Open Session #11: Hosted by Nora Almeida and iki nakagawa

Artists and activists Nora Almeida and iki nakagawa present Watershed Activation, a movement-based session that engages with and activates a multimedia archive of videos, audio, photography, writing, and ephemera. This material was produced and collected at Coney Island Creek in Brooklyn and Venado Verde on the Pacific coast of Colombia. This activation is the continuation of an ongoing, site-specific project that explores relationships between people, water, and shoreline ecosystems and seeks to understand care practices and transcorporeal embodiment––between human bodies, water bodies, and more-than-human species–in the context of climate crisis. Through this experimental session, the artists hope to learn whether and how an activated archive can provoke conversations, emotional responses, or socio-political actions that extend beyond the geographic and temporal space of a performance. 

Nora Almeida is an urban swimmer, writer, conceptual and performance artist, educator, and activist based in Gowanus, Lenapehoking / Brooklyn. Her art explores intersections of archiving, environmental investigation, and spatial disruption. Recent public artworks including The Last Street End in Gowanus and Land Use Intervention Library have focused on relationships between people and environmentally disturbed, post-industrial waterfront spaces. Since 2022, she’s been working on Open Water, a site-specific research and public art project about swimming, water relationships, and flooding. Nora was a Faculty Fellow with Social Practice CUNY in 2021-2022, a Water Connector in 2022-2023 with Works on Water, and a 2023-2024 Climate Justice Fellow with Culture Push. With iki, she is a recipient of a 2024-2025 Brooklyn Arts Council grant to continue working with the public at Coney Island Creek.

iki nakagawa is an artist who practices videography as a means of witnessing, embodying, processing and translating ideas, actions and situations in which they thrive. She has been working as a professional archival videographer, and worked with numerous cultural institutions in NYC and beyond. Her works have been shown at places including The Nature of Cities Festival, MuseumofAmericabooks, Panoply Performance Laboratory, the Vermont Public Television, the Kitchen, Harvestwsorks, Asia Society, Museum of Chinese in America and FEED Media Art Center. She was 2021-2022 Associated Artist at Culture Push, and was a parent Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Art Exchange for the Fall of 2021.