PORTALS: Closing for the INSTITUTE FOR TRANSHUMANIST CEPHALOPOD EVOLUTION

Join us for the closing of this project featuring a series of performances and readings that enact portals by Institute for Transhumanist Cephalopod Evolution friends and co-conspirators at Recess.

Since its birth in a London squat, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination has been committed to dissolving binaries of all kinds. Known for stirring up mass civil disobedience, the group has been walking the tightrope between art and activism since 2004. At the core of their practice lies a fusion of creation and resistance, protest and proposal - interwoven like strands of DNA. The Labofii now inhabits the zad of Notre-dame-des-landes, 'a territory lost to the republic,' according to the French government, where an airport project was abandoned after a 40 years of struggle.

Their presentation will tell stories of two decades of artactivism and how the labofii deserted the city and the binary dualistic concepts of art as we know it, to return art to its true ecosystem, life.

Swimming In a Pool of Split by AVR, performed with Bimbi

Bitterness isn't something you are naturally born with. It is an acquired skill. In a moment of indecision, diving in a pool of split is sometimes inevitable. Two actors perform the play using both movement and dialog. Swimming in a pool of Split explores merging of love that turns into horror that turns into magic and that sometimes has the taste of loving like a landlord

Barnett Cohen will share some new and recent poems that twine intimacy and aggression into one touch

Moonshine, 2025 What is it about the light from the Moon that changes how we think, that alights us from ourselves into a contemplative world of gesture, longing, and desire? What is in the diffused pale light of the Moon that alters us so, that makes poets of us all? Oh how many lovers have gazed at the moon projecting their bodily desire upwards in hopes that it may bounce off our companion back down into the eyes of the other.

Moonshine is a series of handheld ceramic “mirrors” created for a performance to mark the closing of Miriam Simun’s exhibition Institute for Transhumanist Cephalopod Evolution at Recess Art in Brooklyn, NY. They make use of traditional Summerian sculpture techniques and a novel glaze formulated using sand that once made up a beach during the Cambrian epoch, when cephalopods first evolved on Earth.