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Black Quantum Futurism: The Memory Vortex Inn (Ongoing)

Community Space

Open Room
September 20, 2024 – June 30, 2025
Tuesday – Friday, Sunday | 12 – 6pm

Free (Check out the line-up below)

The Memory Vortex Inn is a year-long installation in Open Room, our gallery and community space. The Inn will include a program of film screenings, readings, sound healing sessions, performances, and workshops organized by Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa of Black Quantum Futurism, Performance Space New York, and all of our communities. Black Quantum Futurism transforms Open Room into a sanctuary prioritizing community-based work that uplifts temporal autonomy, play, experimentation, spatial reclamation, and collective visioning.

The Memory Vortex Inn is a sanctuary nestled within the liminal corridors of time, blending the realms of Black temporalities, the mysteries of quantum physics, and the interwoven heritage of African and Afro-Diasporic time and memory practices. The duo’s work intersects futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalized communities. Building on themes present throughout their work, but site-specific to Performance Space, The Inn calls attention to our ability to manipulate space-time and to imagine and build new realities. Crafted with a retrocausal blueprint, this Inn unfurls backwards into the cosmos, tracing our origins and our potential paths, standing as a spacetime for the disentangling and rethreading of our time-bound narratives, fostering a communal space for the re-envisioning of what has been and what could be, with a deliberate focus on the unique temporal and spatial experiences that encourage an experimental dance with the dimensions of time and space.The installation is designed with elements such as the Oral Futures Jookbox, where visitors can record their own memories and stories and listen back to others’. The space will also feature retractable microphones to encourage spontaneous performances, a library, a synth laboratory, and interactive clock sculptures that embody the principles of temporal abundance, all within a setting that evokes the comfort and community spirit of a lounge, the restful embrace of an inn, and the creative vibrancy of a convening.

The Memory Vortex Inn is in service of a future where we—the collective—are stewarding, not just land, but reality itself. Black Quantum Futurism’s interest in creating communal space-time aligns more generally with the ethos of Open Room, which is accessible to the public to use throughout the year. We welcome you to hang out, work, use our free WIFI, and relax, even when no programs are scheduled.

Spring/Summer Season (2024)

This Spring-Summer season pays homage to our historical legacy characterized by a commitment to risk-taking and deliberate disruption of established artistic and social paradigms. Performance Space continues its focus on the utilization of intentional deconstruction to clear the path for regeneration, transcending us to new realms and dimensions.

Join us this Spring as artists delve into the vestiges of our shared history and craft an innovative vision for the future, guiding audiences through non-linear and queer temporal experiences through song, dance, and visionary forms of performance.

John Giorno Octopus Series (Fall 2023)

Using the Octopus’s decentralized nervous system as an inspiration for Performance Space New York’s curatorial practice, the John Giorno Octopus Series invites artists and guest curators to organize an evening-length program with several artists working in any number of disciplines. The series is named after legendary performance poet, John Giorno, and continues Performance Space’s legacy of artist-centric programming and creating space for risk-taking.

Invisible Cultures Series

Communities of microbes swirl invisibly on and within our bodies, enriching and contaminating. The corpses of whales decompose and unleash nutrients into the magnificence and muck of poisoned oceans. Imprints of our past and visions of the future commingle with the present. In Invisible Cultures—our latest series of thematically coalescing interdisciplinary work—live performances, film screenings, installations, discussions, and lectures map systems of coexistence within ancestral, oceanic, and microbial realms.

The series celebrates a primordial queerness in worlds whose ancient, amorphous, fluid structures metaphorically evade the grasp of colonialism and capitalism—yet are nonetheless physically vulnerable to their exploitation and destruction.

At the heart of Invisible Cultures is the phenomenon of whale fall, in which the majestic creature’s carcass plunges to the ocean’s depths and breathes new life into it. This process is embodied in the recent works of mayfield brooks, who presents their latest iteration of Whale Fall—titled Wail•Fall•Whale•Fall—and resonates with the cyclical nature of an ancestral and futuristic temporal vision offered in programs from Knowledge of Wounds and Black Quantum Futurism. Anicka Yi curates an evening considering ocean bacteria’s catalysis of multicellular life. Angel Dimayuga creates a living room environment convening artists and thinkers considering global Asian diasporic experiences, submerged in an oceanic soundscape by Miho Hatori. In quori theodor’s Open Room installation, vacuum packed fermented foods make nourishing offerings in an otherworldly, grotesque environment of curdling gender and Americana. In an evening of immersive dance and film, Galle invites us to decompose into collaboration and non-linear dimensions. Anto Astudillo curates a multidisciplinary evening gathering trans and non-binary perspectives that exude from organic matter and level hierarchies between the worlds of humans and microorganisms.

In these works, we see how ubiquitous, unseen forces are forever at play. We see how considering their queer, wild forms (and resistance to form) can shake hardened understandings of our world that put humanity at odds with nature and science at odds with spirituality; encage gender and sexuality; and flatten time itself. The series is an invitation to navigate untamed oceanic currents, temporal entanglements, and microbial swarms that mirror the very essence of queer life: interconnected, generative, and rooted in the intricate dance between chaos and structure.

First Mondays: Readings of New Works in Progress (Fall/Spring)

One of the great advantages of living in New York City is that we can hear new ideas as they are being created, instead of having to wait years for those books to appear on bookstore shelves. First Mondays allows us to share accomplished writers’ processes as they are happening and gives us an intimate insight into their new work in-progress, long before publication or performances. Join us every first Monday at Performance Space New York for a special opportunity to hear the future.