KIN: A Festival
of memory
and imagination

This panel brings together curators and cultural organizers who are actively engaged in reclaiming narratives, challenging dominant historical frameworks, and building new models for community-centered preservation. Together, they will examine the tensions between institutional stewardship and community ownership, the role of public space in memory-making, and innovative approaches to ensuring that cultural heritage reflects the voices and experiences of those whose stories have been marginalized or erased.

A dream space for repairing our relationship with our ancestors and descendants yet to be born.Spend time in the dream space with Intelligent Mischief, to honor our lineages, past, present, and future. We will claim our place in the long arc of people working to reclaim wholeness for our people and all of humanity. Together we will look back to look forward. We will go back and fetch it to immerse in the technologies that ensure that there are Black people in the future and we are thriving.

The Sound of Reconstruction (T.S.O.R.) activates the agency and autonomy of people marginalized by systems of domination (queer, BIPOC, and otherwise outcasted folks). We convene multi-diasporic artists to create ritualized, participatory performances and a traveling communal altar. Each event asks performers and attendees to contribute offerings, engage in dialogue, and move from spectatorship into collective action. The altar accumulates across venues into a unified multimedia object that materializes solidarity and sustained community organizing.

In response to the crisis our communities are facing in Crown Heights, Field Meridians’s Fall Nature School is offering programs that support the creation of tools for ecological and social resilience and restoration. We will be grounding our artist facilitated workshops and activities in Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 speculative fiction, Parable of the Sower, continuing our year-long dialogue with this transformative text. In it, the protagonist Lauren Olamina begins to craft a book of tenets that organizes a religion she dubs Earthseed against and through a time of environmental catastrophe, societal collapse and great violence.

NYC POC Healing invites you into a ceremony of touch with Hilot Massage—an ancestral Filipino healing art passed down through generations of manghihilot, elders, and community. More than massage, Hilot is radical care embodied: hands reading tension, bones, energy; intuition tracing the aches that carry stories of homeland and of what our bodies have endured. Ear seeds — small, gentle acupressure beads placed on specific auricular points — support energetic balance, stimulate internal awareness, and offer an anchoring touch for emotional ease. Reiki is a form of energy healing that involves the channeling of the universal life force energy to promote healing, relaxation, and balance.