Open Water is a site-specific research, oral history, and public art project about swimming and flooding. The project involves: swimming with people and groups in urban locations in and outside of the United States; conducting oral histories with swimmers and the public; co-creating and facilitating embodied shoreline encounters involving industrial and ecological history discussion, storytelling, plant and animal identification, and guided somatic movement; and transforming public urban spaces through stewardship and art making activities.
Open Water explores / performs swimming as an embodied research method and examines political, cultural, ecological, and economic dimensions of water relationships and swimming practices across time and geography.
In 2023, parts of Open Water intersected with and expanded into a new collaborative and co-located project: Creek: Two Cavities of the Heart. Creek is conducted at Coney Island Creek by the performance artist and urban swimmer Nora Almeida and videographer iki nakagawa 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.
Project Collaborators
(Red Hook): iki nakagawa, andrea haenggi, Aiesha Bennett
(Coney Island): iki nakagawa, Willa Goettling, Jordan Packer, Olive Toren
Event specific collaborators: Coney Island Beautification Project, NYC Parks, Coney Island Brighton Beach Open Water Swimmers, Aiesha Bennett
Support from: Works on Water and Culture Push and PSC CUNY
nora.almeida 