Strategies for Survival

Weeksville Heritage Center
Brooklyn, NY | 2021
       

Nine women from the Weeksville neighborhood in Brooklyn simultaneously read and performed a series of texts found in Weeksville Heritage Center's archive. Using Zoom breakout rooms, each woman live-streamed from a space that had been significant to her during 2020—a year that people around the world spent in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A cozy kitchen, a neighborhood café, an improvised home office, and a Montessori school, among others, connected the content of the texts to the performers' professions and everyday lives. Zoom's format allowed audience members to move between the nine live streams over the course of one hour, each unfolding in a different physical space.

Strategies for Survival is curated by Gabriela López Dena.

This project received the support of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, where an earlier version of Strategies for Survival was presented in 2018.

Click here for the program and the participant’s bios.