In this nightlong program, we face the necessity of going on in an age of personal, systemic, ecological, and international polycrises. Organized by Chloë Bass and Cory Tamler, our long-form, open conversational gathering explores continuity through perspectives such as disability, geologic time and the climate disaster, gentrification, internationalism/anti-nationalism, and abolition.
Drawing on the ambivalences of the nocturnal season, How Do We Continue in Public? asks how we can keep building our collective future from fragmented, often questionable material. Invited facilitators—including Johanna Hedva, Jennie Youssef, Raísa Lin Garden-Lucerna, participants from CUNY’s Performing Futurities Seminar, and others TBA—will contribute texts and knowledge to a six-hour, open conversation that guests can enter, leave, and return to on their own rhythms, in a space full of comforts to see us through the long night. Join us to read, rest, and rediscover wonder through togetherness in uncertainty.
Those who reserve a spot are welcome to arrive at any time before 11PM during the event’s long run. Guests are also welcome to come and go throughout the evening. Please RSVP for a time slot corresponding to your anticipated arrival time.
Accessibility:
The event will take place in the Westbeth Community Room (6:30pm–10:30pm), followed by a silent procession and outdoor experience departing at 11 PM. The Community Room is wheelchair accessible, and offers a wheelchair accessible gender neutral restroom. Limited seating will be available in the Community Room; the outdoor experience will be ambulatory, and involve standing. Please dress appropriately for the weather.
More accessibility details will be shared soon. If you require ASL interpretation, or have another access requirement, please contact Cory and Chloë at spcuny@gmail.com by November 30 and we will make every effort to provide it.
This program is the final event in SPCUNY’s year-long series “How Do We ________ in Public?“. Food, drink, and comfort will be provided.
Bios
Co-host bios:
Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches and now lives in New York City. Their fifth book, My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire, is out this November with Sming Sming Books; and their last book, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, won the 2025 Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ Social Justice Writing. Their solo exhibition, Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy, is on view at CARA in New York City until December 13, 2026.
Jennie Youssef is a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She cannot wait to graduate at the end of Fall 2026. Her dissertation, “Much Depends on Dinner: Early Modern Foodways, Performance, and Dramatic Representation,” brings together the fields of theatre and performance, food history, and premodern race studies in an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and drama in which foodways “perform” in a process of colonial categorization that of identity and race. Her project was awarded a long-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library (2025–2026), and she is currently working on her first monograph. Jennie holds a BA and MA in English literature from the American University of Beirut. She loves libraries and old recipes, and she can be bribed with cake.
Raísa Lin Garden-Lucerna (she/they) is an immigrant and multicultural organizer, creative, caregiver, and lifelong resident of the Southside of Williamsburg. Born into a community and organization that advocates for social and environmental justice, she was raised and nurtured by principles of community self-determination, artivism, and youth-leadership development, particularly in the context of gentrification. Raísa’s lived experience with holistic approaches to organizing, sustainability, and community planning greatly influences her advocacy for interdisciplinary collaboration, and the prioritization of community-led solutions.
Organizer bios:
Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist asking how the named and unnamed feelings we hold in common shape our civic society. Through installation, conversation, performance, text, sculpture, and media-based practices, her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She is currently working on Since feeling is first (2023 – ongoing), a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent or upcoming projects with the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the ICA at VCU, St. Louis Art Museum, Creative Time, the Buffalo AKG, Skirball Cultural Center, California African-American Museum / Art + Practice, Henry Art Gallery, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, The Kitchen, and elsewhere.
Cory Tamler is an artist and dramaturg working across performance, writing, and social practice. Cory is a founding member of In Kinship Collective (Wabanaki/Maine), the author of A Permanent Parliament: Notes on Social Choreography (2022, Laboratory for Social Choreography/Segal Center Publications), and a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Growing up in a city of three rivers, she has worked with bodies of water in Pittsburgh, Maine, Helsinki, Palau, Brandenburg, and in Berlin, co-designing and leading walks, paddles, and residencies with marine biologists, anthropologists, and with other artists across disciplines. She walks the Panke from its source area near Bernau to its two mouths in the center of Berlin.
