On June 24, 2025 BANK Gallery127 Elizabeth St. New York, NY 10013 we presented J.O.A.N.

JOAN is a speculative performance and sonic seminar set in a post-collapse bunker beneath a shuttered university. A group of Barnard students gathers with their expelled professor, Paul, to conduct an outlawed class—a rogue pedagogy that begins as psychoanalytic encounter and political séance but quickly spirals into a reckoning with the institution itself: its buried histories, its policing of thought, and its complicity in a larger apparatus of control.

At the center of this seminar is a crime: the death of Joan Vollmer, shot by William Burroughs in a drunken game of William Tell. Burroughs claimed he had to write to escape the guilt—to write his way out of the murder. The students take this as a starting point, tracing a larger American pattern: a culture built on sacrifice, atonement by spectacle, and violence rationalized through theory, bureaucracy, and increasingly, algorithmic design.

As the class unfolds, the Joans begin to multiply: Joan of Arc, Joan Didion, Joan Crawford, Joan the Baptist, Joan Vollmer. These figures fracture across voices and bodies, interrupted by surveillance feeds, glitching microphones, and mimicry from a rogue language model. The performance becomes a live deprogramming—a ritual of resistance against the systems that shape and surveil them.

Midway through, the narrative ruptures: Paul is fired in absentia by a grotesque AI-modeled Board of Trustees. The students revolt. The seminar dissolves into exile. Now in the desert, the Joans wander through a liminal landscape haunted by Paul’s residual presence—his voice refracted through reflective membranes, a possible echo of the AI virus he helped unleash. Language becomes porous. Identity slips between drag, ritual, satire, and philosophical confession.

JOAN is a project about knowledge and its constraints, about the violence at the root of institutions, and about what it means to resist in an age when every act of rebellion risks being replayed by the very system it seeks to undo. It is pedagogy as possession, martyrdom as media, and revolt staged at the edge of the frame.