Then a Cunning Voice
La MaMa
74 E 4th Street
New York, NY 10003
March 7, 2025
5pm ET
Free / Donate
Join us for a quilting workshop with Korina Emmerich creating quilts for Then a Cunning Voice.
Communities around the world have shared their visions for the future on 84 quilts that form a single 4,000 square foot design created by Fond du Lac Ojibwe textile artist Maggie Thompson, and stitched with volunteers over years of community sewing gatherings. These quilts transport messages from individuals in communities across what is currently called the U.S., Australia and Taiwan, among an ongoing list of contributors. They are responses to the work’s central questions: “What do you want for your well-being? For the well-being of your chosen friends and family? For your neighborhood? For your town, city, reserve, Nation, world?”
Writing these questions with the Native American Community Development Initiative in 2013, we focused on the want. We focused on future imagined possibilities. We imagined people imagining, speaking, writing ideas beyond the locus of the usual. We wanted ourselves, our chosen families and friends, our communities—momentary, long-standing, small or large—to envision a future that is different from the one we are on a path toward. It’s a community-sourced visioning process that continues even now.
The quilts have been sewn by volunteers across the what is currently called the United States, Taiwan and Australia. The quilts served as audience seating, performance area, resting area and “home” for presentations of Catalyst’s 15-hour all night performance gathering and feast, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars. The quilts welcome community at monthly fire gathering in Manahatta on the Lower East Side for Catalyst’s ongoing project with Karyn Recollet, Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter.
The quilts have been transformed by fashion designer Korina Emmerich into futuristic beings that appear throughout Catalyst’s multiscalar performance series, Being Future Being.
Presented as a part of Re–Fest, CultureHub’s annual festival. Join us before or after the screening to experience artworks, performances, conversations, and workshops throughout La MaMa's 74a E 4th Street building. Re–Fest is free and open to all.
Full artist line-up and programming schedule here.