Sarah Cameron Sunde will broadcast a performance live from Kenya
Sarah Cameron Sunde’s 13-hour-long 36.5: A Durational Performance with the Sea is broadcasting live from Mombasa, Kenya, Nov. 8, 2019.
Una Chaudhuri, director of XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement, and NYU Collegiate Professor of English, Drama, and Environmental Studies, serves as an advisor.
Created in response to the devastation wrought in New York by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, this work has been performed on the coasts of every continent on earth, and will conclude—with its ninth iteration—in the artist’s home coast of New York City in September 2020.
36.5/A Durational Performance with the Sea is deceptively simple: at its core, it involves a single artist standing on a shore for the length of time (usually about 13 hours) that it takes for the tide to come in, to cover her body up to her neck, and then to recede. Others—artists, scientists, environmentalists, activists, onlookers are invited to join her in the water for whatever length of time they might like to, or to do anything else they want to: play music, perform, dance, recite, meditate, or simply watch. The signification this action releases—and the ideas it conveys—are anything but simple. They attract attention and elicit interpretations from a range of perspectives: ecological/climatological, feminist, post-humanist, aesthetic, symbolic, philosophical, political. The performance is exemplary of a kind of research-based climate art that is an increasingly active player in climate politics.
The performance has happened in six places around the world already, and will happen in Kenya on November 8th, and in New Zealand in the Spring (date TBD), and then finally in New York in October, 2020.
For more information, or to be involved in the NYU events surrounding the final performance next fall, please contact Una Chaudhuri at uc1@nyu.edu.