Sukkot — Simo

Simo

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Simone Klein, often known as Simo, was born in Providence, RI, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Simo makes sculptures and performances, primarily as a poet. They are interested in mechanisms, improvisation, and bodywork -- often all merging in contexts of ritual and spiritual embodiment.

At Brown, Simo majored in Modern Culture & Media while exploring interests in economics, public health, and physics on the side.

The rest of this bio is coming soon.

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Sukkot

2024, 6 x 5 x 6 ft
video installation and group score
roof piece from Gaza solidarity sukkah, paper, projection, participants

Click here for slides on the project

DESCRIPTION

How do you make ritual portable?
How do we wish for return at the same time as unreturn?
How would you stand in the doorway of a Sukkah?
When do you lose yourself in ritual? When do you lost the world
in ritual?
What do we fear about embodiment in ritual?

The piece was presented on November 22nd, 2025 at the “[Counter]
Cosmogonies” gallery opening on RISD’s campus in Providence, RI. Simo led the other artists, critics and guests in a group score detailed in the slides linked here. The group score involved collaborative somatic archetectures that utilized the cue cards -- FORGE, DWELL, RESURRECT and KEEP -- to learn collectively and explore relationships between the words.

The video componant documents an improvisational score created by myself and the other movers, Edie Fine, and Rose Roston. We research our relationships to ritual as a transformative encounter that insists on an embodiment of troubled memory. We also reflect on our anti-zionist utilization and inhabitation of
Jewish ritual and aesthetics in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation: we grapple with the stakes of ritual, the shelter of it. Situated in the timespace of Sukkot, we engage ephemeral architectures and relationship to land necessarily in the context of that solidarity. FORGE, DWELL, RESURRECT, and KEEP are cues that scatter the piece, calling in the essence of
both our task and critique. Through our movement, we translate generations of translations, building and deconstructing the possibilities of our bodies in space as methodology.

thank you

teachers, time, thank you, change