Sat, Nov 1, 2 pm · 3 pm · 4 pmNE corner of E 7th Street & Avenue A (Tompkins Square Park)
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Performa has partnered with Extra Extra—an interdisciplinary platform exploring sensuality in urban spaces—to present a series of fourteen sensory walking tours throughout New York City. Drawing from Performa’s rich 20-year archive and Extra Extra’s investigative spirit, select international artists, curators, designers and thinkers will reimagine New York’s cultural landscape through themes of play, intimacy, and the city’s evolving future.
These walks invite participants to experience the city and its performance landmarks, from SoHo and Tribeca to Harlem, Brooklyn, and the East Village, through an intimate sensory lens of voice and place.
The program will coincide with Performa’s 20th anniversary, featuring city walks compiled and guided by Andrius Arutiunian, Defne Ayas with RoseLee Goldberg, Nadine Botha, Nina Folkersma, Gabriel Fontana, Emmanuel Iduma, Adam Kleinman, Gabriel Lester, Raimundas Malašauskas, Tavia Nyong'o, Willem de Rooij, and McKenzie Wark.
The guided tours are a harbinger of hope for an unexpected future of the metropole. They encourage you to rediscover the city’s shifting sensuality and engage deeply with its performative legacy, mapped through Performa’s archive.
Join us for this extraordinary journey where artists, designers and thinkers transform how we see, hear and feel the city, offering new perspectives of hope in one of the world’s most vibrant cities.
Armen is a performance based on a personal collection of diasporic Armenian cassettes, vinyls, and VHS tapes of pop and disco records from the 1970s to the 1990s. Echoes of these tracks, sampled from the spots where the physical medium showed marks of wear and indentations (scratches, cuts, etc.) are woven throughout the 42-minute long recomposition. The performance version of the piece takes place in a taxi ride which taps into Arutiunian’s childhood memories of Armenia and of the music blasted out from aged Mercedes-Benz taxi speakers that greeted arrivals at Zvartnots Airport in Yerevan. In the performance version of “Armen”, the work is played through a taxi’s sound system and a cassette player, with the passengers being driven along a predetermined route. This act of listening to the record in a moving vehicle evokes a passage of a psychogeographic journey, a hypnotic speculation into diasporic memories, historic omissions, and sonic cuts.
Co-produced by Performa and Extra Extra. Curated by Defne Ayas, Senior Curator-at-Large, Performa, and Director, Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and Samira Benlaloua, Artistic Director, Extra Extra.
A Performa and Extra Extra Project. Produced by Performa and Extra Extra.
Supported by Creative Industries Fund, Consulate General of the Netherlands, Lithuanian Cultural Institute, Mondriaan Fund, the Municipality of Rotterdam, and the Netherland-America Foundation.
