36.5/ New York Estuary by Sarah Cameron Sunde

September 14, 2022
7:27am – 8:06pm
12 hours, 29 minutes

The Cove, Vernon Blvd., Queens

Built in collaboration with communities around the world, Sunde stands in a body of water for a full tidal cycle. 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea  is a series of nine site-specific performances and video artworks that activate the public on personal, local, and global scales in conversations around deep time, embodied experience, and sea-level rise. Beginning in 2013 with a simple poetic gesture in response to Hurricane Sandy hitting New York, Sarah stood in water for 12 hours and 48 minutes while the tide rose and fell on her body. Since then, 36.5 has grown into a complex, collaborative, evolving series of works involving hundreds of people in communities around the world: Maine, Mexico, San Francisco, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, Aotearoa-New Zealand, and New York City. Over several months, often years, Sarah builds deep and meaningful collaborations with local communities who live near a body of water where sea-levels are expected to rise. Working with a local team, she films the entire event in real time, and translates this footage into a durational video work to be shown in museums, galleries, and public spaces. The ninth and final work in the series will premiere on September 14, 2022 in so-called Queens, Lenapehoking-New York City.

36.5 / NEW YORK ESTUARY is the culminating work in the series, 36.5 / ADurational Performance with the Sea, and the culminating event in the Works on Water 2020-2022 Triennial. It will be a large-scale global event involving several hundreds of people around the world on September 14, 2022. The live performance will take place in the Cove on the East River where Astoria meets Long Island City in Queens, on Wed, Sept 14, 2022. Sarah will stand in water for 12 hours, 39 minutes, a full tidal cycle, inviting the public to participate by joining her in water and/or marking the passing of hours from shore as “the human clock.” Artist collaborators will create interventions and installations to amplify the performance. Viewing stations around the Cove, on Roosevelt Island and Upper East Side, Manhattan will allow audiences to gather from various viewpoints.

For more details about 36.5/ New York Estuary and the eight international re-enactments taking place on the same day, please visit here.

The Path of Most Resistance: a guided walk through Flushing, Queens with Cody Herrmann

This series of guided tours through Flushing, Queens is inspired by the recently rezoned Special Flushing Waterfront District (SFWD) and other similar developments in the downtown Flushing neighborhood. With an emphasis on supporting housing and habitat for all, the tour will highlight how new developments in the area are displacing both human and non-human long term area residents, overlooking the importance of diversity to create homogenized shopping centers.

The tour will trace public space and privately owned publicly accessible space through Flushing, and end along the Flushing Creek coastline with a species ID session highlighting wetland ecology lead by Queens based naturalist Mike Feller in collaboration with Guardians of Flushing Bay.

 Later this year, a video highlighting main themes from the tour will be produced with translated texts made available in English, Chinese, Spanish, and Korean. The projects allows participants to experience the crowded streets of Flushing’s central business district and transportation hub while demystifying the dynamic environmental and socio-economic forces reshaping the neighborhood and waterfront area.

Breathing Together: A Love Story by Buena Onda Collective

Breathing Together: A Love Story by Camila Morales and Dominka Ksel of the Buena Onda Collective embodies the symbiotic relationship between people and plants. The artists invite audiences to send loving energy to the algae growing within the sculpture.

For years, science has revealed the power of caring intention and its incredible impact on plant life. These findings and those demonstrated in Cleve Backster’s studies on plant consciousness, led to the realization that plants register stress and sensed thoughts of harm. The sculpture, formed with the letters that make up the word CARE asks viewers to rethink and expand their relationship to plant life and consider the work plants do for us and their need for our love and respect toward them.

The sculpture is located by the 96th Street entrance to Rockaway Beach until July 18th. Please look back again for upcoming workshops.

Thank you to NYC Parks for their support of this project.

June 26 - Join Buena Onda for a workshop and soft opening at 2pm
July 16 - closing event on Ocean Conservation
More details coming soon!

(Re)Imagining Greenpoint's Green Waters by Ray Jordan Achan

(Re)Imagining Greenpoint’s Green Waters integrates artistic programming with community sustainability initiatives to bring wider attention to the polluted waters of Newtown Creek, offering methods that use community participation, techniques of ARTIVISM within an abolitionist framework, and aesthetics of “Theater of the Oppressed” to promote remediation of the Creek and bring the climate justice conversation to marginalized communities. Local residents will go on a canoe tour of the Creek and experience the water up close, while also witnessing (and being a part of) a community performance celebrating the waterfront.

Performances at Newtown Creek Nature Walk
June 24, 25 and 26 from 6-8 pm

for the depths of us performance-walk + gathering by the Kin to Cove Collective

In the late 1800s a body of water that ran through Ravenswood to the East River was buried underground to make way for increasing industrialization. What in us has been buried in the name of progress– what have we sent down into the dark? Kin To The Cove artists Christopher Bisram and Audrey di Mola lead a neighborhood performance-walk tracing the path of Sunswick Creek down to the Cove, woven with personal and collective mythologies in the form of dance, storytelling, song, and ritual. What can be recovered when we make the ecological practice of “daylighting” a stream, metaphorical? What can be found, inside us, out of the Depths?

Kin To The Cove's full day event in Astoria/LIC, Queens: June 25th 10-11:30am beach cleanup, communal altar creation, and opening ritual at The Cove (31st Dr & Vernon Blvd) with Blue Bus Project; 5pm we gather at 16 Oaks Grove (21st St & 37th Ave) to begin the performance-walk down to the Cove, followed by a 'kindig' gathering as we move into sunset and nighttime.

June 25, 10 am beach clean-up and opening ceremony at the Cove

June 25, 5 pm FOR THE DEPTHS OF US, meet at 16 Oaks Grove in Ravenswood. The performance weaves storytelling and dance back down to the Cove.

Special thanks to dancers: Angela Eslava Jennifer Vazquez, Graciela Morena, and Nicole Ulloa.

The Nukkone Project by Rodrick Bell

The Nukkone project is a ramble and art installation that brings coastal communities and indigenous communities together to celebrate life, self awareness and moving forward into the future with a kinesthetic approach. Using the senses to observe a hand built ancient wetu home structure that will be constructed by the hands of tribal members from several east coast first contact tribes.

Presentation of a Key to the City and To the Future Mayor by Nancy Nowacek

Presentation of A Key from the City

NYC harbor waters, ice cast into a ceremonial key, presented to the public, melts to form a new NYC body of water

To the Future Mayor

Months of emails, phone calls, and tweets to mayoral candidates on the 2021 ballot remain unanswered; and multiple strategies to invite candidates to pay attention to the waterways, waterfront, and the plan for caring, fortifying, and tending our city’s edges are continuously ignored. Does this disinterest portend a new mayoral administration?

Causeway: Reimagining the Edge by Dylan Gauthier

A crowdsourced augmented reality and public drawing project, Causeway: Reimaging the Edge interprets data from the NYC Comprehensive Waterfront Plan's public access implementation study, renderings of future and current building sites along the NYC waterfront, and historic hydrologic maps to invite the public to reimagine water access and care in their neighborhoods. Using a custom Instagram filter developed by the artist, the public will be invited to create photo renderings of future access points along the water. The project asks: how can various proposed solutions to rising sea level rise promote better access and environmental justice in the city? How can we reimagine our city’s edges to allow for additional access to water? What do we want our waterfront to look like in the future?

The Urban Environment and The Sacred: Water Ritual, and Water Is Our Bodies, Our Bodies Are Water by Elizabeth Velazquez

What if humanity lived in constant awareness of sacredness? How would we treat our bodies, each other, the land and water? My current work contemplates the sacred among the urban environment in two works, The Urban Environment and The Sacred: Water Ritual, and Water Is Our Bodies, Our Bodies Are Water.

Long Distance Dedication (Now on with the countdown) by Nancy Nowacek

Long Distance Dedication (Now on with the countdown) is a sound work composed of appropriated lyrics of pop songs from the 1970s as a Greek chorus for the environment. Voices express the emotional urgency of rising sea levels and increasingly intense weather—for humans and non-humans alike. Visitors are invited to stream the work (available from QR codes on signs situated around the island) while sitting on the island’s edges, looking out towards the ocean, and will hear phrases from songs come and go, like flickering radio station signals in far-flung places. The gaps between them become filled by the ambient sounds of the place itself. Singing to all those who can hear it, this soundtrack serves as a collective voice underscoring the bewildering and rapid changes in the world.

(Re)imagining Greenpoint’s Green Waters by Ray Jordan

As a way to understand and to (re)imagine the complicated and polluted history of Newtown Creek, artist and Greenpoint resident, Ray Jordan Achan created a short documentary film based on his own investigations, photographs, interviews and archival material as part of Tending the Edge. Ray’s methodology uses archival material as a way to (re)create New York City’s past, understand it’s mistakes - such as governmental and environmental neglect, to learn how to remedy these missteps and to (re imagine sustainable climate solutions for the future. To open the conversation, (Re)imagining Greenpoint’s Green Waters was accompanied by a panel discussion on climate equity and how to prioritize low-income, Black and brown folxs who continue to get displaced when new public amenities such as waterfront parks are created.

Between a Sea and a Shore by Ella Mahoney

Between a Sea and a Shore is a storytelling project which took place in the spring of 2021 as part of Tending the Edge on the shores of the Rockaways. Ella Mahoney explored human relationships with the ocean through peoples' stories with water by asking them the questions “what is your story with water?” and “how do you care for the water, or how does it help you care for yourself?”. The exploration ended with this painting representing stories of joy, awe, and humbling, being carried into the ocean in celebration and play.

Sinking Shore by Clarinda Mac Low

Sinking Shore by Clarinda Mac Low

Sinking Shore is a series of works on paper using photo transfer, watercolor, and digital and physical collage. Sinking Shore is an outgrowth of Sunk Shore, a collaboration between Mac Low and dancer/marine ecologist Carolyn Hall, where Hall and Mac Low lead participants on a site-based tour that time travels from the far past to the present to the climate changed future of specific shorelines, offering an embodied experience of climate change data. Sinking Shore offers another portal into this embodiment, as documentation from tours of the shoreline of Governors Island explodes into the past and future landscapes that are evoked by the tour narrative. Hall and Mac Low will also lead a live series of speculative conversations in response to the works.

Liminal Bodies | Part I by Electric Djinn

Liminal Bodies | Part I is a multimedia performance examining our relationship to bodies of water and how we interact and access them on a daily basis, combining video projection, live dance, and live music. Produced and Directed by Electric Djinn. Music and Sound by Electric Djinn, Co-produced with Mallika Chandaria, Video production by Mallika Chandaria, Choreography and Dance by Nicolas Fiery & Sofía Forero, Additional Dancers: Maya Balam Meyong, Noa Chaney, Reché Nelson. Additional video footage by Alex Seel and under water footage by Nicolas Fiery.

Inside Electric Djinn's studio “Water Meditation” a 20-minute looped immersive audio-video room, created by Electric Djinn, running throughout the day.

This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

Readings on Water by KC Trommer

"Readings on Water" features poems from WoWHaus poet-in-residence KC Trommer's debut collection We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019), including ""Meat Cove, Cape Breton" (a collaboration with fellow WoWHaus artist Amy Wetsch), "Jaws (1975)," "Mica," and "After Looking at Bontecou's Untitled (1961)," and several poems created for the Triennial, including “Francesa in 5B” and “Speaking of Defenestration.” Please look for the reading mermaid throughout the house and scan the QR Code in order to hear a single poem. 

To hear the full selection of “Readings on Water,” please go to:
https://soundcloud.com/kc-trommer/sets/readings-on-water

Drawn Ashore, Sprouting Signals, and Oxygenated Response by Amy Wetsch

Drawn Ashore, Sprouting Signals, and Oxygenated Response are mixed-media installations that examine our connection to the Hudson River. These works were created in response to a collaboration with scientists from Columbia University where we submerged ourselves into the Hudson to experience and research the diversity of life that exists within. Through these works, I am further exposing the life below the surface, calling attention to what we, as humans, add to the water, and celebrating the hopefulness for the future of water by highlighting writings from participants of “The Next Generation of Hudson River Educators.”

Water in the Streets by Sarah Cameron Sunde and Nathan Kensinger

Water in the Streets is a video work that invites us to bear witness to the encroaching edges of Far Rockaway during the "sunny day flooding" event in May 2021. Combining the research, performance, and video art practices of Sarah Cameron Sunde and Nathan Kensinger, this project was created for Tending the Edge and asks: What do these monthly flooding events say about our future and what does it mean for New York City?

Performance and video made in collaboration with Rockaway Youth Task Force, with support from Beach64Retreat. Music by Joshua Dumas. Produced by Maya Shah for Tending the Edge, a collaboration with Works on Water, Culture Push, and the Department of City Planning.

Rivers, Dreams, Invisible Cities by Maya Ciarrocchi

Rivers, Dreams, Invisible Cities comprises suspended cyanotype prints on silk illustrating past and present trajectories of New York City waterways whose shorelines are inaccessible to city residents. Also included are renderings of fantastical cities belonging to an imagined future. Each print tells an individual story, and their merging manifests a reimagined city forever altered by climate change.

Topia...All We Need is U by Cody Herrmann

Topia...All We Need is U is a multi-channel video installation with audio highlighting the relationship between the current landscape and programming available on Governors Island, and future made possible by a recent rezoning of parts of the Island. Viewers will receive a printed map of the island that uses text and visual markers to further illustrate the changes that will likely be coming to Governors Island. The work emphasizes the extent to which perceived value and speculative real estate has and will continue to shape the Island’s landscape.