Ontopo returns June 7–8 to Bak Lim Sa (Catskills Zendo) with Sensory Cultivation, the organizing principle for this year’s gathering. Structured as a hybrid between an artist-led convening and a lightly held temple stay, Ontopo offers an experimental framework for presenting new work—one that sits at the edge of Zen practice while remaining in active conversation with it. Over two days, artists, performers, musicians, and poets come together for shared meals, meditation, and ritual, alongside performances and offerings that test the boundaries of site, form, and spiritual context. Rather than retreat, this is a space of durational presence and generative friction—where contemporary practices unfold in relation to the land, the monastic rhythms of the temple, and one another.
Hosted in collaboration with the resident monastic community of Bak Lim Sa, Sensory Cultivation cultivates a space of critical not-knowingness, collective presence, and open experimentation. In an age of sensory fragmentation, Ontopo offers a living counter-model: rooted, relational, and alert.
This year’s theme, Sensory Cultivation, proposes a counterpoint to the disorientation of digital life. Informed by botanical cultivation, carrier bag theory, and feminist epistemologies, the summit invites a synesthetic approach to experience. Artists and practitioners are guided by an ethos of aisthesis—perception through feeling—foregrounding forms of knowing that emerge from interdependence, slowness, and non-hierarchical attention.
Highlights include sonic and ritual works by Woojae Kim and Rahul Nair, who blend handmade Korean percussion with improvisational poetics; Anna Ting Møller’s fermentation-based sound sculpture interfacing kombucha SCOBYs with temple-brewed miso; and Grace Villamil’s “LU Lock,” an excavation of interior sound as spiritual phenomena. The artist duo AYDO will host a lantern-making workshop inspired by pre-colonial Buddhist water rituals, while Anh Vo and Kristel Baldoz will offer a performance shaped by shamanic embodiment and queer ancestral memory. Other contributions include poetry, participatory installations, calligraphy, and mycological fieldwork by scientist and eco-philosopher Dr. Patricia Kaishian.
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