DEMO 2023: Collective Abundance EMERGEN-C Archive

DEMO2023 is NEW INC’s festival presenting the next generation of creative projects and enterprises through exhibitions, installations, performances, and talks by industry leaders and NEW INC members at the New Museum and partner venues across New York City. 

NEW INC’s members each take part in program tracks: areas of specialization that are guided throughout the year by a mentor-in-residence. Members in the Collective Abundance track are creatively reimagining new models for wealth, health, and justice. This track spans many disciplines, including architecture, hardware design, urbanism, art, and education. Through practices of community engagement, artistic immersion, and cultural critique, this creative cohort is building newly formed pathways for healing, social care, economic empowerment, and joy. Their work—culminating in the exhibition “Emergen-C Archive”—is rich in non-traditional approaches to archiving from and for underrepresented perspectives, and forefronts the voices, memories, and abilities of the disempowered.

The infrastructures of mapping, zoning, land-use—and the urban social policies that comprise each—contain opaque mechanisms for recording and stratifying information that is rarely known to the public. In contrast, Collective Abundance’s take on these subjects is iconoclastic and subversive: Lafayette Cruise utilizes afrofuturist imaginary to speculate life in a future Chicago; Eliza Evans questions the politics of property records; Amina Hassen and Muvaboard Studios confront representation and visibility in public policies; Melody Stein and Cara Michell problematize the erasure of social and ecological narratives inherent in Western cartography; MICROPOLITAN studio reimages the psychogeography of the playground; Smita Sen activates memories of caregivers and loved ones through objects; Office Party considers the temporality and ephemera of nightlife. All of this is housed beneath Philip Poon’s playful reproduction of a Chinatown awning and Ana Ratner’s curving bookshelf, which holds a reimagined Old Farmer’s Almanac and a miniature library of living medicinal and local plants.

"Emergen-C Archive" illuminates elements of the past, present, and even future that we deem, collectively, to be important, and that are often excluded or expunged from traditional record-keeping. In this, we recognize the need for an emergent-emergency-strategy that, in keeping with the writings of adrienne maree brown, borrows from biomimicry in order to survive and embrace change with abundance.

DEMO2023 is created and presented by NEW INC. The Collective Abundance Showcase is presented in partnership with La MaMa Galleria with fabrication supported by WORTHLESSSTUDIOS. Visit DEMO2023.ORG for more information.