As the Vunja Artist-in-Residence, Krista collaborates with The Emergence Network (ten) to create immersive worlds online and in-person that invite the global networks of ten and various situated local communities to participate in sensory explorations of post-activism as practice.
In 2024, this collaboration took the form of Artistic Director of the Becoming Monster Festival.
Becoming Monster: A Convening at the End of the Human, October 30th - November 3rd 2024, was a five-day festival with virtual, hybrid and in-person components hosted by ten and a strange ecology of friends and partners (non-human and human alike). The event brought together over 800 people from around the planet to grieve the losses that come with living into the end-times AND to play with ideas of fabulation, imagination and questioning: what else might the human be in our crumbling, entangled, pulsating, animist world(s)? The event unfolded over Samhain, Halloween, All Souls Day and los Días de los Muertos, in a season associated with porosity between realms, celebrations of reunion between the living and the dead, congress with the underworld and the ancestors. There were nearly 50 experimental, practice-based online sessions offered; daily virtual spaces for integration and metabolization; around 20 in-person gatherings from Bangalore, India.. to Berlin, Germany to Lake Atitlán, Guatemala; and two hybrid offerings of theater and ceremony.
For a taste of the festival, peek at a clip from the Opening Ceremony (above), listen to the sounds of our collective monster in this sonic collage, peruse a gallery of visual harvests from our time together (below). To learn more about the event in its entirety, visit the festival website.
“The potent 5-day online / offline festival known as Becoming Monster simply would not have been possible without the leadership, inspiration and direction of Krista Dragomer. She is not only a remarkably talented and prolific visual artist, she is also an exceptional writer and curator of queer and evocative aesthetics. As many people who participated in the event noted, Krista helped envision and bring into being entire Becoming Monster worlds via her multi-media artworks, videos, soundscapes and writing. Those of us at The Emergence Network (ten) have been learning alongside Krista and using her Drawing on the Senses practices to integrate and engage directly with our sense perceptions in an embodied way. She is a true mentor for our organization and the people we collaborate with.” —Aerin Dunford, Director
to see the full event archive go to: https://www.emergencenetwork.org/becoming-monster/
In 2025, Krista’s role spilled beyond Artistic Director and co-creator. As local host of the Liquid Cartographies festival in Red Hook, Brooklyn…
Liquid Cartographies: Reshaping the Banks of the Possible was an experimental festival created to explore practices of open-ended thinking. We invited a range of people from many disciplines, traditions, and perspectives, to offer participatory propositions that engaged participants in explorations of fluid perspectives.
From the fiery events (fire in main venue) superbly navigated with community solidarity to the mind-morphing, playful ventures traversing unconventional spaces (including an old tanker), the Liquid Cartographies festival exemplified its own desire and name: Fluid became its Möbian mapping, and the discourse weaved in, out of, and around places of unlikeness. Brooklyn became its spectral marshy afterlife, a crafts space roared in deep ocean murmurs, and wetness was suddenly everywhere. The scope was ample, yet the feel, intimate. Participants and hosts swirled in ease converse, and side conversations over coffee and meals were just as affording as the main sessions. Yet all this happened without guile or artifice, thanks to the quiet skill of the planners. May what the Festival yielded take root, multiply, and seep into other gatherings and lifings to come!
- David U B Liu, Instigator of Mangroves