GOVERNORS ISLAND UN-EARTHED

36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013–present) is a series of nine site-specific participatory performances and video artworks, taking place in nine different bodies of water around the world. In each, I stand in a tidal area for a full tidal cycle as water slowly engulfs my body and then recedes. The public participates in all aspects of making the work. Each work in the series consists of a live performance event, a long-form cinematic video work, and varied ephemera. The project examines the temporary nature of all things and our contemporary relationship with water in urban environments—as individuals, as communities, and as a species.

Paper Trail is a mixed-reality experimental climate change fiction project. Inspired by climate change research and sea-level projections, the tour depicts New York City in different future eras as it grapples with rising sea levels—unless we do something more to combat climate change today.

Paper Trail was developed by A.E. Souzis during her WoW/UNY residency in 2019 and was inspired by (and features) drawings of possible NYC futures made by Governors Island visitors during her 2018 WoW/UNY residency with /rive art collective.

I have centuries of data on the history of fish species and the fisheries in New York City waters. I’ve been researching this industry for years and the stories embedded in the data are many, complex, and show patterns of use and abuse, loss and resilience. It’s an overwhelming amount of information that I’ve shared in bits and pieces, but I’ve never released it all to the public. A book seems daunting, an academic paper isn’t enough and doesn’t reach most of the people in New York City that I would like to. As a dancer, I also wanted to make it physical, tangible, spatial, and interactive.

Over two seasons in residence on Governors Island, I worked to expand a body of work called TRACES. Rivers are constantly changing course, redistributing energy and carving new paths. Dance pathways are also not fixed, with variations every time movement is performed. This series of choreographic works uses stream dynamics and river morphology as a point of departure that, when performed, create large drawings as an artifact of the dance, mapping the unique signature of each performance and, abstractly, the water body that inspired it.

Buttermilk Beach Access Plan is a series of two rope ladders designed to be installed along the Governors Island promenade to provide access to Buttermilk Beach during low tide. As described in the Waterfront Alliance Maritime Activation Plan for Governors Island, tidal timing allows Buttermilk Beach, on the east side of the island facing Brooklyn and Buttermilk Channel, to accommodate at least three hours of on-beach public programming per-day for ten out of every fourteen days. Currently, there are no formal public access points allowing visitors to touch the water along the Governors Island coastline, and there is a six-foot drop from the promenade down to Buttermilk Beach.

Water, Memory and Ritual is a multi-part meditation on water as a medium for the cyclical forces of death and life. The impetus for this project began with remembering those who have died in bodies of water surrounding New York City and on Pagganuck (Governors Island). Waters bordering the five boroughs hold memories of injustice — starting with the loss of indigenous lives at the arrival of settler colonialists. Contemplating death in water through historical events led to encompassing all lives lost in bodies of water. My work reveals a reverent focus on the sacredness of water and its connection with the cyclical forces of death and life.

During my Works on Water residency, I explored the use of algae as a new material in my art practice. After researching emerging sustainable applications of algae, I experimented with it as a dynamic color component in light fixtures, as well as a pigment in paint and ink. Using algae milk paint that I created, I filled existing cracks in the walls of my WoW space, as if it was being reclaimed by elements of the sea.

The text within the artist book, "Holding on to Waste," was collected from the public in answer to the question: "What do you enjoy wasting?" The paper in the book is made from recycled magazines, cardboard boxes, a picture book, paper towels, paper scraps, children’s drawings, mint tea bag wrappers, receipts, scavenged berries, old Christmas cards, photographs, algae, a plastic bottle, chestnuts, fabric and thread scraps, a balloon, a cardboard spool, rubber gloves, empty Emergen-C packets, blue tape, packing tape, food wrappers, double-sided tape, and water collected on Governors Island. In a society where consumerism and wasteful living is widespread, this book asks us to consider more deeply how we allocate and spend our resources, often at the risk of the earth and other times at the risk of our own personal fulfillment and satisfaction.

Water in the Desert 122°F is a meditation on the past and future of the miles of canals that thread through Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona. The largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in North America, the canals were first engineered 2000 years ago by the ancestral Sonoran Desert people. This Native history was destroyed by the construction of the settler-colonial metropolis. This urban space of asphalt and concrete is ill-prepared for the heat that is coming. The summer now reaches 122°F. At 130°, what happens to the city’s vulnerable people, plants, and animals? Adaptation or abandonment?

Admiral's Row, 1864-2016 evolved out of our artist residency at the Works On Water/Underwater New York project space on Governors Island in July 2019. As part of that residency, we created a video installation titled Shoreline Change with several of our short documentary films about New York's changing waterfront. One of those films documented the decay and destruction at Admiral’s Row, a collection of historic mansions inside the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Although the water was never visible through the forest that had grown up around Admiral’s Row during its years of abandonment, the homes there were a unique relic of New York’s nautical history, a history which is also reflected in the cracked walls of the former military houses on Governors Island in which we presented the film.

The photographs in Down For the Day (2016-present) are made along a fifteen block stretch of Rockaway Beach, Queens. Less than a mile long, this section of beach is among the most utilized in New York City, hosting shoulder-to-shoulder crowds on summer weekends. The project title, Down For the Day, is the local description of day-trippers, frequently called DFDs. This term of derision, often meant to distance visitors from locals, is used here to describe the tangled bodies, cramped encampments, and flimsy tropical umbrellas as attempts at finding not only respite from the city heat, but perhaps a momentary paradise, imperfect but one’s own.

Einstein once described quantum mechanics as “spooky action at a distance,” an invisible world of atoms that is composed of even smaller particles that can be moved and affected without being touched. The imperceptible energy exchanges and mysterious movements between these subatomic particles can also be affected in more than one place at one time and can occur thousands of miles apart.