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Dr AL | DFBRL8R Relic Activation Lab is an ongoing, practice-based research platform built around the DFBRL8R Relic Collection. It treats the archive not as storage but as a site of study, transmission, and transformation.
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Saturday 23 May 2026 | 6–9PM | Mana Contemporary Studio #665
DFBRL8R presents TRIAGE, a public event closing the inaugural Dr AL intensive at Mana Contemporary.
Nine artists, archivists, and researchers have lived inside the DFBRL8R archive while making urgent decisions about what to save, what to stabilize, and what to release. TRIAGE is the public moment where that labor becomes visible. TRIAGE is care as closure and alchemy. TRIAGE is our invitation to inhabit and enliven the body of this archive together.
2026 Inaugural Cohort:
Taylor Rae Botticelli, Angeliki Bryan, Akiko Ichikawa, Janjaa (Helen S. Lee), Jinlu Luo, Alex H. Macy, Seth Nguyen, Kately Towsley, Yalin Zhao
**Taylor Rae Botticelli** (b. 1993, Massachusetts) is a Chicago-based artist and writer. She holds a BFA in Theatre Performance with a focus on devised and movement-based work. Taylor has an interdisciplinary focus on personal narrative and memory through performance, poetry, comedy, installation, essay, and consumable work. Taylor has studied at SITI Company (NYC), Penland School of Craft (North Carolina), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Maine), and The Lincoln Lodge (Chicago). She has over a decade of experience working in the restaurant industry at both rural farm-to-table restaurants and Michelin-starred tasting menu concepts. She specializes in non-alcoholic beverage recipe development, wine direction, and staff education.
**Angeliki Bryan** (Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico) is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in fine arts and classical ballet. Based in Chicago, her practice moves between physical studio work, body based performance, new media, and creative coding. Integrating contortion into her practice, she uses both physical and digital spaces to explore themes of decay, memory, the hidden, and the eerie. She is interested in capturing what is often unseen and bridging the gap between body and technology.
**Akiko Ichikawa** was born in Sagamihara, Kanagawa, Japan, and grew up in the suburbs of Boston and Nashville. She has been fascinated by performance art since high school. Ichikawa has presented her work at Socrates Sculpture Park, PERFORMA, Jamaica Flux, the Spring/Break Art Show, the Art in Odd Places Festival, all in New York City, the Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale in South Korea, the FIAP performance festival in Martinique, and in Newark, New Jersey and Washington D.C. She has written about the East Asian artists in Hector Canonge’s Itinerant Performance Art Festival for Hyperallergic and contributed an essay about Nana Ama Bensti-Enchill’s performance at Panoply performance space in Brooklyn for its recent anthology. This is her second visit to Chicago.
Janjaa (Helen S. Lee) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Atlanta, raised in Busan, South Korea, who spent seven years in Seoul working as an artist, curator, art director, model, actor, and content creator. Now based in Chicago, they reflect on the digital image creation industry and the structures beneath its surface. Their practice aims to create settings that bring invisibilized realities back into reassembled compositions, working with sound, sculpture, performance and media alongside a research-based writing practice. They are open to collaboration as an oppositional statement against a segregated digital society.
Jinlu Luo (born 1994, Sichuan, China) is a Chinese artist based in Chicago. Her multifaceted projects include paintings, creative writings, installations, narrations, melodramas, directing, and live performances. She completed her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018 and 2021, and has presented her performances at programs and events in Chicago, including Elastic Arts and No Nation Gallery. Her interdisciplinary practice has spanned a variety of disciplines and themes, including the exploration of performer presence and absence, and a poetic and imaginative sensibility toward anthropological and geopolitical concerns, centered on observations and engagements with everyday life.
Alex H. Macy. 33 years old, data scientist and artist. Alex is interested in ‘found’ art. Accidental music, inadvertent symbolism. The unspoken, loudly felt dynamics in the ecosystems we inhabit, but do not acknowledge. Alex is interested in systemetizing these interconnections to deepen their affect, rather than to produce an effect.
Seth Nguyen (b. Hanoi) is an archivist and cultural worker.
Kately Towsley is a visual artist and poet from Oklahoma, currently based in Chicago. Working with fiber processes, performance, and installation she makes work that responds to place using materials and experiences that relate both to her personal history and context within the wider world. She loves listening to the earth and the body, and is finding an especial magic in collected porcelain ceramics and an exchange of poems with a friend.
Yalin Zhao’s practice operates at the intersection of performance and spatial experimentation, to investigate how individuals navigate silence under the weight of collective narratives, displacement and unspoken political and social tensions. She works with states of muteness, withdrawal, and partial disappearance, using her body as a site where presence becomes unstable and identity trembles at its edges.
Assistant: Anabelle Lee Dehm
Organizer: Joseph Ravens
The DFBRL8R Relic Activation Lab (Dr AL) gathers a small cohort for an intensive inside a living archive of performance art relics. Participants work collectively with the material remains of live art, sorting, handling, cataloging, researching, and activating, while testing how relics might persist through care, use, redistribution, reinterpretation, and controlled change. Some things are kept. Some things are changed. Both are forms of care.
Anchoring the Lab is the Department of Dismemberment (DoDis), a working framework for relics designated for transformation, dispersal, activation, or controlled removal from the archive. DoDis asks how the remains of live art might persist not only through preservation but through handling, reinterpretation, fragmentation, redistribution, and use. It is the Lab's permission slip to touch, to rearrange, and on occasion to let go.