Ecologies of the In\between

Johanna Hedva (b. 1984) is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician from Los Angeles. Hedva is the author of the 2024 essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, which won the Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ Social Justice Writing. They are also the author of the novel Your Love Is Not Good, which Kirkus called a “hellraising, resplendent must read,” and the novel On Hell, which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. In 2020, they published Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their artwork has been shown in Berlin at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; in Los Angeles at JOAN, HRLA, in the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, and the LA Architecture and Design Museum; in London at TINA, Camden Arts Centre, and The Institute of Contemporary Arts; in New York City at Amant Foundation and Performance Space New York; in South Korea at Seoul Museum of Art and Gyeongnam Art Museum; the 14th Shanghai Biennial; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich; Modern Art Oxford; MASS MoCA; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano; and in the Transmediale, Unsound, Rewire, and Creepy Teepee Festivals. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House (2021) and The Sun and the Moon (2019). Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 11 languages. In 2024, they were a Disability Futures Fellow, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber

CAConrad (b.1966) is a practitioner of the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual and the author of multiple collections of poetry including Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (2024), Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibrations (2021), While Standing in Line for Death (2017), Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for a Future Wilderness, and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (2012). Their poems have been internationally exhibited as sculptural art objects in galleries such as MoCA Tucson, Futura Gallery in Prague, Fluent Gallery in Spain, and Champ Lacombe in London. Conrad is the recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Book Award. Influenced by their upbringing in a factory town where production trumped presence, CAConrad has made it their life’s project to disentangle the logics of capital from creativity and cultivate an ethics of attention. Since 2005, Conrad has worked with an original practice of (Soma)tic poetry rituals, procedures that lead to states of what Conrad refers to as an “extreme present” and generate raw, stream-of-consciousness notes for poems. Photo by Augusto Cascales

Kelsey Shults (b.1988) is a visual artist based in North Adams, Massachusetts specializing in sculptural paintings. Shultis received her BFA from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design and studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, Czech Republic. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including the 2025 Young Masters Invitational Exhibition at the Cynthia Corbett Gallery in London. Shultis creates deeply personal representations of her inner landscape through a practice of tapping into her intuition and the unconscious. Decentering logic, rationality, and conscious thought, Shultis channels her work through a process in which she “asks the image to reveal itself rather than impose meaning or thought onto it.” Through landscapes populated with a visual vocabulary of abandoned houses, goddesses, moss, goats, rainbows, forests, demons, mermaids, rabbits, witchcraft, and children, Shultis’ work alternates between abstraction and revelation, wonder and horror, creating an aesthetic that she refers to as “haunted innocence.” 

Báyò Akómoláfé (b. 1983) is a self-described trans-public intellectual, international speaker, professor, and author born to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. He is author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home (2017) and the influential essay, "Black Lives Matter, But to Whom?" published by the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. Báyò is host teacher at Dancing with Mountains, a dynamic online pedagogical offering, and the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene. Animated by material feminism, post-structuralist theory, post-humanism, and Yoruba indigenous cosmologies, his philosophical project offers an alternative way of responding to the civilizational crises of the 21st century. Proposing that conventional methods of activism maintain the status quo and reinforce colonial ways of thinking, Akómoláfé presents a framework of postactivism, which embraces cracks as unanticipated breaks in existing architectures of dominance and sees fugitivity as a path forward because it is marked by uncertainty and surrender. Living and theorizing from this middle space between beginning and end, Báyò uses storytelling, writing, and facilitation as a means of putting into practice alternative ontological and relational mechanisms.