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.
What was it like to be an artist in 1970s SoHo? How did you spend your evenings? Where did you go for coffee, or to see your friends perform? In We Owned Downtown, Performa founding director and chief curator RoseLee Goldberg and Curator-at-Large Defne Ayas invite audiences to step into the energies of New York’s downtown art scene of the 1970s. Together, participants will learn about a neighborhood that was transformed from a deserted industrial district into a unique urban setting by hundreds of artists living in close walking distance from one another; painters, performers, sculptors, filmmakers, poets, choreographers, musicians and writers. Walking the streets today means meeting friendly ghosts outside every building, remembering conversations, feeling the past in every step, being intensely present in the city that never stops reinventing itself.
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.
