Imagined Futures//This Must Be the Place

Taking place September 18th-27th spanning Climate Week, we invite you to travel across the boroughs and connect deeper to the waterways and the city Using audio guides, community storytelling, artistic visions and directing participants to the work of community organizations, the program is an invitation to deepen our relationship and access to place, the histories that live within and around them, and to become active participants in stewarding our future ecologies throughout New York City. With activations held in every borough- Coney Island Creek, the Far Rockaways, Newtown Creek, Flushing Creek, Bronx River, Staten Island Blue Belt corridor, and Swindler’s Cove, and partnering with NYC-based environmental orgs such as Bronx River Alliance, Guardians of Flushing Bay, RISE, the DEP & Newtown Creek Alliance, participants are invited to travel all over NYC. Each site will have a series of clues along a short route that offers an experience of the waterways– the history behind them, the current work happening to help the ecology and community, and the possible futures ahead. Participants will be encouraged to not only learn about the situation, but do something about it right then and there. Artists include musician Max Kutner at Swindler Cove, poet La Bruja at the Bronx river, new media Everything Good Studio in Newtown Creek, social practice artist Nora Almeida in Coney Island Creek, multi-disciplinary artists and educators Niceli Portugal in Flushing and Camila A. Morales in the Rockaways, and photojournalist Nathan Kensinger at New Creek in Staten Island. The program is free and uses the creative scavenger hunt app Goosechase. Through a simple scan of a QR code, participants can easily join the experience through a web based-app that does not track personal data and allows for up to thousands of users to participate, get points, follow along and post content to share with each other.