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.
Inspired by Teju Cole’s idea of “Black listening,” this participatory walk, guided by Christian Nyampeta, invites audiences to attune to diasporic memory through sight, sound, and brief acts of description. At each of five stops, the guide shares a poem or a printed photograph as a prompt; participants respond by taking a single image that echoes the prompt’s sensorial mood, then describe it in one sentence. Across the route, these quick images and spoken lines accumulate into a collective “album” of the walk—an embodied archive of what is remembered, misheard, and carried. Drawing on kindred practices (Teju Cole’s Black Paper at Performa 2017; Okwui Okpokwasili’s Utterances from the Chorus), the piece frames looking and listening as diasporic techniques.
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.
