36.5/ New York Estuary by Sarah Cameron Sunde

September 14, 2022
7:27am – 8:06pm
12 hours, 29 minutes

The Cove, Vernon Blvd., Queens

Built in collaboration with communities around the world, Sunde stands in a body of water for a full tidal cycle. 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea  is a series of nine site-specific performances and video artworks that activate the public on personal, local, and global scales in conversations around deep time, embodied experience, and sea-level rise. Beginning in 2013 with a simple poetic gesture in response to Hurricane Sandy hitting New York, Sarah stood in water for 12 hours and 48 minutes while the tide rose and fell on her body. Since then, 36.5 has grown into a complex, collaborative, evolving series of works involving hundreds of people in communities around the world: Maine, Mexico, San Francisco, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, Aotearoa-New Zealand, and New York City. Over several months, often years, Sarah builds deep and meaningful collaborations with local communities who live near a body of water where sea-levels are expected to rise. Working with a local team, she films the entire event in real time, and translates this footage into a durational video work to be shown in museums, galleries, and public spaces. The ninth and final work in the series will premiere on September 14, 2022 in so-called Queens, Lenapehoking-New York City.

36.5 / NEW YORK ESTUARY is the culminating work in the series, 36.5 / ADurational Performance with the Sea, and the culminating event in the Works on Water 2020-2022 Triennial. It will be a large-scale global event involving several hundreds of people around the world on September 14, 2022. The live performance will take place in the Cove on the East River where Astoria meets Long Island City in Queens, on Wed, Sept 14, 2022. Sarah will stand in water for 12 hours, 39 minutes, a full tidal cycle, inviting the public to participate by joining her in water and/or marking the passing of hours from shore as “the human clock.” Artist collaborators will create interventions and installations to amplify the performance. Viewing stations around the Cove, on Roosevelt Island and Upper East Side, Manhattan will allow audiences to gather from various viewpoints.

For more details about 36.5/ New York Estuary and the eight international re-enactments taking place on the same day, please visit here.

for the depths of us performance-walk + gathering by the Kin to Cove Collective

In the late 1800s a body of water that ran through Ravenswood to the East River was buried underground to make way for increasing industrialization. What in us has been buried in the name of progress– what have we sent down into the dark? Kin To The Cove artists Christopher Bisram and Audrey di Mola lead a neighborhood performance-walk tracing the path of Sunswick Creek down to the Cove, woven with personal and collective mythologies in the form of dance, storytelling, song, and ritual. What can be recovered when we make the ecological practice of “daylighting” a stream, metaphorical? What can be found, inside us, out of the Depths?

Kin To The Cove's full day event in Astoria/LIC, Queens: June 25th 10-11:30am beach cleanup, communal altar creation, and opening ritual at The Cove (31st Dr & Vernon Blvd) with Blue Bus Project; 5pm we gather at 16 Oaks Grove (21st St & 37th Ave) to begin the performance-walk down to the Cove, followed by a 'kindig' gathering as we move into sunset and nighttime.

June 25, 10 am beach clean-up and opening ceremony at the Cove

June 25, 5 pm FOR THE DEPTHS OF US, meet at 16 Oaks Grove in Ravenswood. The performance weaves storytelling and dance back down to the Cove.

Special thanks to dancers: Angela Eslava Jennifer Vazquez, Graciela Morena, and Nicole Ulloa.