{Re}HAPPENING 14 Artist Lineup

"The Country Dwellers" is an immersive video installation which traces the connections between Appalachian folk magic and the rise of Neo-Paganism. The title of the work derives from the Latin root of the word pagan, paganus, meaning “rural person” or “country dweller,” a term that gestures toward the deep spiritual relationship these communities maintained with the land and how that connection shaped their sense of self. Various archival stories about folk magic like wart conjuring, water dowsing, thrush healing, and planting by the signs are investigated in this film in order to connect regional folk magic practices to their current resurgence.

Charlie Boss Orchestra, led by Charlie Boss, assembles a rotating group of strings and winds to perform their compositions. The ensemble combines careful attention to phrasing, harmony, and structure with spontaneous interaction, allowing each musician to contribute to the unfolding music. The result is a series of performances that are structured yet fluid, precise yet alive, with every note actively shaping the evolving soundscape.

Come sit with The Star Loom, a community weaving project, created out of a reclaimed Black Walnut Tree, fallen during Hurricane Helene. Together we will weave, feel held, and share unexpected connections. Thread by thread we will fill the loom with our heart shapes and soul textures.

Vermilion | 10 explores a relationship in a duet. Intertwined bodies and colloquial gestures unfold within the landscape, accompanied by polymer props. Dancers move athletically, interlocking limbs and even lifting each other, exploring the light and dark in human dynamics.

Come play among giant wooden birds, moths, and horses - collaborate with strangers on homemade instruments. In a wooden wonderland of repurposed objects, we study the idea of "at hand" together. "Creatures From a Door to Perception" is on view all weekend inviting you to compose with the stranger next to you. This installation is created by Fred Merrill with workshops led by The Electric Cabbage Ensemble (Carolyn Zaldivar + Matthew Carey).

“Pace Investigations No. 14” is a live performance that experiments with the rhythms of movement and time. Repeating and stretching actions in unexpected ways, the work invites audiences to notice how moments accelerate, merge, or dissolve, creating a dynamic tension between measured and felt time. The piece unfolds in real time, shaped by attention, environment, and shared experience.

“35mm Multi Image Slideshow” is a wall to wall analog installation that projects mixed media slides—scratched, painted, and collaged with Roscolux gels—alongside archival photographs using four Kodak Ektagraphic projectors on auto loop. The colorful textured visuals and the whizz burr of the self timers randomize the 320 symbols, marks, and graphic images, compelling the viewer to construct meaning from each set of four. Ultimately, this mirrors the psyche’s drive to surface unconscious material and rebels against digital isolation by gathering friends and strangers to cultivate collective presence.

“Sphere” is a live expanded cinema performance that integrates moving image, choreography and sound, created by artists Ivana Larrosa and Lee Tusman (ExquisiteCorp). Inspired by Merce Cunningham’s piece “Beach Birds,” parallel choreographies of avian and aquatic systems — migratory patterns, collective movements, and sensory perception — become metaphors for attention and coexistence. Meeting your neighbors in a living system of impermanence and uncertainty, while engaging contemporary ecological concerns.

Join us in a visual, kinesthetic, and auditory experience. Enter an Inhabitable Drawing and contribute to it as it emerges through the weaving of space led by architect, dancer, and sound artist. Be a part of a durational performance that sets up the stage for all of us to expand the possibilities of space and of connection.

From the dining hall leading to Lake Eden, Lost Voyage Collective multimedia artists engage in a journey, activating choreographed spaces and transportable objects that uphold personal creative agency. By relinquishing control of outcomes, they invite viewers to navigate their own stories, emphasizing process and the connection between self and surroundings. This interactivity brings forth a focus on process and an interpersonal navigation of the relationship between oneself and their surrounding environment.

Solidarity March and Crankie Sing-A-long is an interactive performance by the marching band Brass Your Heart with the addition of a wearable mobile crankie which helps the audience learn the words to Saro Lynch’s song “More Waters Rising” with scrolling text and illustrations. The crankie will be paraded with the marching band, playing international solidarity songs, through the Lake Eden campus.

Passing By is a durational performance in which light, sound, and movement come together to create the presence of a river without water. Projected reflections ripple across stones and a moving body, accompanied by a meditative soundscape inspired by dripping water. Visitors are welcome to encounter the work at any moment, staying briefly or returning over time to experience its slow, shifting rhythms.

Every day sounds. Everyday Violence. Everyday.

A reactive installation: a web of kinetic fabrics animated by fans trigger and propel an evolving quadraphonic modular synthesizer soundscape.

“Quack! An Interactive Chance Poem for Black Mountain” is a playful chance-based interactive poetry carnival game. Waddle on up! Pluck a Duck! Open your beak! Recite that poem! Flap your wings! Win Prizes! Birds of a feather flock together!

Thank You Water is a prayer of gratitude to the waters of our land. The lake as instrument is created from the 6 strings of woven prayers from you, the community, gathered over time, and recited on high from 5 community elders, along with a water song at the heart of Lake Eden.

la/do is a short performance combining sound and movement in small, unconventional spaces. Audience members stand close and experience the work alongside the performers. Each piece lasts 10–15 minutes and leaves no physical trace, existing only in the shared moment of listening and attention.

REDACTED is a participatory art installation inviting you to anonymously share what you keep to yourself—and then watch as those responses are projected, edited, and partially obscured in real time. Each iteration becomes a living portrait of its moment, shaped by the people who take part.

Return to the meadow of your imagination with a collaborative writing celebration based on the poem "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow" by Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan. Participants will create new lines of poetry that will be posted/planted in the meadow as we create a collective and blooming new poem.

A room of sound and color that evolves in response to participants movements and actions.

Experience spiral worker, a rhizome-like happening where you'll interact with touch-controlled aluminum corn ears that generate sound through a hybrid modular synthesizer inspired by the 1963 Buchla 158, creating an interconnected network where performers on electronics, percussion, violin, euphonium, and saxophone merge with audience members in a non-hierarchical sculptural world. Drawing from disability-centered design and Pauline Oliveros' AUMI project, this multi-sensory event transforms everyone into spiral workers—gathering, transferring, and co-creating material in real time within an experimental system that rejects imposed order for collective spontaneity.

Join us for a unique participatory workshop exploring the intersection of American experimental art and Japanese avant-garde performance. Through the lens of Japanese Butoh dance and the performance art genre of Happenings, participants will explore the historic dialogue between Black Mountain College and Japan's post-war artistic movements. Learn about Butoh Fu—Butoh's distinctive notation system—develop your own choreographic scores, and practice embodying these scores through movement. No prior dance experience necessary.

In 2020, Jake Parker Scott built a boat in the form of nine aluminum gongs. In this immersive expanded cinema performance they will ride their "boat" through a storm of 16mm film projections towards the light of the moon (and other angels).

Explore the deep resonances of Empath II, an invented string instrument in Nature's Scale (the harmonic series), tuned to the 60Hz electric hum. The audience is invited to speak or sing into this one-of-a-kind instrument, or relax into the art of listening as dozens of microtonal strings sympathetically resonate with the sounds of the surrounding festival.

Calling upon the element of desire and chance in the act of fishing, our collaborative, participatory installation invites participants to respond (catch) and make (release) a small creative act.

Re-experience the {Re}HAPPENING while experiencing it happening. Immerse yourself in a non-linear tape loop collage of the event in progress and bring John Cage to multi-dimensional life with an interactive display of magnetic audio tape. Listen as time and space wows, flutters, and crinkles.

Through matière exercises, students in the preliminary art and design course at Black Mountain College explored the creative possibilities for mundane and unconventional materials like trash and fallen leaves. Inspired by legendary BMC professor Josef Albers’s matière exercises and the modular alphabet he created at the Bauhaus, I will gather materials on-site at the former campus of Black Mountain College to construct a series of functional fonts, which will be projected live as I work.