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.
A walk traces a trail between two sets of rooftops and two temporalities: Christian Jankowski’s Roof Walk (2007) and Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece (1971). Between them unfolds a corridor of invisible architectures — air, scent, vibration, original and fake labels — the air thick with molecular interference. Inspired by Chandler Burr’s writing on New York’s scents, the walk drifts through olfactory holograms: steamed rice, diesel, cardboard, ozone. Each molecule carries traces of everything else, forming an atmospheric montage where past and present, performance and residue, fold into one another. “We dance like molecules,” Malašauskas notes, spinning a hula hoop, an act of compulsive improvisation. Beginning at Canal Street and moving toward SoHo, the dérive is guided by molecules rather than maps: smells appear, vanish, and reappear like performers finding their cues. The city becomes a moving hologram, each fragment containing the whole, each inhalation revealing a different composition of time. The piece extends the artist’s exploration of immaterial exhibitions — a choreography of encounter, trace, and disappearance, and never back the same way.
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.
