My content will involve an opportunity to take some self-guided walks (in person or on Google maps) around some long erased shorelines in hopes that we can re-imagine what used to be here and what we can learn/create from its erasure. Most of my map explorations into Mannahatta start with a visit to the Welikia map, for some quick geo-reference of pre-1609 Manhattan.
Week 12: Sherese Francis
The Edge as a Road to Other Possible Wooorrr(l)ds:
A speculative journey around Jamaica Bay through poetry and imagery collages. The artwork and prompts will highlight the importance of naming, etymology and mythology as gateways to submerged memories and remembering underserved places and histories we need to return, to protect and to conserve.
Week 11: Sunk Shore
Sunk Shore (Carolyn Hall and Clarinda Mac Low) brings you on a tour of the climate changed future on the shores of the East River.
Join them as they time-travel to 2092 and back again.
Picture a shoreline you know well - it can be near you now, one you grew up with, or one you visited and fell in love with. What do you imagine it will look and feel like 72 years in the future - in 2092? Think about the temperature, the air, the ground, the water, the sounds, the smells. Will it be further inshore or offshore? Who lives there and how do they live? What structures are nearby? What plants, animals, birds, fish, and insects do you see? Note what has changed…
Sunk Shore is a speculative, experiential tour of our climate changed future that takes place along specific shorelines. The experience is built to bring you into an embodied experience of information that can seem very remote or abstract, giving number and date visceral weight and impact. The tour is based on research about events expected to take place (and already happening), including rising sea levels, changing animal species, higher heat, ingenious solutions, social revolutions, and more.
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Week 10: Denae Howard
The inspiration for this artwork is ritual and reflection - relearning human senses while feeling stillness/ closeness after unexpected separation. The work will be a collaging of digital media and found video/media, with extracted sounds of the waterfront and songs that are notes of the space. Associated music will also be stitched into the sequence, exemplifying breaks in consciousness and aligned patterns of thought that represent the experience at the location of the water's edge. The artwork will live as static images curated by conversations had via my senses, when taking these visits to the water's edge.
Prompts:
What pulls you to the water's edge? Why are you here? How do you feel? What do you feel? What do you smell? What can you hear? Have your breaths changed?
Week 9: Kamau Ware
"The Edge Within" asks people to get in tune with the water we have in our bodies and how it carries memories of our ancestors.
In creating Black Gotham Experience, it has been necessary to get in tune with redacted narratives in urban spaces. I often go on walks where the history happened and dial up my empathy and imagination to feel stories. It is not a scientific way of researching but it does complement what is discoverable in the archives and secondary sources to engage through meditation and kinesthetics.
Week 8: Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow
I’m Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow presiding during week 8 of “Walking the Edge”. In the next coming days, I will showcase my work at various water sites around New York City. I hope that this work inspires you to get out of the comfort of your homes to safely explore your water’s edge.
When I think of the water’s edge I think of this massive body as the element that brought many of our ancestors here.
The water holds memories of their voyages.
Today, I’m prompting you to think about water as being a place of reflection. How does a large body of water make you feel?
Out of curiosity of what would be my nearest waterfront I’ve been researching areas for this project and came across Shirley Chisholm State Park while speaking to my neighbor in Queens. I recently rode my bicycle there to explore it as a possible site for my site specific performance work titled Junkanooacome, which touches upon Afro-Caribbean and American histories, landmarks, race, gender, and social justice. After learning more about Shirley Chisholm and the park named after her I’m inspired.
Week 7: Tattfoo Tan
On Friday, June 12, Tattfoo Tan takes us on a meditative journey along the north shore of Staten Island, traveling along one of our original Walking the Edge routes, inspired by this passage from Swami Vivekananda:
“Suppose there is a wave in the ocean. The wave is distinct from the ocean only in its form and name, and this form and this name cannot have any separate existence from the wave; they exist only with wave. The wave may subside but the same amount of water remains, even if the name and form that were on the wave vanish for ever. So this Maya is what makes the difference between me and you , between all animals and man, between gods and men.”
Tattfoo’s Heal Humankind in Order to Heal the Land book.
Week 6: Elizabeth Velazquez
The video piece, Agua de Vida, documents the enactment of an intuitive expression of water worship made at Jamaica Bay and contemplates water and land as the most basic components of a human body. Without water, the body is dust, and with water, the body is alive. The conditions of bodies of water on Earth are interconnected with the conditions of human bodies on our sacred planet.
Before settler colonialism, the area surrounding Jamaica Bay held indigenous villages of Canarsie and Rockaway peoples, and the bay provided an excellent source of food and transport. Today, it is a holy place where pujas are performed by many Indo-Carribean Hindu worshipers that compare the bay to the sacred Ganges River in India.
My intention with creating, Agua de Vida, is to uplift the sacredness of water in the midst of worldwide human impact that has been detrimental to its stability and life-giving force. Irreverence for water and life, is causing a global crisis that has devastated the lives of people, land and water- with marginalized bodies receiving first impacts and being most affected.
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Week 5: Simone Johnson
Rising sea levels and living in a city originally made me think of the legend of Atlantis. I wondered about the place millions call home going underwater at some point in the future.
One of the reasons Atlantis is interesting is because it has been described as a technologically advanced society. I want to play around with this concept
What if 'technologically advanced' in New York City meant being in right relationship with water? Or intentional conversations, collaboration and experimentation between different kinds of artists and other creatives like educators, healers, librarians, urban planners, architects, activists, farmers and fisher folk, engineers and legislators?
What if bioartists were involved in conversations about NYC's climate emergency plans, like the Climate Mobilization Act?
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Week 4: sTo Len
sTo Len takes us on a scenic stream of consciousness walk through his neighborhood to his favorite waterfront off the beaten path: the Newtown Creek. Along the way are the ghosts of waters past, old trails, lots of memories, discarded gloves and a few masked friendly faces.
“The Newtown Creek is a special place to me and I wanted to take you all along on a video walk since we cannot do one in person. I think that we can learn a lot from the water that surrounds us, especially at a time when the pandemic has created such suffering and uncertainty, when our scheduled lives are so ephemeral and put on hold, when we must remain so still in our solitude. The water is there, its constantly moving and shaping the land. The water’s edge is blurring our hard edges. I go to the water for guidance. It shows us how to ebb and flow, a liquid GPS to better navigate the world as fluid dreamers, dancers, and survivors. It can teach us how to re-emerge into the world with one another as well. As public space has become completely transformed by the coronavirus, rediscovering the outdoors outside the box provides new opportunities for us to engage with the water and one another. Its time to reclaim new public commons beyond the ones predetermined by our patterned behavior. It's time to rediscover our waterfronts and find new ways to access our edges.”
Prompts to think about this week :
What body of water in NYC is closest to your home as well as to your heart?
Can you find access points to get to it’s edge?
Will you take us there through a photo, video, story, or song?
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?
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Week 2: Eve Mosher
For me, the water's edge has always been a place of solace. So I keep thinking; what would it look to explore my waterfront when I'm not leaving my apartment? Where does your imagination go along the water’s edge? What might we learn about the history of our water's edge that can inform the future we want…
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Reflection: A Final Dive
Curatorial team member Katie Pearl invites all participants in Works on Water - artists, scientists, collaborators, experts, viewers, audience - to return to 3LD one last time. Together we’ll take a final look, reflecting on the exhibition. In light of the curatorial team’s original vision and their plans for a Works on Water triennial, what was our experience? What new connections were discovered? How has WOW provided (or not provided) space for needed civic and creative conversations?
36.5/Mannahatta
36.5 / Mannahatta was a one-time performance in Zuccotti Park that invited performers to connect with the tidal shift in the water surrounding the city and the streams below that were buried under layers of dirt and concrete long ago. The movement is based on a portion of Sarah Cameron Sunde’s ongoing series of works, 36.5 / a durational performance with the sea, in which the public is invited to participate by standing in the water for an extended period of time and by marking the passing hours on the shore with a series of choreographed movements.
36.5/Mannahatta was part of the Arts Brookfield Series at Zuccotti Park.*
Place Making, Place Taking, Place Keeping
Led by Emily Blumenfeld with Olivia Georgia from City as Living Laboratory and Damian Griffin from the Bronx River Alliance
In the funding world, Creative Placemaking is trending. But in the art world, "placemaking" itself is a problematic term because it can also refer to development. This conversation points us toward three terms: place making, place taking, and place keeping. Which one is at work in any given context? Who is doing the making, what is the motivation? As we consider placemaking in collaboration with the waterways other questions come up as well: what’s worth keeping, what’s worth changing, what’s worth making anew? How does our work intersect with both environmental and economic justice?
Micro to Global
How do we engage with an element that is simultaneously so vast and so small? From droplets and micro-plastics, to global shipping routes and surveys across centuries, this conversation will explore how artists and scientists turn to the furthest limits of size, space, and time to investigate both our relationship with water and water’s relationship to us.
Time and Tide: A Literally Immersive Performance and the New Climate Temporalities
Led by Eco-Critic and NYU professor Una Chuadhuri
Participants include WOW artist and curatorial team member Sarah Cameron Sunde (36.5) and Awam Amkpa, author of Theatre and Post-Colonial Desires
What happens when the dimension of human life that has long been the very definition of predictability--the climate--becomes utterly unpredictable? How can art create new embodied knowledge for living in this time of "The Great Acceleration"? Eco-critic Una Chaudhuri and a panel of scientists and artists will engage Sarah Cameron Sunde about her ongoing project "36.5: A Durational Performance with the Sea."
Freshkills Park Tour
At 2,200 acres, when it is completed Freshkills Park will be almost three times the size of Central Park. The transformation of what was formerly the world’s largest landfill into a productive and beautiful cultural destination —the largest park development in New York City in over 100 years—makes the park a symbol of renewal and an expression of how our society can restore balance to its landscape.
Mariel Villere led a special tour to visit closed sections of the landfill-to-park project.
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.
Mespeatches: a performance on the Newtown Creek
Sto Len offered an on-site performance and watery séance. From his boat, the artist asked the creek for forgiveness while creating a ceremonial print in its honor.
For the past two years, printmaker and performance artist Sto Len has been creating mono prints on Newtown Creek in Maspeth, Queens (which was originally called Mespeatches by the Native American tribe of the same name who lived in the area). Mespeatches translates to “at the bad water place.” Working en plein air from a rowboat, Sto uses a process similar to paper marbling to print directly off of the patches of oil and debris floating on the surface. The resulting works are both beautifully patterned and effectively troubling as they offer us a grim reflection of an environmental disaster many would rather ignore.