Storefront for Art and Architecture and Montez Press Radio presents the first episode of On the Ground: Broadcasts, titled Threshold. This episode explores the tensions between public and private space through a close look at New York City’s ground floor.

Architect Sol Camacho, former Cultural Director of the Instituto Bardi, reads from Lina Bo Bardi’s seminal text, Vitrinas. Artist Alvaro Barrington discusses the storefront as a threshold between life and work. Canal Street Research Association further explores their inquiry into billboards and the “facadification” of Manhattan in a four way chat with artists Nick Poe and Gabriela D'Addario, and Levi Eichenstein, CEO of Red Rock Outdoor. Journalist Nathan Kensinger and UPENN Media Studies professor Shannon Mattern engage in conversation around their respective works on the transformation of the city’s streets and sidewalks. Architect Germane Barnes expands on his long-standing research on Porch Politics.

Sound and Video Credits:
Brown, Barry Alexander (Director). (2010). Sidewalk [Film, excerpt] 20:20-21:18

Cohen, Jem (Director). (1996). Lost Book Found [Film, excerpt] 03:29-04:20

Fitzgerald, Kit and Sanborn, John with Van Tieghem, David (Directors). (1982). Ear to the Ground [Film, excerpt] 00:00-1:04

Houston Jr., Otis. (2020). I Like Where I Stay. On AMERICA [Audio file]

Wilson-Tanner. (2022). Sun Room. On 69 [Audio file]

On the Ground: Broadcasts | Threshold

Storefront for Art and Architecture and Montez Press Radio present the second episode of On the Ground: Broadcasts, titled Void. This episode focuses on the various registers of emptiness across the built environment. The void is unpacked as spatial absences, erasure, unmet potential, permissive emptiness, liberating silences, and capital-driven failure. We explore the many languages of vacancy in New York City in dialogue with other socio-political contexts with shared challenges.
 
Participants in this episode include the following: Dominique Petit-Frère from Limbo Accra who talks about Into the Void, a digital project aimed at archiving West Africa’s unfinished property developments and revitalizing their existence through collectivity and embracing liminal space. Dragonfly aka Robin LaVerne Wilson, member of The Stop Shopping Choir, brings us into The Earth Chrxch. Writer Jeremiah Moss, reads an excerpt from Feral City, a book they published in 2022 about life in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic. Artists Tom Burr and Carlos Motta think about void in its multiple possibilities and what it means in the context of queer life. Artist Igancio Gatica has a conversation with Martha Snow from the Urban Design Forum and Gina Lee from the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development about their studies on the hidden stories of vacancy in the city and their potential. Dia Art Foundation curator, Jordan Carter, reads an excerpt from a text by Glenn Ligon published in Artforum in September 2004, titled Black Light: David Hammons and The Poetics of Emptiness. Collaged within the episode are clips from archival videos and audio from artists Amanda Williams, Gordon Matta-Clark, June Jordan, Zoe Leonard, and Francisca Benítez.
 
Sound and Video Credits:
Spirit of Space (Director). (2017). Amanda Williams, Color Shift [Film, excerpt] 0:00-01:00
Silver, Howard (Director). (2007). Gordon Matta-Clark Exhibit at Whitney walkthrough with Jane Crawford [Film]
Holman, Bob (Director). (1989) REC0047_2_158_2142: WNYC-TV Poetry Spots June Jordan [Film, excerpt] 01:17-02:52
Documenta 12 (Director). (2007). Zoe Leonard, Analogue (1998-2007) [Film]

On the Ground: Broadcasts | Void

Storefront for Art and Architecture and Montez Press Radio present the third episode of On the Ground: Broadcasts, titled Care. This episode focuses on different projects that are rooted in care and mutual aid through the lens of the city's ground floor, and how practices that strengthen bonds of affection can transform and reshape our immediate environment.

Participants in this episode include the following: An experimental choral performance read by Natalia Boumatar and Zara Zulfiqar, created for a class at Cooper Union titled "Public Art as Alimentary Infrastructure." This project is by Anders Kristensen, Natalia Boumatar, Ralph Karam and Zara Zulfiqar. It engages fragments of texts about settler colonialism through collective oral readings. Red Canary Song introduces us to their advocacy around Asian and migrant massage parlor workers through their short film, “Fly in Power”. Curator Diya Vij, writer and organizer Ted Kerr, and artist Zacarías González have a conversation about the 90s Chicago-based art collective titled Haha, and their project Flood, which was a hydroponic garden in a storefront that grew vegetables and herbs for people with HIV. Curator Eric Booker reads some archival texts from Smokehouse Associates, the artist collective that transformed Harlem with vibrant, community-oriented abstract murals and sculptures during the late 1960s. Writer Lam Thuy Vo reads from an article she wrote on Pearl River Mart for Documented NY. Artist Cudelice Brazelton talks to Senior frieze editor Terence Trouillot about his recent exhibition at Wschod Gallery in the Lower East Side and how his work relates to intimate micro practices of care. We learn from OlaRonke Akinmowo how the Free Black Women’s Library is fueled by tenants of Black Feminism, and the transformative power of both reading and creating. Huda Tayob discusses her research on Architectures of Care. Scholar Adam Anabosi performs a poem by Palestinian poet Tawfiq Zayyad written to the Palestinian people in their different places of refuge. Interspersed throughout the episode are clips and archival sounds from professors and writers Premilla Nadasen, Carlos Sanabria, Sharon Zukin and artist Jenna Bliss’s documentary "The People’s Detox."

Sound and Video Credits:
The Peoples’ Forum (Director). (2023). BOOK TALK: Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism with Premilla Nadasen and Ujju Aggarwal [Film, excerpt] 4:00-14:31
Red Canary Song (Director). (2022). Fly In Power [Film]
Bliss, Jenna (Director). (2018). The People’s’ Detox [Film, excerpt] 0:00-02:10
Global Cities Local Streets (Director). (2015). Orchard Street, New York [Film, excerpt] 0:14--09:00
Center for Puerto Rican Studies - Centro (Director). (2017). The Bodega: A Cornerstone of Puerto Rican Barrios [Film, excerpt] 10:13-25:06
Tayob, Huda. (2015). Architectures of Care [Audio file]

On the Ground: Broadcasts | Care

Storefront for Art and Architecture and Montez Press Radio present the fourth and final episode of On the Ground: Broadcasts, titled Analogue. This episode focuses on our online obsessions, the digital realm, and how technology and commerce have changed the urban landscape and public life. 


Participants in this episode include the following: Poet and artist Benjamin Krusling layers and colleges audio textures to explore structures of dispossession and the constitution of public space. Remixing music, particularly drill and trap, with archival footage sourced from New York media outlets like CBS and Newsweek, and tiktok, Ben uses sampled reports about crime tracking apps, police surveillance, and recruitment videos for civic services, against the backdrop of  failing city infrastructure. Architect Jesse LeCavalier reads NYC Local Law 166, a local law established in 2021 in relation to micro-distribution centers for distributing goods from ecommmerce platforms otherwise known as microhubs. Artist Danielle Dean talks about post-Fordism, Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, and specifically how capitalistic structures are maintained through specific forms of labor organization and data collection. Artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s 4-channel video and live performance titled At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade into Each Other. Performed by multiple avatars generated from people who participated in the 2018-2019 March of Return in Gaza, the work repurposes fragments from Edward Said’s After the Last Sky to reflect on what it means to be constructed as a person who’s right to exist is threatened. Writer and technologist Sophia Tareen brings together Claudia Irizarry Aponte, senior reporter covering labor and work issues for THE CITY and AI researcher Ria Kalluri to discuss contemporary labor movements and digital technology. Architect and curator Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli reads an excerpt from his research project Riders not Heroes, introducing us and setting the foundation for his video essay of the same name which we listen to next, that investigates the precarious conditions of food delivery riders in Milan. Artist David L. Johnson meets sociologist Sharon Zukin about their shared ongoing interest in the transformation of New York City and the increasing privatization of civic infrastructure. Artist Cao Fei’s documentary 11:11, recorded the work overload of the entire JD.com logistics sectors before and after the Double Eleven Shopping Day in China which is the equivalent of the Black Friday, sketches out the landscape of consumption driven by the powerful Internet economy and asks how this situation will lead us into a future social ecosystem. Curator and researcher Camila Palomino reads from her recent essay on artist Emily Jacir and unpacks her 2000 work, My America (I am still here).

Sound and Video Credits:
2050+ & -orama (Directors). (2021). Riders Not Heroes: Anatomy of a Delivery [Film]
Fei, Cao (Director). (2018). 11:11 [Film, excerpt]
Mauriès-Rinfret, Emmanuel (Director). (2022) Retail Apocalypse: The Epilogue | SSENSE x CCA [Film]
Julmud (2023). Tuqoos | ط​ُ​ق​ُ​و​س [Audio Files

On The Ground: Broadcasts | Analogue

Fluid Coexistence is the first episode of Season Two of Storefront: Broadcasts. It traces the swamp as a site where something can both belong and not belong, as a space of possibility and impossibility, where multiple ideas, forms, and ways of life can exist in harmony and disharmony all at once.

This season, each episode is anchored around a specific idea or provocation that is inspired by essays or projects that we’ll unpack or expand upon through conversations and research. Fluid Coexistence is grounded in the essay “Sensing Grounds: Mangroves Unauthentic, Belonging, Extra-Territoriality” by curators Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl, published in 2013 at e-flux.

Participants in this episode include: Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl reading passages of their essay that will thread together the other segments throughout the episode. Environmental scientist Gonzalo Carrasco and architect Feifei Zhou discuss their project “Before There Was Land, There Were Mangroves”, commissioned for the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale. The project involves a series of mapping analyses examining Singapore’s history of land reclamation and the chemical impacts of recent industrial and urban transformations along the Southern coastline. Anthropologist Marcus Barber talks to Waka Mununggurr, the chairperson of the Djalkiripuyngu Aboriginal Corporation, about Indigenous relationships to land and sea. Tejah Shah reads five poems that were written by Minal Hajratwala, commissioned for Shah’s project Between the Waves. Chris Cyrille-Isaac tells a story he wrote called The Crab and the Aparahiwa in French for his exhibition “But the world is a mangrovity.” An English translation of The Crab and the Aparahiwa can be read here. Collaged in between are audio clips from soundscapes, interviews and films by Nicole L’Huillier, Thao Nguyen Phan and Barbara London, Sónia Vaz Borges and Filipa César, and Magnetic Ideals.

SOUND & VIDEO CREDITS
L’Huillier, Nicole (2018). Amphibian Songs [Audio Files]
Amphibian Songs was originally composed for Futurity Island, a project by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, designed in collaboration with Indrė Umbrasaitė, that is an infrastructure for interspecies communication and an open space for learning. 

Borges, Sónia Vaz & César Filipa (Directors). (2022) Mangrove School [Film, excerpt]

LOOP Barcelona (2020) Becoming Alluvium Thao Nguyen Phan in conversation with Barbara London [Film, excerpt]

Shah, Tejal (2012) Between the Waves [Audio Files]

Lumm, Kirsty and McKnight, Heather (2023) The Swamp: Ritualising our Biodiversity as a Utopian Somatic Practice [Film]

Swamplands: Broadcasts | Fluid Coexistence

Embodied Memory is the second episode of season two of Storefront: Broadcasts. It explores bodies of water as sites for the coalescence of time and place, where mythology, cultural and ecological narratives, citizenship, belonging, and familial legacies, can be traced and archived.

This season, each episode is anchored by a specific idea or provocation, drawing from essays or projects that we’ll unpack or expand upon through conversations and research. Participants in this episode are grounded by the writing and sound project A Ubiquitous Wetness by artist Zahra Malkani. 


Zahra Malkani reads her text and plays accompanying field recordings that thread together other segments throughout the episode. Dilip da Cuhna talks about The Invention of Rivers in a lecture from 2019 at Harvard GSD. Architect Ola Hassanain and curator Michelle Mlati listen and respond to an oral excerpt of a performance by Ola at The Rijksakademie in The Netherlands last year as part of her project Tell the waters what the clay kept secret. In this performance, she recites a prayer towards water as a reparative act to the ecological emptying witnessed in Gezira, Sudan. Ola and Michelle discuss the role of the “Watcher” that has been entangled with Sufism and other ways of watching liminal waters. Arjuna Neuman presents part of the radio show For Lula, Mississippi, unearthing the ecological unconsciousness, from early blues to Choctaw music and culture, to contemporary pop. He connects Charlie Patton's High Water Everywhere that describes the great flood of the Mississippi to Beyonce's Formation. Priyageetha Dia presents the soundscape of her animation work, The Sea is A Blue Memory, and architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier reads an essay she wrote about her research on Aguas curativas (healing waters) in Northwestern Spain. Lastly, we pay tribute to the late Bill Viola with The Reflecting Pool, 1977–1979.  

SOUND AND VIDEO CREDITS
Harvard GSD (2019) Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture: Dilip Da Cunha, “The Invention of Rivers” [Film, excerpt]
Dia, Priyageetha (2022) The Sea is a Blue Memory [Audio Files]

Viola, Bill (1977-1979) The Reflecting Pool [Film]

Swamplands: Broadcasts | Embodied Memory

Fugitive Terrain is the third episode of season two of Storefront: Broadcasts. It explores the dichotomous tension of swamps, rivers, and other water bodies as contested sites of catastrophe, conflict, and violence, but also as frontiers of freedom and retreat. 

This season, each episode is anchored by a specific idea or provocation, drawing from essays or projects that we’ll unpack or expand upon through conversations and research. Participants in this episode are grounded by a reading from the book SILT: Prose Poems by writer and poet, Aurora Levins Morales.

Aurora Levins Morales reads the preface of SILT that threads together other segments throughout the episode. Galerie Lelong partner, Mary Sabbatino talks about Cuban artist Ana Mendieta’s work on the occasion of the 2013 exhibition Ana Mendieta—Late Works: 1981-85. Artist Jota Mombaça and art critic Harry Burke discuss Mombaça’s 2023 exhibition A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP at CCA Berlin, which Harry reviewed for e-flux. Cultural theorist Fred Moten explains the poetic narratives of Black fugitivity in a conversation originally recorded for the Boston Ujima Project. Artist Dala Nasser and architect and sound artist Mhamed Safa discuss the complex history of the Wazzani River, which runs through Lebanon into Northern Israel and whose waters are at the center of major tensions in the region, in relation to their project Red in Tooth. Curator Mariam Elnozahy presents The Great Man-Made River, her project about what was the largest irrigation project in the world, promising Libyans and Africans water independence, abundance, and freedom from foreign control. Calfugueo talks at Art Basel earlier this year about their performance work Ko ta mapungey ka (Water is also territory), which seeks to question the historical links between water and the Mapuche people in relation to the violent neoliberal extractivism present in Chile. Lastly, we listen to a part of Skeletal Water-Xray Water Part 1, from the long-form spoken word and sound composition album Fugitive Equation, by poet Nathaniel Mackey and the Creaking Breeze Ensemble.

SOUND AND VIDEO CREDITS
Mary Sabbatino and Gallerie Lelong, “Ana Mendieta at Gallerie Lelong,” Video, 2013.
Jota Mombaça in collaboration with Anti Ribeiro, Darwin Marinho, and Luana Peixe, “until the last morning,” Video, 2023.
Fred Moten and Boston Ujima Project, “Poetic Narratives of Black Fugitivity,” Video, 2024.
Dala Nasser and Mhamed Safa, Red in Tooth, 2021. Video, 19 min.
Seba Calfuqueo, “Ko ta mapungey ka (Agua también es territorio),” Video, 2020. 
Seba Calfuqueo, Stephanie Comilang, Dr. Senam Okudzeto, and Art Basel, “Conversations | Activating environments: New ways of thinking of land, sea, and life,” Video, 2024. 
abdo Fg. “جزء من خطاب الزعيم الليبي معمر القذافي في افتتاح النهر الصناعي العظيم.” Video, 2021.
‌abdo Fg. “زوري النهر اوصل يامروة – حفلة افتتاح النهر الصناعي العظيم.” Video, 2019. 
abdo Fg. “زوري النهر اوصل يامروة.” Video, 2019.
abdo Fg. “سلم علي من يسلم علينا – اوبريت النهر الصناعي العظيم.” Video, 2021. 
Nathaniel Mackey and The Creaking Breeze Ensemble, Fugitive Equation, Fonograph, “Skeletal Water, X-Ray Water (Part 1).” Audio, 2021.  

Swamplands: Broadcasts | Fugitive Terrain

Aural Fragmentation is the fourth and final installment of season two of Storefront: Broadcasts. This special episode is produced and sound-designed by Mexican artist, researcher, and community organizer Jerónimo Reyes-Retana. He expands upon the ideas explored in our previous episode, Fugitive Terrain, such as  the tension of water bodies as contested sites of catastrophe, conflict, and violence, but also as frontiers of freedom and retreat. 

Aural Fragmentation compiles a selection of ideas, provocations, and speculations stemming from a unique encounter at the easternmost edge of the Mexico-US borderlands. In this hidden corner of Tamaulipas, an oyster field vital to the local economy of the marginalized community of El Campo Pesquero de Playa Bagdad is now in alarming proximity to the SpaceX launch port at Boca Chica, Texas. In this context, confluence extends beyond the meeting of the waters of the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico, creating a threshold not only between Mexico and the US but also between the so-called Third World and the First, inviting reflection on the emergence of new frontiers in outer space.

For over three years, Reyes-Retana has examined this Mexico-US confrontation through the multifocal lens of decoloniality. By implementing contingent and relational research methodologies in collaboration with educator and community organizer Ana Cerino, Reyes-Retana’s work seeks to establish alternative channels of political agency in response to a unique case of social and environmental injustice caused by the sonic shock waves produced by SpaceX’s massive launchers during lift-offs and static fire tests—a situation that, paradoxically, remains silenced. In this episode, Mexican musician Cecilia Bastida—one of the leading voices of the emblematic music band Tijuana No—reads a text in which Reyes-Retana uses the oyster field of Playa Bagdad as a vertex to articulate a multitemporal and multidimensional dialogue with Chicana feminist writer and thinker Gloria Anzaldúa’s engagement with borders as sites for conjuring emancipatory synergies.

This episode includes testimonies from Reyna, a prominent community member who has worked in the oyster field for more than two decades and is a collaborator in Reyes-Retana’s research. Her voice is complemented by on-site field recordings that offer a sonic perspective of a landscape shaped by dissonant realities. Through an interplay of languages and juxtaposed symbols, stereophonic sound impressions invite reflection on how borderlands serve as fertile conceptual terrains for the emergence of third zones for listening—spaces from which to navigate a geopolitical climate of aural fragmentation.

Swamplands: Broadcasts | Aural Fragmentation

Storefront for Art and Architecture amplifies the understanding of the built environment through artistic practice. Founded in 1982 by artists and architects in downtown New York, Storefront has chronicled the changing urban landscape of the city over the years, and remains committed to producing and presenting work about diverse notions of place and public life.