How do we build a world from the detritus of a faltering society? How are we responsive to the environment, people, and objects around us? What are the ways that we can hold a more sacred relationship to one another? This in-progress installation from artist Yanira Castro and her design team—including Kathy Couch and RPI alum Stephan Moore—invites you to enter and effect a rumbling, buoyant, weather-like microcosm constructed of shipping pallets, clothing bundles, tarps, and emergency paraphernalia. Explore how your own actions, presence, and storytelling influence the space and atmosphere. Then stay to share your experience of the project at this early stage of development with the artistic team.

TOPOS presents the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by celebrated composer-performer Sarah Davachi. The Rose Dialogues, scored for two violas, cello, organ, and electronics, begins with the simplest of musical devices—the canon (or, which can colloquially be thought of as a round)—and spins an oceanic world of unexpected harmonies, haunting melodies, and formal surprises.

The topos of Davachi’s work is listening itself. Her music invites a deep attention, drawing us gently into the slow blossoming of her sonic landscapes. Within the veritable ocean of alternate tunings and temperaments, we are carried by waves of respite and repose, a darker pull that nudges us toward the unexpected.

Joined by musicians Eyvind Kang, Whitney Johnson (violas) and Lucy Railton (cello), Sarah Davachi’s piece moves slowly and with a precise ear for timbre and harmony. Its surprises feel hard-won, emerging from a rigor rooted in early Western compositional techniques: counterpoint, canon, heterophony, polyphony. And yet, her music is timeless, a dilated present that inches towards an uncertain yet harmonious future. A future that, in listening, seems to go on without end.

The premiere performance of Davachi’s The Rose Dialogues & Interludes at TOPOS is preceded by an onstage conversation with the composer.

Suzi Analogue, music professor at UNC, prolific producer, songwriter, composer, founder of Never Normal Records, is based in Miami, FL. Her work pioneers the new wave of women producers in electronic music and beyond. Her recent project commissioned by Alfreda Cinema and Brooklyn Academy of Music, BY ANY MEANZ SONICALLY, is a live electronic score set to a visual montage highlighting profound influence of Black women in electronic dance music, tracing their impact from the early roots in jazz and rhythm & blues to the global prominence of dance music today. The rich textures and rhythms created are both an homage to and extension of the legacies of those who paved the way, from the Afro-futurist soundscapes of artists like Sylvia Robinson to the avant-garde and spiritual experimentation of Alice Coltrane. Suzi will present her work as producer, educator, and cultural shape shifter.

Wednesday, January 29
Ludwig Godefroy
Concordance

Wednesday, February 05
Sara Navrady / Mecanoo
Architectural Alchemy: Space, Meaning & Connection

Wednesday, February 12
James Carpenter
Embodied Light in the Public Realm
Mosaic Architecture Lecture

Monday, March 10
Nzinga Mboup  /  Worofila
Crafting in-situ Knowledge

Wednesday, March 19 (online, 5 p.m.)
Jun Sato
SITE
Transparent Structures providing Komorebi Naturalness

Monday, March 24
Thom Mayne / Morphosis
Of the Moment
Mike Wacholder Memorial Lecture

Note:

All lectures will be held at EMPAC Theater with the exception of Jun Sato, which will be held online.

All lectures at EMPAC will start at 5 pm est. Design studios will end early to allow students and faculty to arrive on time.

Movement artist Justine A. Chambers shares new writing on and recent documentation of her dance work, The Brutal Joy, which is currently on tour across Canada. Emerging from traces of childhood memories of family gatherings on the South Side of Chicago, The Brutal Joy is a scored improvisation which unfurls Black vernacular dance alongside sartorial gesture in the lineage of Black dandyism—as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black-living.

Through the choreography of movement, sound, light, and attire, The Brutal Joy mines remembered and imagined pasts to build a relational, living counter-archive in and on her own body in the present.

In this talk, Chambers discusses how the piece oscillates between compositional structures of the riff, the vamp, and the break, letting provisional moments of self-actualization in the present surface through a dance of future possibilities.

Chambers’s choreographic practice is grounded in empathic and collaborative creativity, diasporic practices as knowledge reservoirs, and outward-facing activations of a cumulative bodily archive of the everyday. In The Brutal Joy, intergenerational inheritances of movement and personal style are tools for reclaiming Black existence and value through self-determination and collective ritual. Gesture, gait, gaze, rhythm, sonic texture, and shadow serve as materials for imagining otherwise.

Artist Steffani Jemison reflects on her fall 2024 residency for the latest iteration of an evolving set of video and live performance works. Her series, collectively titled In Succession, explores how we find the courage to be—physically, ethically, and collectively—the means toward ends that we may never ourselves get to see.

Across In Succession’s iterations, Jemison explores a range of scaffolded structures: sometimes sculpturally built to support performers in action, sometimes constructed with their very bodies, supporting each other. Shared weight and pressure create an exchange of physical and moral responsibility, an opportunity to absorb ideas from and find security in proximity to one another.

In her fall residency, Jemison turned to the medium of video to explore the potential afterlives of a 2024 performance that activated her most large-scale sculpture to date: a climbable scaffold structure. As in much of her work, in this developing iteration of In Succession, Jemison treats the camera as an extension of the moving body; the phenomena of perspective and perception operate as at once optical and embodied. The performers’ bodies and the camera are mutually implicated, and simultaneously influence the viewer’s experience.

As starting points for these bodily and material explorations, Jemison often seeks out the archival traces of historical events as they appear in journalistic accounts—with all their exaggerations, omissions, and idiosyncrasies of time and place. In this talk, Jemison shares her recent thinking on all these forms of porosity: how living, thinking, breathing human bodies absorb movements and ideas from each other.

In other words, how do we inspire (literally blow into, breathe in) and how are we inspired? Can we find freedom with rather than from one another? Where does the courage to seek possibility lie? To imagine beyond what we know?

In this program with video and performance artist Claudia Pagès Rabal, the artist shares various facets of her artistic research. Pagès’s past works have often engaged with palimpsests in which informal, vernacular languages and customs are at cross-purposes with official operations and the semantics of power.

Her recent work often swerves from intriguing cultural symbols to the raw material structures that underlie them and back to the unstable substance of language. A recent work Typo-Topo-Time Aljibe at SculptureCenter New York focused on a Moorish cistern successively rebuilt across many centuries, such that each architectural update coincided with new forms of displacement and cultural erasure. Through performance, video, and sculptural installation with a custom-made LED screen she fabricated, Pagès and her collaborators move through the graffiti in the cistern. The marks on its walls become a kind of found score that enlivens a complex flow of economic exchange and evolving cultural systems.

Pagès’s work often occupies what the artist refers to as the gerund: a space of language and movement that is detached from any particular subject.

Circulating, administering, grouping, and ungrouping—Pagès’s projects explore how discrete actions turn into endless tracings of motion and generate new forms of power. Pagès is particularly interested in the cultural life of logistics, often focusing on patterns of trade as they are reflected in material culture.

For this event, artist Jewyo Rhii is in conversation with curator Katherine C. M. Adams to discuss her artistic practice. Jewyo Rhii’s work engages with the long afterlife of artistic labor and builds public links to patterns of transit, movement, and storage we rarely see.

Her practice often bears the mark of itinerancy, reflecting on the experience of passing through places where one cannot stay and making meaning out of encounters with transient situations. Love Your Depot (2019– ) is a large sculptural installation using principles of storage to activate a workspace for younger artists; Night Studio (2009–2011) developed through turning Rhii’s studio space into an open house; and the exhibition Of a Hundred Carts and On (2023) activated art storage systems to give a shifting tableaux of works new meanings through their mobile, expandable installation. As Rhii interrupts objects on their way to being stored, shipped off, filed away, or compartmentalized, she affirms material culture in its moments of incompleteness. By engaging with states of personal and material precarity, and casting artwork in relation to the (im)possiblity of its preservation, Rhii allows us to see how ephemeral structures in our lives build their own stories—and hold ours together.

In this program, Rhii speaks in particular about how her work uses sculptural machines and architectural storage processes to create new possibilities for collective storytelling. The event will also touch on the collaborative facets of Rhii’s practice, which often directs itself to local communities and artist groups.

In this program, Critical Intimacies: Feminist Imaginative Technologies, artist and filmmaker Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, together with writer and film/performance researcher Katie Kirkland, offer an experimental lecture through dialogue and the exchange of films and texts.

Nguyen-Chi and Kirkland explore the feminine and anti-colonial gaze across performance, video, and cinema. How can we practice critical intimacy within the realm of art, cinema, and theory, i.e. how can we de-construct and construct simultaneously? How can we transform tools of oppression into tools of liberation?

Focusing on feminist forms of resistance and re-enactment, kinship and transmission, Nguyen-Chi and Kirkland center on female artists and theorists with ancestry from East and Southeast Asia whose work grapples with legacies of Western imperialism.

As they discuss specific artistic and theoretical works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Anocha Suwichakornpong, and others, they consider the use of hybridity to resist epistemic violence, cultivate self-reflexivity, and build critical intimacy.

Through this program, Nguyen-Chi also explores approaches and themes relevant to her work on the forthcoming film project Letter to the Father (working title), which will be co-produced by EMPAC.

Wednesday, September 11
Ferda Kolatan
Misfits & Hybrids: Architectural Artifacts for the 21 Century City

Wednesday, September 18
Marcela Correa
Natural Synthetic

Wednesday, October 09
Anton Garcia-Abril
ENSAMBLE Studio
Architecture of the Earth

Wednesday, November 06 (online)
James Wines
SITE
What Else Could it Mean: Transformation Ideas in Art, Architecture and Context

Monday, November 11
Patcharada Inplang + Thongchai Chansamak
Sher Maker Studio
Read the River – Read the Wood Grain

Note:

All lectures will be held at EMPAC Theater with the exception of James Wines, which will be held online.

All lectures at EMPAC will start at 5 pm est. Design studios will end early to allow students and faculty to arrive on time.