Event details
Thursday, September 24, 2026
6:30 pm 

Dia Chelsea 
537 West 22nd Street 
New York, New York

Free. Spaces are limited; register for the event here.

It’s okay—we all refuse. Some of this, maybe all of this. If we gather in counterpoints, it’s collective refusal. Sol Cabrini’s Refusal Meeting #0: The Refusal of (Pre)occupations treats voice, atmosphere, and moving image as misaligned systems that temporarily connect yet never cohere. In this spatial and sonic environment, language appears spontaneously, is distorted, or withdraws altogether. Meaning can circulate unevenly, break, or linger as residue, as aftersound. 

Inspired by Cabrini’s ongoing research and writing on unbeing, refusal, and opacity under occupation, the Refusal of (Pre)occupations functions autonomously, treating language as dynamic material rather than simply a message. How does thought behave when it is spatialized, distributed across life, and subjected to manipulation and delay? What emerges is not resolution or recognition, but rather exposure to the conditions under which the right to opacity, as writer Édouard Glissant defines it, is the right to relation without transparency: to gather among one another without defining the other, to touch without total ruin. This performance considers Glissant’s concept as a weather system of sonics passing through the gravity of (pre)occupations, the extraction of natural resources, and the stress of bureaucratic checkpoints.

The Refusal of (Pre)occupations unfolds throughout Dia Chelsea’s program space as a distributed situation of poetics. With no fixed stage, the event features a shifting field of live cello by Ethan Philbrick, vocal performances by Muyassar Kurdi and Cabrini, a soundscape by Isaac Silber, projected paintings by Elii Lee, and visuals by Juliana Fadil-Luchkiw and Cabrini. The audience is free to move about and create their own encounters with the work.