#PickoftheWeek | Artist to Perform as Tide Rises and Falls (Spoiler Alert: She Gets Wet) – QEDC

#PickoftheWeek | Artist to Perform as Tide Rises and Falls (Spoiler Alert: She Gets Wet)

BY QEDC It's In Queens

Sarah Cameron Sunde mixes performance, public art, and video into an explosion of creativity.

She also gets wet.

The Manhattan-based artist will lead a 12-hour-plus virtual event from Hallets Cove near Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City on Saturday, Sept. 5. The show, “36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea,” will run from 6:43 am to 7:09 pm, as Sunde stands in a tidal area for a full tide cycle so the East River will slowly engulf her body and then reveal it again.

She won’t be alone, as hundreds of people will stand in natural bodies of water all around the world with her.

Videos from previous “36.5” works will show throughout the day as will chats with “36.5” collaborators, NYU faculty and students, and Socrates Park Executive Director John Hatfield. Each passing hour will bring a short performance, action, or report from some wet place in the world.

Here’s Saturday’s schedule as per Eastern Standard Time.

6:43 am: Livestream begins;
7:43 am: Report from Bangladesh;
8:43 am: Report from NYC;
9:43 am: Report from Kenya;
10 am: Conversation with Hatfield;
10:43 am: Report from The Netherlands;
11:43 am: Report from NYC;
12:43 pm: Report from Brazil;
1:30 pm: Conversations with collaborators from The Netherlands, Kenya, Brazil, Bangladesh, and New Zealand;
3:43 pm: Reports from Maine, Mexico, and San Francisco;
4 pm: Conversation with NYU faculty and students;
5:43 pm: Report from New Zealand;
6:43 pm: Report from NYC; and
7:09 pm: Livestream ends. Towel time.

The event is free, but it can only be viewed online. It’s not open to the public at Socrates Park.

In total, “36.5” consists of nine site-specific episodes that Sunde created in response to Hurricane Sandy and the parallel she saw in the struggle for artists to survive in NYC and the struggle for humanity to survive as sea levels rise. In all the pieces, she stands still in water as the tide notes the passage of time on her body, providing a metaphor for the changing environment.

Sunde began “36.5” in Bass Harbor, Maine in 2013. She then developed the project in Akumal Bay, Mexico, and San Francisco in 2014, before launching it on a global scale in North Sea, The Netherlands in 2015. The fifth segment is from Bangladesh’s Bay of Bengal in 2017 and the sixth one was made in Brazil’s Bay of All Saints in 2019. Then there was Kenya’s Bodo Inlent in 2019 and Manukau Harbour, New Zealand, in 2020.

It all ends in Socrates Park on Saturday.

“I create interactive moments and situations that strive to stimulate dialogue between strangers and open new possibilities between the everyday and the existential,” Sunde states on her website. “My work is an intimate encounter with our ephemeral nature, a fine line between complete abandon and utter control, action and stillness.”