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?

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.

Long Distance Dedication (Now On With the Countdown)

Long Distance Dedication (Now On With the Countdown)
by Nancy Nowacek and Carlos Alomar

This 2-channel sound sculpture expresses the uncertainty, grief, and tumult of our present moment through appropriated background vocals from 1970s pop songs, written during a similar time of political, social and environmental upheaval. A Greek Chorus for the earth herself, it serves as a collective voice for the more-than-human world who bears witness to the rapidly escalating effects of climate change and the political agendas determined to disavow it.

Channel: Key from the City

Nancy Nowacek

Channel: Key from the City is an offering of water made to each NYC Mayoral candidate. It is a gesture that embodies the power citizens give—and trust they place—in their elected officials. It reminds candidates of two realities: the first is that power is fluid and dynamic. The second is the central and critical role that the waterways play in every facet of the city’s life and future. Each candidate’s willingness to accept the offering and pledge to heed New Yorkers’  voices represented in the next Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, and thereby tend the city’s edges will demonstrate their understanding of New York City as a city of water.

Week 3: Nancy Nowacek

In this week’s walk to the edge, consider bridges—on foot or virtually, through StreetView or through the links provided to different city maps.

You may encounter some of the 2072 bridges in the city…You might need to construct a few bridges to the edge: mapping a safe route, or packing a bag of supplies…

Moving towards the edge might forge connections to different feelings, memories, cultures or perspectives.

Think about the anchors of your crossing—where you start and end—in mind, body, and space. Contemplate it’s span, or experiences you have along the way: how the sounds, smells, and air change.

At the edge, spend a moment reflecting on a bridge you think the city will need in the future. There may be many. What would they look like? Be made of? How can the waterfront and waterways help build bridges to the future you envision?

Water (Em)Power

When did the narrative around our waterways become dominated by fear and danger? Instead of seeing the waterways as a threat and focusing on all the ways it can hurt us, the work of these participants shift the pervading rhetoric towards one of action. To face climate change, we must feel empowered to do so. WATER [em]POWER focuses us toward artists, organizations, and individuals who engage in building our relationship to the waterways as a means of discovery, knowing, and empowerment.

The Play About the Bridge

Nancy Nowacek makes art that overlays the politics of the body and the politics of space. In The Play About the Bridge, two actors and two chairs traverse the incalculable span that unfolds in an attempt to walk 1200 feet. The work reimagines Nowacek’s project, Citizen Bridge, a quest to build a bridge to reconnect Brooklyn and Governors Island, once connected by a walkable sandbar at low tide. It is a dream that pits a clear and simple vision against the forces of the water, the fine print of governmental policy and the flows of capital. Success and failure lose all meaning. Time is the only truth, and yes marks the end, always just out of reach.

A nplay about the bridge was written with Celine Song.

The Play About the Bridge was part of the Arts Brookfield Series at Zuccotti Park.*

Walking on Water: The Play About the Bridge

Two chairs, script

Nowacek worked with theater artist Celine Song to re-imagine her ongoing project, Citizen Bridge as a performance. The Play About the Bridge was presented in the gallery on June 20, 25 and in Zuccotti Park on June 22.

Bringing Multiplicity to the Table

Art engaged with ecology offers new forms of environmental engagement and advocacy, yet the community of artists working on NYC waterways represents a relatively narrow range of perspectives, compared to those that make up many of the communities along the water’s edge. Bringing Multiplicity to the Table invites organizations who excel at engaging a broad spectrum communities in art, culture, and ecology through a wide range of methods. At this Long Table conversation, WOW artists Eve Mosher and Nancy Nowacek join these representatives as well as practitioners from the fields of art, maritime ecologies and community activism to discuss methods of engagement and strategies towards multiplicity around the NYC waterways. Note: The Long Table format (developed by performance artist Lois Weaver), is designed to equalize audience and invited participants, by providing a simple and specific structure for listening and conversation.