Photo by Andrew Federman. Courtesy Abrons Arts Center.
Performances: $15
Purchase Tickets
Roundtables: free w/ RSVP
RSVP
Fri, June 28
7:30 P.M. Performance
Sat, June 29
2:00 P.M. Roundtable
7:30 P.M. Performance
Sun, June 30
2:00 P.M. Roundtable
6:00 P.M. Performance
Perfect City is a working group that addresses the design, policy-making, and zoning of cities. This June, Perfect City’s lead artists Tiffany Zorrilla (aka Lola Libre), Jahmorei Snipes, and Aaron Landsman present Perfect City for Sale: a weekend of performances, installations, roundtable discussions, and a zine launch.
Presented by Abrons Arts Center.
PERFORMANCES
At the conclusion of their 2-year residency through the Creatives Rebuild New York's Artist Employment Program, Perfect City members Aaron Landsman, Jahmorei Snipes and Tiffany Zorilla share their individual artistic practices with presentations of performances-in-progress.
Your ticket includes a free copy of our new issue of the Perfect City zine! The zine includes working group writing, collaged images from the community, and critical contributions from collaborators in our partner city of Amsterdam around visibility, safety, design and youth leadership.
Jahmorei Snipes: PILLAR
A series of poetic monologues exploring the world through the lens of Black womanhood. Through spoken word performance, Snipes considers place, safety, and identity from her own perspective, building on themes of storytelling and visibility from Perfect City’s 2023 art and research project Invisible Guides. The development of PILLAR began in 2018 from Snipes’ frustration as a woman forced to maintain patriarchal structures. In her own words, “The function of pillars is to hold up a structure in order to keep it from collapsing. Black women have become the pillars that maintain the structure of our community”.
Lola Libre: BUYME
A metamodern interactive art project that investigates the existence of digital colonialism and its role in perpetuating the exploitation of femme bodies both on and offline. The installation incorporates web-based art, installation, and performance activation to challenge our understanding of power dynamics in digital landscapes and encourage reflection on who and what receives protection online.
Aaron Landsman: All The Time in the World
A new performance work about collective self-regard and the ways capital-driven social media algorithms define how we apprehend the world now. The text is designed and rendered as an original card game - a combination of Uno, Exploding Kittens and Five-Card Draw - played by four actors at a folding table in front of an audience. All the Time in the World takes the ‘media’ out of social media and leaves the gathering and the words. The piece invites us to consider moments in our lives that escape our lenses and render more strongly as memory than our image diaries allow.
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSIONS
Perfect City will offer two roundtables that invite participants to think together about how our neighborhoods and cities can thrive in an increasingly difficult climate. Each discussion begins with Avoidance Mapping, a social exercise and workshop that makes our invisible knowledge about the city visible. How do you belong when you move through a place? What protects us in the city, and how does our need for protection change depending on our age, race, ability, gender or size?
Saturday, June 29 roundtable focuses on how the nature and discussion of gentrification has shifted since Perfect City’s 2016 founding. Sunday, June 30 roundtable tackles the digital commons, citizenship, activism and the city.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jahmorei Snipes is an actress, advocate and artistic activist. Originally from El Barrio, she currently resides in Harlem, New York. With a profound care for her city and the world around her, Jahmorei joined The Youth Channel at Manhattan Neighborhood Network Youth Media Center. In 2017, she joined Perfect City and co-founded The Catcalling Project. She received a BFA in Acting with a minor in political science from Marymount Manhattan College, Jahmorei has continued to pursue her passions as an actor, theater-maker, and activist. She has presented workshops regularly through Perfect City at CUNY, Princeton and ASU, and with the Confident Futures project alongside other artists and advocates in Amsterdam.
Tiffany Zorrilla is a Dominican woman who was born and raised in the Lower East Side and currently resides in El Barrio in Harlem. Tiffany is a prolific artist with fluency in many media, including but not limited to poetry, ceramic sculpture, painting, video-making, and non-fiction writing. Her research and work exist conceptually within studies of anti-misogynist, anti-colonial resistance, and literary criticism. A published writer and strong advocate for her community, she co-founded The Catcalling Project, sings jazz and plays the piano.
Multidisciplinary artist Aaron Landsman formed Perfect City in 2016, from the understanding that many sustainability initiatives in urban planning do not address systemic inequities, and often lead to cities becoming more exclusive. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, support from major foundations and residencies at ASU and Princeton, where he continues to teach.
ABOUT PERFECT CITY
Formed by Aaron Landsman in 2016, Perfect City is a multiracial, multigenerational working group that addresses the design, policy-making and zoning of cities. Much of our current work focuses on how the city often renders low-income women, families of color and trans people escaping domestic violence unsafe, even within the shelter system. Led by working group members Tiffany Zorrilla and Jahmorei Snipes, Perfect City’s offshoot The Catcalling Project looks at how the rhetoric of real estate development and that of street harassment both propagate displacement and a lack of safety for women of color. In 2019, Zorrilla and Snipes began to offer Avoidance Mapping workshops for residents at Henry Street Settlement’s Urban Family Center (UFC), a residential shelter with counseling and other services.
ABOUT ABRONS ARTS CENTER
Abrons Arts Center is a home for contemporary interdisciplinary arts in Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhood. A core program of the Henry Street Settlement, Abrons believes that access to the arts is essential to a free and healthy society. Through performance presentations, exhibitions, education programs, and residencies, Abrons mobilizes communities with the transformative power of art.
ABOUT CREATIVES REBUILD NEW YORK’S ARTIST EMPLOYMENT PROGRAM
Perfect City For Sale is made possible with support from the Creatives Rebuild New York’s Artist Employment Program, a two year initiative that funds employment for up to 300 artists, culture bearers, and culture makers (artists) in collaboration with dozens of community-based organizations across New York State.