“Even in the space of refusal, there’s work to be done. Patchwork is a way to consider that.”

Kristen Holfeuer

13 May 2025

Published: 15 September 2025

As part of her fieldwork as a doctoral student in performance studies, Kristen had initially planned to visit a blockade in unceded Wet’suwet’en territory in British Columbia. Violent police action at the blockade, pandemic restrictions, and the fact that she was caring for her new baby made this visit impossible. Instead, the community members who facilitate permissions for guest researchers proposed that Kristen hold a fundraiser in New York rather than visit the site. Kristen had to rethink how to be in reciprocal relationship. Her patchwork approach enabled her to maintain reciprocal relationships while collaborating at a distance. “Even in the space of refusal, there’s work to be done. Patchwork is a way to consider that.”

While initially collaborating with a group of artist-activists on the fundraiser, Kristen learned from their subsequent performance protests at bank locations in Manhattan – key financiers of the pipelines running through the indigenous territory of the community she worked with. The arts-activism led Kristen to understand the interconnectedness of extractive relations between pipeline construction in Wetsuwet’en territory and the monied forces in New York, while also demonstrating supportive actions that can be taken as a form of research.

Similarly, as part of her fieldwork, Kristen learned from a bead worker in Toronto and later met with her again in New York, which afforded her a deeper understanding of the practice as that which builds and maintains relationships. In her dissertation, Kristen included reflections about these activities as interludes between dissertation chapters, making visible her relational work as a researcher while also maintaining focus on the labor of artists and activists.

Nodding to another form of craft, Kristen reflects that patchwork ethnography “has these quilting implications - of small pieces, of something improvisational that becomes whole through practice, and can always be added to. Wholeness is not a final moment, but rather, a composition of ongoing practice. It doesn’t assume that I know everything. I just have a series of questions and a desire to work them.”

Kristen Holfeuer is a theatre artist from Saskatchewan with a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU. kristen.holfeuer@gmail.com