another without defining the other, to touch without total ruin. This performance considers Glissant’s concept as a weather system of sonics passing through the gravity of (pre)occupations, the extraction of natural resources, and the stress of bureaucratic checkpoints.
The Refusal of (Pre)occupations unfolds throughout Dia Chelsea’s program space as a distributed situation of poetics. With no fixed stage, the event features a shifting field of live cello by Ethan Philbrick, vocal performances by Muyassar Kurdi and Cabrini, a soundscape by Isaac Silber, projected paintings by Elii Lee, and visuals by Juliana Fadil-Luchkiw and Cabrini. The audience is free to move about and create their own encounters with the work.
performance that combines improvisational dance and sound to physically
materialize the haunting of the Vietnam War. Debuted in 2023 at the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, the first iteration of this
performance focused on the atmospheric quality of oppression through
humidity, urination, and experimental dance. This reprise shifts towards
the acoustic nature of despair, picking up on the resonance of militarization
as it creeps along one’s skin and leaks into the everyday. Performing this
work in Seoul, a city that is physically and sonically occupied by the
American military, Vo and Silber also reconsider the generational trauma of
US intervention across the younger Asian diaspora who have not directly
experienced war but still experience the effects of that violence.
In Seoul, Two Little Kids (reprise) reframes the Asian experience of
American military violence as neither straightforward nor discrete; there
is a tangled web of inter-Asian politics at play here. The Korean and
Vietnam Wars were borne of Asian and Western colonial occupations. They
both fought against the brutal Japanese empire, but Vietnam’s fight for
independence was preceded by centuries of colonization by France and
China. The United States mutated these post-colonial civil wars into a
deadly game of Cold War geopolitics at the cost of millions of civilian lives.
Yet, Korea allied with the United States in the Vietnam War, hypocritically
committing atrocious massacres and war crimes similar to what they
experienced less than two decades earlier at the hands of the American
army. The entanglement of violence, and its compounding consequences,
is still felt today; Vo has written that “most people [in Vietnam] do not live
but only know how to survive.” It is within this context that Two Little
Kids (reprise) looks to sonically transform a shell-shocked subsistence.
Reprise, a term used in music to denote an innovative repetition, also
means to resume or repossess. Vo and Silber’s performance is a reprise in
all of its definitions. Two Little Kids (reprise) is titled after Thach Lam’s
eponymous short story Hai đứa trẻ, in which two children in Vietnam’s
rural countryside experience poverty and perpetual despair, told through
the metaphor of light and dark in a never-ending cycle of ghostly
survivance and drifting sleep. Vo and Silber bring Lam’s haunting into the
present, animating the liminality of trauma and oppression. The body
becomes the medium for this reprise, stripped bare, a vessel through which
Vo embodies the compounding, oppressive psyche of historical and current
US military occupation as they vocalize, vibrate, sway, urinate, and sweat.
Their chants, recalling a ritual practice, reclaims a body lost to time and
rupture. This sonic landscape is heightened by sounds extrapolated from
water, which Silber extemporizes into an inescapable audial onslaught.
Experienced as a whole, Vo and Silber seem to ask: when the body (theirs,
yours, ours) becomes so resonant with sound, liquid, and movement, can it
repossess agency and break free of the apparitional interstices of the
post-war psyche?
- Text by Sarah Cho
Two Little Kids (reprise) took place as part of the exhibition Red Study curated by Yezoi Hwang, featuring work by Hwang as well as Kentaro Takahashi, Sangha Khym, and Kideok Park.
the sonic infrastructure of the performance will involve a microphone placed by the door of 210 canal street, transmitting its signal to gmtc via fm radio, which will be amplified alongside local radio station signals via transduction onto various surfaces in gmtc including the wall, the floor, and a tank of water filled from the 210 canal street plumbing system. a hydrophone microphone will amplify the vibrations of the water, which will be filtered through layers of effects processing and feedback manipulation. activating this layered sonic atmosphere, the performance asks us to consider the ways we process the regimes of transmission that penetrate, shape, and transform our experience of embodiment.
considering the site of gmtc, of 210 canal street, chinatown, nyc, a block where vendors, tourists, shop owners, restaurant workers, residents and pedestrians intermingle in a contested and vibrant urban ecology, alongside local fm radio where a broad spectrum of musical and informational programs collide at the site of the antenna, the performance provides a space to reflect on the layered degrees of presence inhabiting the immediately local, offering an altered spatiotemporal sense through sonic vibration.
poster by jennifer yejin lee @jenniferrlee_
gmtc fm excerpt #1
gmtc fm excerpt #2
Our set was an improvised quintet performance featuring myself (drums), Kyle b. co. (trumpet, vocals, electronics), Erinn Buhyoff (saxophone), Sol Cabrini (vocals), and Max Hoenig (piano, synth).
I will be a collaborating musician for this performance, along with Alex Capraro.
It was once said “In da Clerb, We all fam.”
We all exist under the same rhythm, the same beat. Are standing in the same line.
There was also that one song “We Are the World” by the supergroup USA for Africa.
That is the vibe here. The patterns of race made music as part of Critical Race Therapy are spread through machines and brought to life in some imaginative DJ sets. Critical Club Therapy uses the club as architecture for connecting one another’s experience. There will be a bar, there will be a dance floor. There will be a line to get in.”
Featuring: Buffy Sierra, Crackhead Barney, myself, Sol Cabrini, and Kat Sotelo.
Like the ocean at Fort Tilden, the tree’s history is entangled with histories of war. Once employed in leather tanning for military gear, its production was dominated by the Argentina-based British company La Forestal. During the Cold War, competing powers raced to secure it as part of the global contest for strategic raw materials.
The work plays on fuerte’s double meaning, fort and strength, asking which forms of strength endure and which histories remain.
This sonic activation amplified Fort Tilden’s Atlantic water as a resonant speaker, incorporating radio reception, fm transmission, and hydrophonic listening transduced through a tank of water tinted with Quebracho natural dye. Improvising with this site specific sound system became a practice of environmental attunement - leaning into resonant frequencies, building dissonances and harmonies of feedback, weaving rhythmic interventions into the folds of the kaleidoscopic textures emerging from the tank. In dyeing the amplified water with quebracho rojo, the performance allowed for an exploration of the sonic dimensions of the dye permeating the site of Pombo’s intervention. All were asked to add ice cubes of quebracho dye prepared by Pombo to the resonant tank throughout the performance, and were invited to then take a vessel of dyed ocean water home with them at the end.
Fuerte Quebracho was made possible with public funds from the Queens Arts Fund, a re-grant program supported by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by New York Foundation for the Arts and is part of New York Textile Month.
transmissive dispersals involves fm radio transmitters, a radio receiver, a tank of water, a pair of hydrophone microphones, digital effects processing, and a pair of old Yamaha speakers. Listening to the sounds of Bowery down below the island gallery fire escape, the performance involves playing with the feedback created in the final circuit of this circuitous signal path, hearing the radio’s vibration in the air mixed with its dispersion inside the water. These performances serve as meditations on the permeability of apparent membranes separating inside/outside, vibration/signal, water/air, centri-fugal/petal, object/force.
Photos of transmissive dispersals #1 to the left. (7/26/25)
Video of transmissive disperals #2 by Kyle b. Co. (8/9/15)
Video of transmissive dispersls #3 by Kyle b. Co. (8/30/25)
Many thanks to Sunmi Yong at gmtc, and Mike Tan at island for making these performances possible.
Warehouse Market New York Edition was a three-day event that offered a place for artists, makers, designers & publishers to share their independently produced or self-made garments, fashion or textile related publications & objects, and exchange knowledge about fashion and clothes in context.
What material is your garment made of? How many hours went into producing this publication? What did the material cost? How much do you sell it for?
This edition featured a special focus on production/labor hours, production/labor costs, and retail pricing, encouraging transparency and conversation around value, sustainability, and independent practice through daily presentations and public programming.
Photos by Sinclair Li