Swamplands Reader Launch

Join us for the launch of Swamplands Reader at Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA)! Emerging from our 2024–2025 thematic exhibitions and research on the murky entanglements of water, this reader brings together artists, writers, scholars, and activists from the Meadowlands to the Gulf of Mexico. Canal Street Research Association (CSRA) will do a performative reading of their piece on canalization, then joining contributors Sónia Vaz Borges and Sean Vegezzi about how each of their practices intersect with water—from militant mangrove schools to city waterways. This conversation will be moderated by Isabel Ling of MOLD Magazine.

Copies of the publication will be available for purchase on-site, and can also be ordered online through our shop.

Sónia Vaz Borges is a militant interdisciplinary historian and long-time social and political organizer. Along with filmmaker Filipa César, she co-authored the short films Navigating the Pilot School (2016) and Mangrove School (2022). She teaches at Drexel University in the department of History and Africana Studies.

Canal Street Research Association was founded in 2020 in an empty storefront on Canal Street, New York’s counterfeiting epicenter. Delving into the cultural and material ecologies of the street and its long history as a site that probes the limits of ownership and authorship, the Association repurposes underused real estate as spaces for gathering ephemeral histories, mapping local lore, and tracing the flows and fissures of capital. They have occupied storefronts, empty office buildings, and storage units, and were formerly located in a basement under Canal Street. The fictional office entity is operated by Shanzhai Lyric (Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky), a poetic research and roving archival unit that takes inspiration from 山寨 (shanzhai or counterfeit) goods to examine how bootlegs use mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies.

Isabel Ling is a writer, editor, and cultural critic based in New York City. She is the senior editor at MOLD Magazine. Her writing on food, art, culture, design, and technology has been published in outlets such as Curbed, Vulture, Eater, The Verge, Frieze, Spike Art Magazine, and Hyperallergic.

Sean Vegezzi is an artist and researcher who has examined urban topographies and infrastructures through image-making, site-specific installation, sculpture, and writing. Vegezzi’s practice begins from lived experience and investigates civic life in relation to issues of autonomy, privacy, security, incarceration, and policing.