Nov 24 2024

Energies | COLLECTIVE WALKING AND MAPPING FOR TEENS AND YOUNG ADULTS

Sun | 3PM

On the occasion of Energies, SI is pleased to present a special workshop for teens and young adults (16 to 25 years old) coordinated with Arthur Lee and Natalia Boumatar.

There is a long history of assembly and the public activation of urban space in the East Village. In this workshop, a collective walk will be organized around the idea of desired experience. How may we reframe our wants not around the singular urban wanderer, but on a collective participation? How do we organize around these desires? 

This program will begin with a guided exploration of the archive at Loisaida Inc. lead by Lead Archivist, Maylyn Iglesias, to explore the East Village as it once was. 

Next we will embark on a collective walk towards Swiss Institute, stopping at several points of interest while we actively compare and contrast this neighborhood’s past and present.

Once we arrive at Swiss Institute, we will have a short break with refreshments before engaging in a collective map making exercise that brings the past and present together. We will provide participants with maps, photos, and written narratives of the East Village and ask them to use their first-hand experiences and second-hand resources to further ideas of collective maintenance and community infrastructure in the creation of a collaged map.

This workshop is free, and by RSVP only. It will last approximately 2.5 to 3 hours. Please RSVP to education@swissinstitute.net.

Please note: This workshop will begin at Loisaida Inc. at 710 E 9th St, New York, NY 10009

Accessibility note: This workshop will require participants to stand and walk for at least 30 minutes at a time. Please reach out to the email above if this is a barrier for your participation.

Natalia Boumatar is an architecture student interested in overlaps between storytelling, living archives, and histories of place. Born in Beirut and raised in Baltimore, she lives and studies in New York. She teaches at Art with a Heart and is pursuing her BArch at The Cooper Union.

Maylyn ‘Zero’ Iglesias is a Nuyorican photographer, educator, archivist and curator born and raised on the Lower East Side. Her early sensibilities were formed in New York City by 1980’s graffiti, hip hop, punk and her mother’s Salsa and Supremes records. She graduated from LaGuardia Community College with an Associates Degree in Commercial Photography. Iglesias’s work is focused on her beloved Loisaida with the aim of documenting her neighborhood, while finding a way to stay connected to her roots and preserving remnants of the quickly disappearing Nuyorican culture that once thrived so boldly in her youth. Her personal project, “What’s It Mean to be Nuyorican” was added to the LaGuardia Wagner Archives in 2021. During that time she joined the Loisaida Center to head their newly-launched archive program, which was created to preserve the history of LES photographers, poets, musicians and neighborhood leaders and activists. Frustrated with not seeing women artists like herself represented in art shows and galleries, she began curating group art shows in 2022. Her own art and photography has been shown in New York, New Orleans and London. Maylyn has co-taught photography workshops and been a teaching and darkroom assistant at ICP, the Free Film Project, Lower East Side Girls Club and the Josephine Herrick Project.

Arthur Lee (he/him) is an educator and architecture student raised in Queens and based in the East Village. He is currently a BArch candidate at the Cooper Union. He works primarily through digital modeling and collective workshopping. For the past two years, he has been moved by Loisaida’s history of resistance and reclamation from the 1980s to early 2000s and its continuation in the present through grassroots institutions, agricultural practices, and energy infrastructures. These histories motivate his own work with grassroots institutions in the Loisaida neighborhood: he’s collaborated with the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, and is an intern at the Loisaida Center, recently contributing to their 2024 exhibition Ecolibrium: Empowering Community for Sustainable Energy Equity. He is currently an educator at the Saturday Program, a free initiative offering high school art classes. Along with his research collaborators, he won the 2024 Benjamin Menschel Fellowship for an upcoming exhibition on Taiwan’s new agricultural practices called The Plant Doctor.

Image: Residents on the roof at 519 E 11th Street, photo by Jon Naar.