DAWN-DUSK-DAWN

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, this project will undergo constant modifications; the features of this page provide accruing information on the project’s developments.

DAWN-DUSK-DAWN unfolds as a space to reconnect with the cycles of life—light and dark, beginning and ending—as a way to reflect on regenerative practices and life-caring technologies. This project asks how we might open space to better hear what is within us, and from there, listen more deeply to what surrounds us.

Physically, at its center Session artist Bel Falleiros places an immersive sculpture: a large woven vessel that visitors can enter, a structure that holds and embraces. Surrounding it, an evolving field of references—images and texts from poets, scientists, artists, and activists—will gather over time, gradually transforming into a constellation or mapping inspired by the night-sky. Through a sequence of public programs, the project extends into embodied experience: hands-on art-making, collective practices with the body, and gatherings attuned to spirit and the senses.

This work considers what it means to remember our interdependence with each other and with the natural world, particularly in a moment of deep environmental and social imbalance. It reflects on the cycles that are often overlooked in contemporary urban life—silence, darkness, uncertainty—and the ways these states can serve as generative, life and light-making spaces. Like rest, they offer the conditions to notice, nurture, and care for what is emerging.

In a time shaped by collapse and urgency, the project proposes a shift in orientation: away from extractive systems and toward the spaces where life is sustained. New York City sits on one of the most diverse estuarine ecosystems in the world, while also carrying one of the largest environmental footprints. What might be learned from this duality? Estuaries are nurseries—sites of nourishment, transition, and becoming. Can a city rooted in such a geography remember its capacity to hold and sustain life, human and non-human alike?

DAWN-DUSK-DAWN returns to the importance of intimate, held space for reflection—alone and together. It asks how we are shaped by the conditions of this moment, and how we might begin to heal ourselves while also tending to the environments we inhabit. Without turning away from what might come, the project invites us to stay with the present and to trust in the regenerative capacities of both nature and ourselves. Envisioned as a refuge, the space is inspired by the words of Ailton Krenak, who calls for a “becoming forest” within the metropolis—a shift toward a future where life can continue. Visitors are invited to enter, rest, and spend time with the work as it evolves—returning across cycles, engaging with its programs, and carrying its questions outward.