Who is kept safe in Washington Square?

For our final, Isaac Silber gave us the option to: “plan and execute a performance, located in New York City.” Preceding that, I attended a wheatpasting workshop hosted by Rent Refusers Network, East Village Mutual Aid, and Tompkins Homeless Collective. I had also just read Emily Kies Folpe’s It Happened on Washington Square (2002) where she describes the history of the park. I learned that Washington Square was the site of farms given to formerly enslaved Africans by Dutch colonizers who wanted to create an area of buffer between themselves and Lenape communities. This inspired me to create some sort of project invoking this history, particularly because it is so closely connected to the question of whose safety is prioritized in our current police state. I chose the phrase for my posters to put doubt into the way safety is defined. In the last year, these posters have disappeared, been altered, and even molded over, becoming collaborations with strangers and the streets of New York.