Undercurrent is excited to announce “10001,” a collaborative virtual project that launches on August 5 at 10001.undercurrent.nyc and continues through September 12. This project is co-organized by the European Union National Institutes of Culture’s New York Cluster. Borrowing the zip code from both the Empire State Building and New York City’s Central Post Office, “10001” focuses on the collaboration of strangers and the narrative of their collective creative process using New York City as the linchpin. Coming from a variety of disciplines, twelve European Union artists who have never met each other will be randomly paired, making up a total of six teams. Through a series of Zoom sessions, each team will spend a six-week period developing a single project that will reimagine NYC post March 20, 2020.
New York City has long been a blueprint for pop culture and fiction, a metropolis amongst vertical cities, and a plinth for diversity, culture, and the arts. It has weathered and survived many unforeseen catastrophes, and even now struggles on a variety of fronts after having been the world epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the most densely populated city in the United States, we will need to adapt and evolve as families, neighborhoods, communities, and boroughs. With shelter-in-place orders, social distancing, closed country borders, and global protests for justice and racial equality, communication, exchange, and collaboration are needed more than ever. This project imagines rehabilitating NYC through collaboration. As strangers, how do we work together with what we do not know for a hopeful and better tomorrow?
