Artists in Residence Program
Artists
As a part of Deluge we invited a group of artists to make work to explore public engagement with flooding in the summer of 2022. View some of the outcomes here.
Paolo Cirio
Paolo Cirio engages with social, economic, and cultural issues of contemporary society. He shows his research and intervention-based works through installations, artifacts, photography, videos, and public art both offline and online. Originally from Italy, Cirio lived in NYC for over ten years. In 2010, he created the Drowning-NYC.net project to raise awareness about how the rising sea level impacts residents of Lower Manhattan, engaging high-school kids and adults to the future gentrification brought by urban climate adaptation and the complex causes of Global Warming. In 2021, Cirio launched a utopian Climate Tribunal to put on trial major fossil fuel firms using evidence consisting of data, graphs, and documents. Later, Cirio launched the Climate Class Action, a campaign for taking legal class action against fossil fuel companies.
Project: Flooding NYC Claims
For the FloodNet Arts Grant, Cirio is developing the project Flooding NYC Claims to simulate legal claims that can financially compensate New Yorkers based on flooding data being computed with data about the greenhouse gas emissions figures produced by fossil fuel firms. This project integrates “attribution science”, climate change litigations, and global climate treaties. Central to Cirio’s concept is the historical study “Carbon Majors Database” by the Climate Accountability Institute, the first that established specific responsibilities for each international fossil fuel firm, and deduced that the 100 major oil, gas, and coal producers have generated over 70% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Sabina Sethi Unni
Sabina Sethi Unni and Nikolas Michael are NYC-based urban planning graduate students, writers, and organizers who are passionate about community engagement around climate resiliency, from public art to advocacy toolkits to blog posts to participatory maps. As a team, they have co-created many environmental justice projects, like a participatory street map that incorporates flood data and interviews with Polish grandmothers, and a community based adaptation framework for post-disaster flooding and land management in NYC.
Sabina is a theatermaker and artist-scholar in training passionate about cultivating participatory public spaces through collaborative art and urban planning. She is the co-founder of Fresh Lime Soda Productions, a contemporary South Asian theater ensemble. Her theater work aims to be comedic, politically engaged, immersive, fun, and participatory; blurring the line between spectator and performer and providing space for political education.
Nikolas Michael
Nikolas is a Cypriot-Polish-American who co-founded Avli, an organization based in Cyprus that explores climate change as a driver of peace rather than division through education, art, and protest. A lifelong Queens resident, after Hurricane Sandy, he was inspired to help his community after filling out his college application in Hillcrest Public Library after his home lost power.
Project: Rainy Day Play
“Rainy Day Play” is a devised comedic show about flooding, climate resiliency, and community.
Maya Simone Z.
Maya Simone Z. is a NYC-based interdisciplinary artist, choreographer and educator from the South. Their work centers queer, Black diasporic emotional and spiritual connections as told by their ancestral lineages, Afro-futurist imaginings, and dreams of this and other worlds. Maya Simone has worked with Sydnie L. Mosley, Jasmine Hearn, Lisa Fagan and others. They have developed works presented at Green Space, Corkscrew Theater Festival, Theater Mitu and more. Maya is also a More Art Fellow, an Art & Survival Fellow with Double Edge Theatre and BDAC, a member of PURPOSE Productions and serves on the Dance/NYC Junior Committee. They support multiple artists as an arts administrator and emerging producer. They are a constant dreamer.
Project: state of water: brooklyn waterfronts
state of water: brooklyn waterfronts is an oral history project that documents and archives NYC residents’ stories and experiences of flooding and how we exist in relationship with water.
Nancy Nowacek
Nancy Nowacek is a research-based and socially engaged artist. She co-founded art collective Works on Water to support and grow the community of artists committed to advocacy for urban ecologies. She has been working in collaboration with the NYC Department of City Planning and Works on Water (2018-2022) to create outreach strategies in support of the 2020-2030 Comprehensive Waterfront Plan. She helped lead these initiatives—Walking the Edge (2020) and Tending the Edge (2021)—and co-curated the Works on Water Triennial Video Show of water-based artworks from around the world (2020). She has created multiple works about the New York City waterways and climate change, including Key From the City (2021), and The Bridge (2012-2016).
Project: Encounter at Farpoint
Shinnosuke Komiya
Shinnosuke Komiya a.k.a Yamico is a multidisciplinary research-based technological Artist/Researcher/Designer/Educator born in Japan and based in NY. He explores cognitive human augmentation to stimulate human cognition from speculative perspectives. He questions perceptions of future technology and creates novel ways of seeing, without preconceived notions of the world. He aims to inspire audiences to look more carefully, discover beauty and ask questions of daily life. His works are experimental sculptures, installations, and performances that consist of web, immersive media, and hardware with physical objects. He is interested in the relationship between organic and inorganic such as natural phenomena and synthetic objects.
Project: Flood Realities
I am working on an AR app to use the sensor data to visualize the potential height of the flood with LiDAR AR on iPhone.
Danielle Isadora Butler
Danielle Isadora Butler designs experiences, installations, and objects. Her work focuses on creating opportunities for emotional connection. She has designed and produced playgrounds that teach about cooperation, physical poetry archives that get you ready to listen, and creative residencies on boats in remote and challenging waterways. Danielle’s skill in human-centered design pulls from her previous work in restorative justice, arts education, and creative technology. Danielle believes that relationship building is the key to engaging people in environmental issues that feel too large or abstract. As co-founder of the Tideland Institute and dean of the microgrant Awesome on the Water, Danielle is passionate about improving access to the water, expanding New Yorker’s relationship to their harbor, and engaging environmental challenges through creative interventions.
Project: Maritime Library
Maritime Library: We’re building a floating library. Designed as a historic harbor barge in miniature (10’x16′) this small library is a familiar institution in an unfamiliar place.