The Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair
Project Directors: This project is led by Marianne Hirsch and Diana Taylor, with Susan Meiselas, Lorie Novak, and Laura Wexler, and builds on the work of the Women Mobilizing Memory working group at CSSD.
Project Manager: Lee Xie
Project Coordinator: Meg Jianing Zhang
VISIT THE OFFICIAL
Zip Code Memory Project website here.
The ZIP Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, a Social Engagement project housed at the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, seeks to find reparative ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on different Upper New York City neighborhoods. In partnership with community, arts and academic organizations, and working across the zip codes of Morningside Heights, Harlem, Washington Heights and the South Bronx, we will gather a group of scholars, artists and activists to develop a series of hands-on artistic practices that can transform and enliven those spaces. Building on the networks of care that local communities have created, we hope to mobilize memory and repair a sense of trust that will help us all build a sense of shared responsibility and belonging. ZCMP will consist of group meetings and discussions, reparative memory workshops, public roundtables featuring the work of reparative memorial artists, the building of an interactive website, and a final exhibition and memorial event.
ZCMP website: zcmp.org
News
CSSD Social Engagement Project organizes an event for community mourning and healing that will take place on December 5th, 2021.
The Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair (ZCMP), co-directed by Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Diana Taylor (New York University), seeks to find reparative ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic, while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on different Upper New York City neighborhoods. It is housed at the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) at Columbia University and is supported by a CSSD Social Engagement grant funded by the Columbia University President’s Office. CSSD is pleased to announce that the Zip Code Memory Project is the recipient of a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for a two-year term beginning July 1, 2021.
All proposals must be submitted by May 24, 2021. Applicants will be informed of decisions by June 1, 2021.
These new groups will build on established CSSD projects in alignment with Columbia University's Fourth Purpose.
Partner Organizations Include:
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
The Museum of the City of New York
El Museo del Barrio
The Bronx Documentary Center
City College of New York Black Studies Program
Rifkind Center for the Humanities and the Arts
Centro Civico Cultural Dominicano
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Magnum Foundation
City Seminary of NY
Public Humanities and Arts Graduate Fellows
Ph.D. Candidate, Performance Studies, New York University
Luis Rincon Alba is a Colombian artist and scholar based in New York City since 2010. He has taught at the departments of Art and Public Policy and Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Doctoral Student, Divinity, Union Theological Seminary
Linda Aristondo is a Latina bilingual woman of color and attorney championing the needs of vulnerable populations. Her field of interest is collaborating with nonprofit service organizations dedicated to serving the legally disenfranchised, including vulnerable undocumented immigrants and refugees.
Ph.D. candidate, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, NYU
Gabriel Carle (San Juan, 1993) completed a B.A. in Escritura Creativa at Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University. Their creative and academic research interests center on issues of Queerness, Indigeneity, and Blackness in Caribbean literature and activism.
Ph.D. student, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University
Bárbara Pérez Curiel is a Ph.D. student at New York University's Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She holds a Master's degree in Modern Languages (Spanish) from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor's degree in Modern Languages (German) from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Ph.D. Candidate, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Mia Florin-Sefton is a Ph.D. candidate and University Writing Instructor in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University, where she specializes in 20th and 21st century transatlantic anglophone literatures and culture; with a focus on how narratives of succession mediate and explicate the shifting relationship between biological and economic theories of heredity and inheritance. She is also currently at work on a project that looks at the history of sex glands and early history of hormone replacement therapy in the context of theories of racial degeneration and eugenics post-World War I.
Ph.D. candidate, American Studies, Yale University
Kristin Hankins is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Yale University. She holds a B.A. in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and previously worked as a program, project, and exhibition coordinator at a non-profit public art organization.
Ph.D. student, History, Columbia University
Nancy Ko is a scholar of race, capital, and migration working at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. A Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Columbia University, her present research traces the consequences of the emergence of Sephardic identity politics in the global Middle East. Nancy holds an MPhil at the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a B.A. from Harvard University, where she was a founding organizer of the Open Hillel movement.
Doctoral Student, English, City College of New York
Leah Kogen-Elimeliah is a poet, essayist, short story and nonfiction writer from Moscow, currently living in New York City. She is an MFA candidate at City College of New York, is the Founder and Director of WordShedNYC Reading Series and an Editorial Associate for Fiction literary magazine.
Ph.D. Candidate, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Aya Labanieh is a Ph.D. candidate in the English and Comparative Literature Department, where she works on imperial conspiracies and their conspiracy-theory afterlives in 20th and 21st century Middle Eastern literature and politics. Her broader interests include conspiratorial thinking within a global digital context, and how conspiracy theories function as alternate histories, heretical discourses, popular critiques, epistemic injuries, and modern enchantments.
Ph.D. candidate, Department of English, New York University and SSHRC
I’m a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of English at New York University. My dissertation project deals with prophetic utopianism, which is a mode of utopianism that engages in prophetic denunciation-annunciation as a means to sustain revolutionary praxis.
Doctoral Student, Creative Writing, The City College of New York
Laura Salvatore is a poet, currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at The City College of New York, where she will be completing her thesis this fall. She studied Art History and English at Southern Connecticut State University.
Workshop Leaders
Fellow, Urban Studies, University of London
Kamal Badhey (she/her) is a photographer, artist-educator and independent curriculum designer of South Asian ancestry with an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MS in Museum Education from Bank Street College. She is a member of the Urban Photographers Association and South Asian Women’s Creative Collective. Her work intersects with diaspora, using photography, oral storytelling, and family history to stitch together stories. It follows the Telugu saying, ’Katha kanchiki, manam intiki’, ‘The story goes far far away, and now we are back in our homes’. Her project Portals and Passageways, exhibited internationally traces her jeweler ancestor and great great grandfather Annam Rathnaiah from unknown origins to a former British colonial bazaar in Secunderabad, India. Kamal brings two decades of experience collaborating with youth and adults in public schools, transitional housing, community centers, civic engagement, and universities. She was a Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow and a Claremont Documentary Fellow.
PhD Candidate, French and Romance Philology, Columbia University
Noni Carter is a historical and speculative fiction author. She has published work in RSA Journal, Kweli Journal (forthcoming August 2019), and is the author of the YA historical fiction novel, Good Fortune (Simon & Schuster, 2010), winner of the Parent’s Choice Gold award. She is a 2016 graduate of Voices of Our Nation and the recipient of the 2019 PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship for her work-in-progress novel Womb Talk.
Fellow, Photography, School of Visual Arts
Jordan Corine Cruz (b. 1993) is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, photography, video, and sound. Using traditional materials, imagery, and layered sound as cultural signifiers, Cruz creates interactive spaces and objects that focus on the intersections between self-identification, labor, gender, and displacement.
Fellow, Theatre, Universidad Católica de Chile
María Jose Contreras Lorenzini is a Chilean performance artist and scholar. She holds a Ph.D from Università di Bologna and is Associate Professor at the Theater School at Universidad Católica de Chile. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. Using a wide range of formats, from massive public interventions to intimate actions of resistance, Contreras creatively explores the relation between the body and memory.
Fellow, Social Practice Artist, Abrons Arts Center
George Emilio Sanchez is a writer, performance artist and social activist living and working on the ancestral homelands of the Lenapehoking, or Land of the Lenape, today known as Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York. Most recently he premiered XIV at Dixon Place in New York City in 2019. He recently was named the Keith Haring Fellow by the MacDowell in New Hampshire, and he is a Social Practice artist-in-residence at Abrons Arts Center in New York City.
Doctoral Candidate, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Carina del Valle Schorske is a poet, translator, and PhD candidate in Comparative Literature. She is broadly interested in the history of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychic inquiry among artists and intellectuals of color in the Americas (Harlem, Mexico City, the Caribbean). She is currently at work on a project about Pamela Colman Smith, a turn-of-the-century Jamaican folklorist and the illustrator of the world's most widely used tarot deck.
Curators
Fellow, Performance Arts, Brooklyn College
Alo Gorozpe is an artist, curator and community organizer. Born in Mexico City, Alo has a bachelor in Architecture from Universidad Iberoamericana (México City) and an MFA in Performance Arts from Brooklyn College. Alo´s most recent artistic and curatorial work presents itself as a series of communal performances in public spaces.
Curator, Oral History and Art, Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art Istanbul
Işın Önol is a curator and writer based in New York. She has been working as an independent curator (predominantly in the USA, Austria and Turkey) since 2009. Before that, she led the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art Istanbul as its director and curator. (2006-2009). Her curatorial research focuses on interconnecting archival information with oral histories to create platforms for collective memory through collaborative art practices
Past Events
The opening events of IMAGINE REPAIR include performances and presentations by Alicia Grullon, Marie Howe, Fred Moten, Amyra Léon, Rev. Juan Carlos Ruiz, George Emilio Sanchez and Noni Carter with workshop participants, and a concert by Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir.
Virtual Roundtable featuring artists Maria José Contreras, Raphael Lozano-Hemmer, and Kamau Ware.
A solo performance by george emilio sanchez that delves into how U.S. courts have diminished the Tribal Sovereignty of Native Nations.
Public Zoom Roundtable with Gregg Gonsalves, Laura Kurgan, Bill Rankin, Jia Zhang, Jacqueline D. Wernimont and Laura Wexler.
A concert in honor of Samuel Hargress, Jr. who opened the historic jazz club, “Paris Blues” on November 15, 1969.
Virtual Roundtable: Reparative Memory
Featuring: Michael Arad, Susan Meiselas, Doris Salcedo, Hank Willis Thomas, Mabel Wilson
Moderated by Carol Becker
This special panel including Angelika Bammer (Emory), Raina Croff (Oregon), Evelynn M. Hammonds (Harvard), Sará King (Oregon), and Bianca Jones Marlin (Columbia) will focus on issues of inter-generational trauma, healing, neuroscience, and race.
With thanks for a Grant from the Henry Luce Foundation
With thanks for additional funding from Columbia School of the Arts; The Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities; Institute for Religion and Public Life; Yale University Public Humanities; City College of New York Rifkind Center for the Humanities and the Arts; Public Humanities Initiative of GSAS, NYU; Institute of Performing Arts, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU