Please join us for Historias Entrecruzadas: In the Dome with artists Natalia Nakazawa, dre jácome, and Matt Mottel. Moderated by Flux Factory’s Curator & Exhibitions Director Meghana Karnik, this conversation addresses the importance of telling our own stories in three perspectives rooted in social architecture, oral history, and community organizing. As more people live under threat of deportation and organized abandonment — what crucial learnings have arisen through the artists’ participatory projects?

Natalia Nakazawa engages people in creating spaces of resistance through collective map making experiences, recording oral histories, and 3D scanning objects through Our Stories of Migration. She is a Socrates Sculpture Park 2025 Artist Fellow.

dre jácome’s interactive storytelling installation, Earthseed, weaves together land-based, Indigenous, and contemporary technologies — inspired by temazcal ceremonies, ecological design, and the survival cosmologies envisioned in Octavia Butler’s Parable series. Modeled after the protective form of the pinecone, which opens and closes in response to its environment, Earthseed encodes intimate stories of survival onto seedlight sculptures, functioning as an emergent archive that reveals itself only through chosen protocols of entry. She is a 2025 Rhizome Fellow at Flux Factory.

Matthew Mottel builds geodesic domes as a performance architecture, based on Syeus Mottel’s (father) 1970’s photojournalism of Loisaida cultural organization CHARAS, who built geodesic domes in collaboration with Buckminster Fuller. 

This event is hosted in partnership with the 2025 Socrates Annual: Up/Rooted. Light refreshments will be provided.

About the Panelists

Natalia Nakazawa (b. 1982, Charlotte, NC) is a Queens-based interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work spans painting, textiles, and social practice. As a child of Latin American (Uruguayan) and Asian (Japanese American, Yonsei) diasporas, she draws on complex cultural legacies to explore identity, migration, and storytelling. Through collaborative, community-driven projects, Nakazawa blurs the boundaries between education, activism, and art, inviting collective participation. Her jacquard textiles incorporate images from open-access museum collections, often highlighting historical moments of cultural exchange. These works serve as tactile archives; places to critically engage with memory. https://www.natalianakazawa.com/

dre jácome (b. 1992, Atlanta GA) is a transdisciplinary storyteller weaving across land-based and digital technologies. as a child of the andes mountains, magdelena river, and georgia red clay, she has been a lifelong student studying the subversive healing technologies found on the land and body. inspired by magical realism and the survival arts of everyday living, her work aims to oppose and propose experimental counter archives that honor and defend BIPOC intimate knowledge systems held in story, nature, and recovering cosmologies. with her background as a herbalist, historian, and cultural organizer, she grounds her projects with relational methods including archival research, oral history, critical ethnobotany, and partnerships with community organizations and chosen family. her work has appeared at Lincoln Center, Smack Mellon, and MOCADA Abolition House. she received a BA in History & Latin American Studies from Swarthmore College, and a MS in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU. https://www.drerenate.xyz/

Matt Mottel (born 1981, New York, NY) is an artist, performer, and writer whose work enlivens primary source materials and creates collaborative projects that open access to subterranean culture. Social activism and cultural community run throughout his performances, videos, sculptures, and music. Rooted in his New York upbringing, Mottel holds a B.A. in Political & Cultural Studies from SUNY New Paltz (2003) and an M.F.A. in Digital Intermedia Art Practice from City College (2019). His projects have been presented internationally, including a co-improviser residency in Moers, Germany (2021), and the solo exhibition burnt truth at Gundula Gruber Gallery in Vienna (2021). He was an SPCUNY Fellow in 2022–2023. In 2024, Mottel co-founded Parents in the Avant Garde with his wife, artist and educator Nicole Lattuca. The collective makes intergenerational art and music with parents and children, with performances at The Stone (April 2024) and in Newburgh, NY. In summer 2025, they were educators-in-residence at Catskill Arts Space, where they developed Scribble Scores, an ongoing project exploring collaborative mark-making as graphic scores for sound and music performance. https://www.mattmottel.info/

Image: From a Village Preservation event at The Loisaida Center titled, “Chino Garcia Oral History and Screening of CHARAS is Alive on Spaceship Earth,” 2018 (detail). Source link. CC BY-SA 2.0.