WRITTEN BY: RAY JORDAN ACHAN
PRODUCED BY: EXILED TONGUES
DIRECTED BY: RAY JORDAN ACHAN
Check out Ray’s work featured in Blue Dot Living: Artists Address Brooklyn’s Environmental Blight
Project History
2022
Recipient of the 2022 Creative Equations Fund: Justice, Equity, Sustainability + Performing Arts Grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council
Commissioned as part of Water Connectors: an artistic project by Works on Water that commissions four public art projects that will connect NYC communities vulnerable to the effects of climate change with their waterfront, and with each other.
Site-specific performance at the Newtown Creek Nature Walk- June 24 & 25, 2022 with artists Meadow Cloud, Leilani Da Divine, Terran Scott, & community members.
Performance Presentation at FabNYC (July 14, 2022) and Amos Eno Gallery (July 14-30, 2022)
2021
Commissioned as part of Tending The Edge: Caring for the NYC coastline and its communities, now and in the future.
ABOUT: (Re)Imagining Greenpoint’s Green Waters integrates artistic programming with community sustainability initiatives to bring wider attention to the polluted waters of Newtown Creek, offering methods that use community participation, techniques of ARTIVISM within an abolitionist framework, and aesthetics of “Theater of the Oppressed” to promote remediation of the Creek and bring the climate justice conversation to marginalized communities. Through collaboration with global majority artists, this site-specific performance is a collection of oral histories, soundscape, theater and visual arts. Local residents will go on a canoe tour of the Creek and experience the water up close, while also witnessing (and being a part of) a community performance celebrating the waterfront.
Performances at Newtown Creek Nature Walk: June 24, 25 at 6pm.
MORE INFO (TENDING THE EDGE)
As the city considers who will become our next mayor and we come face to face with our own future, NYC Department of City Planning (DCP), Culture Push (CP), and Works on Water (WoW), have come together, with support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs through the Mayor's Grant for Cultural Initiative. to consider how we will collectively tend to the edges of our vulnerable coastal archipelago.
Artists from across the five boroughs, who each have deep roots in New York City’s coastal communities, will spend the next two months with the water’s edge, offering points of engagement and weaving relationships across the shoreline, through districts, wetlands, rivers, and boroughs, all the way to city hall.
Tending the Edge coincides, intentionally, with the forthcoming primary election and the release of the next Comprehensive Waterfront Plan (CWP) which will define the city’s waterfront goals for the next ten years. Collectively, Tending the Edge emphasizes that the CWP is not just a document, but a reflection of our lived experiences and aspirations and aims to bring the CWP into the public discourse during this critical moment. Most importantly, we are asking you - as a leader in the city, to act with urgency, to uphold the CWP and to prioritize issues of climate adaptation and resiliency planning.
“This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the Department of City Planning (DCP)."
As a way to understand and to (re)imagine the complicated and polluted history of Newtown Creek, artist and Greenpoint resident, Ray Jordan Achan will create a short documentary film based on his own investigations, photographs, interviews and archival material. Ray methodology uses archival material as a way to (re)create New York City’s past, understand it’s mistakes - such as governmental and environmental neglect, to learn how to remedy these missteps and to (re imagine sustainable climate solutions for the future. To open the conversation, (Re)imagining Greenpoint’s Green Waters will be accompanied by a panel discussion on climate equity and how to prioritize low-income, Black and brown folxs who continue to get displaced when new public amenities such as waterfront parks are created.
