Location: The Point, 940 Garrison ave, Bronx NY 10474. Directions

You can come from ruins, yet not yourself be ruined. Social disintegration and existential desperation can be sources of life and creative energy. Our first hit rappers know something that Hegel said modern men and women had to learn: they know how to “look the negative in the face and live with it.” They have looked the ruins in the face, and they have lived with them, and they have come through. Now they can see and feel their way to new life.  – Marshall Berman “New York City: Seeing Through the Ruins”

Artist and activist Shellyne Rodriguez will be hosting a panel discussion that aims to trace back the people’s ongoing fight to remain in the Bronx. The event will cover the era of the slumlord fires, the subsequent redevelopment, as well as the most recent efforts to gentrify the Bronx via luxury developments, including an attempted renaming of the South Bronx and the art-washing that is plaguing major cities throughout the globe. Longtime tenants who survived the fires will give testimonials and veteran activists from Nos Quedamos, Mothers on the Move, and Take Back the Bronx will provide a historical context for the battle of the Bronx now raging between the community, developers, and the artists caught in between.

This event is a part of a series of six programs associated with Nonstop Metropolis: The Remix, complementing the launch of Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Nonstop Metropolis: A New York Atlas at the Queens Museum on October 2, 2016. Marshall Berman’s essay “New York City: Seeing Through the Ruins”” is a jumping off point for the map Burning Down & Rising Up:The Bronx in the 1970s by cartographer Molly Roy and artist Lady Pink; both found in Nonstop Metropolis.

Free, no RSVP required.

Photo: Protestors at the No Commission art fair organized by Bronx Hip Hop Producer Swizz Beatz.