Department of Transformation: Get It Together!

How can experimental art and design open up new channels of communication and connection?

As part of the exhibition Letters for the Future at Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch, DOT and BPL Presents invite you to visit the new Library for Arts & Culture in Downtown Brooklyn for Get It Together! a free, all-ages afternoon jamboree of artist-led workshops and performances that position creative practices as tools for transformation. 

From singing human diagrams and spell-casting seminars to performances, culinary offerings, and—of course!—some karaoke practice, DOT invites you to immerse yourself in the ways that art can forge new connections and shape the world we share.

Program:

• 3:00pm

Doors open

First 25 attendees receive a free DOT gift!

• 3:30pm 

Lize Mogel: Performing Infrastructure

Counter-cartographer and interdisciplinary artist Lize Mogel leads an embodied exploration of NYC’s water supply in this workshop and performance, unpacking the complex web of history and infrastructure that binds NYC to the upstate communities of its watershed ecosystem. Participants will create a “human diagram” of the city’s water supply system, forming the connections between reservoirs, aqueducts and water tunnels with their bodies, and re-inscribing the connections between upstate and urban communities. Props will be provided; be prepared to make some noise! 

• 4:30pm

Hilma’s Ghost: Bottled Magic: The Ancient Art of Witch Bottles

Leveraging the power of spell casting as a transformative mode of language operating beyond the rational, feminist artist collective Hilma’s Ghost (Sharmistha Ray, they/them; and Dannielle Tegeder, she/her) valorize the work of women, trans and nonbinary artists—contemporary and ancestral—who use abstraction and mysticism in their work. In this presentation, Tegeder discusses the history of witch bottles and spell jars, and demonstrates the ritual invocations used to activate their work Enchantments: Bottled Devotionals of Divine Feminine Spirits, on view (and available to borrow!) at Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch as part of Letters for the Future.

• 5:30pm

Kevin Quiles Bonilla: A Study of Piles

Interdisciplinary artist Kevin Quiles Bonilla presents A Study of Piles, a performance-lecture grounded in documentation of the colonial history and ongoing ecological vulnerability of his native Puerto Rico. Positioning the “pile” as a form that transcends political, cultural, and geographic difference, Quiles Bonilla’s performance asks how these ubiquitous but often overlooked structures function as reflections of the universal human experience embedded within urban landscapes.

• 6:00pm

Karaoke Practice! with P! Krishnamurthy 

Featuring jamboree refreshments by 

Domestic Performance Agency/Athena Kokoronis

Join DOT founder P! Krishnamurthy for Karaoke Practice!, where collective voice, performance, and transformation take center stage. As a readymade format, karaoke can generate varying levels of discomfort in people while also demonstrating a person’s virtuosic potential, creating community through a shared sense of vulnerability and mutual support. In DOT tradition, we invite artists to join us in prototyping new formats for raising our voices together, and in this edition, Athena Kokoronis, interdisciplinary artist and founder of Domestic Performance Agency, will provide the culinary fuel for our karaoke fire. Eat, drink, be merry, and belt one out with us!