351 Canal St
New York, NY
Swamp cocktail hour, 6 pm
Ribbon-cutting ceremony and reading, 7 pm
Taking cues from the Canal Street catacombs – local lore that describes a network of underground tunnels beneath Canal Street – Canal Street Research Association inaugurates a new longer-term underground archive, devoted to surfacing buried channels.
This new zone is part storage and part sculpture, designed in collaboration with architectural collective common room and conceived in collaboration with poet-painter Basie Allen and artist Craig Jun Li working with curatorial duo ACOMPI. Rainwater and leaks collected on-site form an inconspicuous circulation system flowing through shifting archival materials collected by the fictional office of Canal Street Research Association.
These underground flows are further circulated by Live Stream, a new virtual channel that will stream occasional happenings in the Canal Street Research Association basement archive. These may include interviews with neighbors and vendors, poetry and performance, as well as surfaced waters.
To celebrate the opening of the new archival sculpture, the night will begin with swamp cocktails followed by a ribbon-cutting ceremony with a collaged reading of watery texts by Canal Street Research Association and Basie Allen. This project brings into play a nexus of relationships that skirt the edges of official and unofficial, formal and informal, real and fake, above and below.