Historias Entrecruzadas: In the Dome, panel discussion with artist Natalia Nakazawa, dre jácome, and Matt Mottel. Moderated by Meghana Karnik
Saturday, October 18, 2025 | 3:30pm – 5:00pm
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Please join us for Historias Entrecruzadas: In the Dome with artists Natalia Nakazawa, dre jácome, and Matt Mottel. Moderated by 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.
Meghana Karnik is Curator & Exhibitions Director at Flux Factory.
About Natalia Nakazawa
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.
About the Fellowship
The Socrates Annual Fellowship and exhibition reflects Socrates’ founding commitment to artistic experimentation and excellence, while also nurturing artists’ careers. Artists are selected through an open call and receive financial support, access to Socrates’ outdoor studios and technical support, and inclusion in a Park-wide exhibition. Since 2001, 279 artists have participated with many subsequently receiving further commissions for public art projects. The Socrates Annual Fellowship & Exhibition is one of the Park’s longest running programs and is an important training ground for early career artists to gain experience creating art in the public realm.
This year’s Fellowship will respond to the theme “Up/rooted,” which explores the complexities of uprooting species for long-term sustainability and resilience. The term “uprooted” evokes the tension between dislocation and resilience. “Up” signifies the act of lifting away, while “root” refers to the hidden systems below the ground—anchoring life and absorbing essential nutrients. This duality invites us to reflect on the implications of relocation and adaptation, exploring how when done thoughtfully it can foster new growth and understanding. In what ways can we foster regeneration while acknowledging and mitigating the losses within our ecological and social landscapes? How might we navigate the delicate balance between ecological preservation and community needs to create a more resilient future?