Join us for the third in a series of dynamic public programs that delve deeper into the themes, contexts, and aesthetics that have informed Queens Museum’s Spring 2019 Exhibitions. July 21 programs will feature artist interventions organized by Beta-Local and performances by Guadalupe Maravilla and Black Quantum Futurism.

Gallery hours will be extended until 6pm on the occasion of Alternatives & Futures Public Programs. 

Overview:

Beta-Local Presents:
11am-1pm: Pop-up Exhibit: Satellite calling control, no answer
1-4pm: Alien Publication and Workshop with Christopher Rey Pérez, presented with the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Program and Endless Editions 
2-3pm: Listening Session with Rebecca Adorno

3-4pm: Guadalupe Maravilla performance Walk on Water

4:15-5:30pm: Performance and Interactive Activity Project: Time Capsule by Black Quantum Futurism

Detailed Schedule of Events:

Lots of Flying Objects with Beta-Local

Beta-Local is an artist-run organization based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and transdisciplinary collaboration. Puerto Rico is an archipelago that has been defined by the US Supreme Court as an unincorporated territory “inhabited by alien races.”[1] As part of Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas, Beta-Local will transport its operations to Queens for a full day of programming led by aliens, alongside New York-based collaborators. Beta-Local collaborator bios can be found here.

11am-1pm: Satellite calling control, no answer [2]
Collaborators of Beta-Local are invited to mail unidentified flying objects into outer space/outer lands with no clear hope of a response or return, similar to NASA’s 1977 Golden Record, which famed astronomer Carl Sagan suggested was akin to launching a message in a bottle into the “cosmic ocean.”[3] Packages arrive at the Queens Museum from April to July and be opened in the museum on July 21st and displayed as traces of the organization’s work and ideas.[4]
Contributors: Amara Abdal Figueroa, ACirc, Aravind Adyanthaya, Juan Antonio Arroyo, Juan Bautista Climént, David Berge, Beta-Local, Ricardo Cabret, Matthieu Cartal, Ramiro Chaves, Céline Condorelli, Mike Cooter, Tony Cruz Pabón, Néstor Delgado Morales, Mary Ebeling, Cristian Forte, Javier Fresneda, Frances Gallardo, Carrie Hott, Andrés Jurado, Miatta Kawinzi, Karen Langevin, Lazum, Sofía Maldonado & Abdul Vas, Gilda Mantilla & Raimond Chaves, Noelia Medina, Alicia Milne, José Ortíz Pagán, Santiago Pinyol, Lydia Platón, Kathryn Ramey, Mariola Rosario, Lynne Sachs, Sagrada Mercancía (Adolfo Bimer, Santiago Cancino, Víctor Flores. Sofía de Grenade, Alejandro Leonhardt, Adolfo Martínez, César Vargas), Kristine Servia, TEOR/éTica, The Franklin, Salvi Vivancos, Susanne Winterling

1-4pm: Alien Publication and Workshop
Christopher Rey Pérez will edit a collective project investigating the ambiguous concept of ‘alien’, both as extraterrestrial and foreigner with a group of New York-based and foreign collaborators. The publication will explore processes of extraction, and ways in which foreigners and extraterrestrials are always extracted from their context. The resulting publication will be printed in risograph and presented with the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Program and Endless Editions as a number of unique editions for readers to continue extracting and publishing.
Contributors: Amara Abdal Figueroa, Aravind Adyanthaya, Ramiro Chaves y MANIMAS, Colectivo Se Habla Español, Nicole Delgado, Gabriela Galván, Diego Gerard, Amanda Hernández, Lucía Hinojosa, Mauricio Marcin, Jason Mena, Andrés Monzón-Aguirre, Andrés Paniagua, Iberia Pérez, Mariana Rodríguez, Luis Othoniel Rosa, Jorge Sánchez, Dmitri Zurita
(Atrium, 1st Floor)

2-3pm: Listening Session
As part of a series of conversations with musicians and sound artists about influences, interests and drifts, Beta-Local invites Rebecca Adorno to share her on-going research regarding mysterious unidentified audio frequencies and underwater sounds.
(QM Theater, 2nd Floor)

[1] Downes v. Bidwell, US Supreme Court, 1901.
[2] Satélite llamando a control, no responde – sung by Ismael Rivera, written by J. Marrero, 1974.
[3] Carl Sagan’s description of the NASA’s Golden Record, produced in 1977.
[4] A similar gesture was part of the project Estación Espacial by Guillermo Rodríguez (La Práctica 2015-2016), in the exhibition PANDORA curated by Paula Borghi.

Guadalupe Maravilla

3-4pm: Performance
Walk on Water is a new mythology by Guadalupe Maravilla which will be performed on the Queens Museum’s Panorama of the City of New York. Walk on Water will incorporate autobiographical storytelling and choreographed rituals to create new visual memories for the entangled genealogy of border crossing stories. Maravilla will perform on the rivers of the Panorama along with a futuristic border crossing Coyote, La Momia songstress and the Alien Abductor. A gong sound bath will be administered by a team of healers to transform the Panorama into a giant vibrational healing instrument intended to cleanse political phobias and blockages of New Yorkers.
Walk on Water is the second part of a performance trilogy based on Maravilla’s autobiography. The first part, titled The OG of Undocumented Children (performed at the Whitney Museum, 2018) told the story of how Maravilla became an unaccompanied child immigrant and his experience crossing the border into the US.. The second part for the Queens Museum focuses on Maravilla’s past as an undocumented immigrant, the deportations his family endured, and what methods can be found for healing. The final performance of the trilogy, Disease Thrower, will center on how the trauma of Maravilla’s border crossing manifested into cancer and the ways he overcame the disease.
Artist bio can be found here.
(Panorama of the City of New York)

Black Quantum Futurism

4:15-5:30pm: Performance and Interactive Activity
Project: Time Capsule by Black Quantum Futurism
Beneath several affordable housing projects and housing estates across America and Europe, mysterious time capsules have been unearthed. These time capsules appear to be quantum in nature, displaying the features of retrocausality and entanglement, opening up the capsule contents to influences from the present, the future(s) and the past(s). Project: Time Capsule is an interactive, performative lecture that explores the contents of the time capsules, as well as the topics of gentrification, temporal-spatial oppression, and Black communal hacking with readings, video, and live sound experimentation.
Project: Time Capsule is inspired by true events – a mysterious safe with time capsule-like contents was found beneath the grounds of a public housing complex in Macon, Georgia in 2017, while others have been discovered under several other affordable housing projects in recent years. In Project: Time Capsule Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) speculates on the discovery of these time capsules as activation events that occur in several different housing projects in America and Europe simultaneously. The unearthing of the time capsules, both real and mythological, touches upon many facets of BQF’s praxis, including their use of “quantum time capsules” and several projects exploring communal temporalities, sites of memory, and access to affordable housing.
Artist bio can be found here.
(Atrium, 1st Floor)

Related Programming on July 26

Catch the three co-directors of Beta-Local in conversation at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Friday, July 26 at 6.30 pm. Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Pablo Guardiola, and Michael Linares present the programs and day-to-day operations of the artist-run non-profit through the many forms of collaboration put into practice over the last ten years.
Click here to learn more. Tickets are required ($10 adults; $8 members, students, seniors, and visitors with a disability).

Images: Courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla, Black Quantum Futurism, and Beta-Local.
Credits (third image): Dr. Yajaira Sierra-Sastre in Hawaii during the simulated mission to the Red Planet. Photo: Sian Proctor

Public programs for Spring 2019 exhibitions at Queens Museum are made possible by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Special thanks to Paper Outlet for their in-kind donation to the Alien Publication and Workshop.