Long Live Dweller
“Dweller has evolved based on the people who are connected to it,” says Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson, who founded Dweller in 2019. The education component and blog came about in 2020 at the suggestion of Ryan Clarke, who now curates and organizes the festival alongside Enyo Amexo and Hutchinson. “When it’s a trio of you and you've developed a certain vision for it, it becomes quite precious and intimate in a way,” Hutchinson says, but that comes with the risk of “being too precious and not letting it grow.” She hopes that the future of Dweller will bring expansion of their team and a structure that allows them to be compensated for their work — so far, the festival has been a labor of love, motivated by the team’s love for the community that Dweller cultivates.
“Dweller is the most wonderful time of the year," says multidisciplinary artist Maya Margarita, who DJs under the name “br0nz3_g0dd3ss." “I truly look forward to it all year round, like it's actually Christmas for me!” Margarita played sets during the first edition of Dweller in 2019 and the third in 2022. She got involved with Dweller through her friendship with Hutchinson, who she says “has always been so supportive of my music, and just everything that I've set my sights on from the beginning.” For this year’s Dweller, the two of them decided to have Margarita do something a little different than a typical DJ set.
Back in October of 2023, Margarita debuted “Stupid But Cute But Sexy And A Little Mysterious,” a one-woman variety show that premiered at the club Paragon in Bushwick. Hutchinson came to see the show, and was so impacted by it that she asked Margarita to incorporate the performance into Dweller’s programming. “Dweller has had live music before, but I think this is the first of its kind,” Margarita says. “So I wanted to really do it justice. And each show is different, so I wanted to conceptualize something completely different and exciting.”
Margarita and I spoke a few days before her performance on February 23rd, and she let me in on the secret before anyone else. “Even though it's been advertised as a one woman show, it’s not going to be,” she divulges. “I have a bunch of my girls coming out and we're gonna sing, we're gonna dance, we're gonna do lip sync, we’re gonna do burlesque — and nobody at Dweller knows anything about this.”
“Thinking about what Dweller means to me, of course immediately I thought, I can't do this alone,” Margarita explains. “I want to lift Black trans voices and Black trans talent. It's just gonna be a gag moment, because I couldn't really see it any other way than sharing the stage with my sisters, celebrating each other within that tradition of Dweller.” Fellow multi hyphenate artists and performers Star Amerasu, Zenobia, Gia Love, Rahrah Gabor, and Ms. Z Tye joined Margarita on stage.
Roxanne Harris, who plays her sets under the name ALSOKNOWNASROX, is an artist, curator, and educator who uses computer programming as an outlet for creative expression. Her practice combines her coding skills with her knowledge of musical composition and arrangement to create music that plays as Harris types out lines of code in real time. “You can actually code in a way that's not just trying to get that job and get that check,” she explains. “It can be used as an art form. It can be used as a way to express yourself, and break those barriers and demystify some of those processes.”
“Code just works for me,” she continues. “Because I know how to personalize it to myself to be able to make the music that I like. And the best part is that I can show people how my brain works too.” This year, Harris played Dweller's opening ceremony, with her code projected live on the walls of MoMA PS1 as she typed.
“People can see you think and see what you're processing and even the text that is being used to make the music. I think that's pretty unique about the practice.” Dweller is a comforting reprieve from the typically overwhelmingly white demographics and stiff cultures of the kinds of institutions that typically celebrate coding innovations. “Dweller, it is just such a different energy,” Harris says. “To have people who are so supportive and so enthusiastic and so excited, who are willing to express, to move, to smile, to connect. Stagnancy is not a thing when it comes to Dweller.”
Harris was invited to play her first Dweller in 2023, at the education night held at Nowadays, within just a year of graduating from college. “I thought to myself, I must be mad blessed that at this early stage in my career, my practice is so exciting to folks that Dweller would want to give me that platform,” she says. “It’s like people say: Dweller is a portal.”
