FLOODLINES

Presented in partnership with Wellcome, FLOODLINES is an evening of music, poetry, science, and conversation about what happens when waters rise and how cities heal. Ccoinciding with Climate Week NYC, we’ll convene by the Red Hook waterfront to turn our hearts and minds to all places where cities and oceans meet. Here, the flood is both a literal threat and a metaphor for social and infrastructural saturation. Staged in our historic brick-walled space that was once filled by Hurricane Sandy’s waters, this program asks: whose bodies bear such floods, and what does urban health look like in an age of extreme heat, heavier rains, and rising seas?

Hosted by the acclaimed writer Hanif Abdurraqib, with music by Hurray for the Riff Raff and poetry from Eileen Myles, the night will feature curator and design theorist Paola Antonelli leading a conversation with leading scientists, filmmakers, architects, and activists, along with libations and installations in the garden and a DJ set by Madame Gandhi. It will unfold in Pioneer Works’ main hall alongside a multimedia exhibition by Tuomas A. Laitinen that asks us to engage the dreamworld of octopuses. Considering all creatures who depend on the ocean for life, we’ll join together to reflect on how human health, now more than ever, depends on evolving our cities’ relationship with the waterways around us.

Interactive activations from FloodNet NYC, Genspace, Urban Ocean Lab, Resilient Red Hook, Collective Scope, Melting Metropolis, and Counseling Center Group of New York will take place before and after the program, offering hands-on ways to engage the science and stories at the evening’s heart.

About our host and guests

Hanif Abdurraqib is a prolific poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. A recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2021, his acclaimed and prize-winning books include They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Go Ahead in the Rain, A Little Devil in America, and, most recently, There’s Always This Year. Abdurraqib also serves as a Curator at Large at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where his work has shaped our cultural conversation by exemplifying poetry’s power to unite hearts and minds.

Hurray for the Riff Raff was founded by Alynda Segarra, an itinerant traveler whose adventures prompt art that reminds us there are always other ways to live. Born in the Bronx and of Puerto Rican heritage, Segarra was raised there by a blue-collar aunt and uncle, and was radicalized before they were a teenager by New York’s punk haunts and queer spaces. At 17, Segarra left the Bronx to crisscross the country by hopping trains. They eventually found home—spiritual, emotional, physical—in New Orleans, where they formed a hobo band and realized that music was not only a way to share what they’d learned and seen but a way to learn and see more. Rising from house shows to a major label, Segarra has become a pan-everything fixture of the modern folk movement whose most recent album, Live Forever, is out now from Nonesuch Records.

Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, and journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. The author of over twenty books, Myles’ novels include Chelsea Girls, which won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel, and their most recent volume of poetry is Working Life. Myles also serves as an advisor to Pioneer Works Broadcast. They will be joined onstage at Flood Lines by Steve Gunn, an acclaimed Brooklyn-based guitarist and singer-songwriter who has worked with countless leading and underground musicians and who appears regularly with Myles at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

Paola Antonelli is Senior Curator of Architecture and Design and founding Director of Research & Development at The Museum of Modern Art. Named one of TIME Magazine’s 25 most incisive design visionaries, her work explores design’s intersection with technology, biology, and society through groundbreaking exhibitions, her Design Emergency podcast, and her renowned MoMA R&D Salons.

Edward Buckles Jr. is a New Orleans-based filmmaker, photographer, and founder of the arts platform House of the Young Ent. He was 12 years old when Hurricane Katrina struck, and spent seven years documenting the disaster's long-term impact on his peers for his acclaimed HBO documentary Katrina Babies (2022)—winning both the Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Director and the inaugural Human/Nature Award at the Tribeca Film Festival. Drawing on his community's tradition of oral storytelling and fine-art portraiture, Buckles uses his craft to explore disaster trauma and reclaim the narrative of his city.

Kate Orff is the founding principal of SCAPE and Director of the Urban Design Program at Columbia University. Best known for pioneering "oyster-tecture"—using living reefs to soften waves, clean water, and restore coastal ecosystems—she spearheaded the Living Breakwaters project off of Staten Island. The first landscape architect awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, she was also named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people.

Robbie Parks is an environmental epidemiologist and Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. His research investigates the intersections of climate change, extreme weather, and health equity, and focuses on how tropical cyclones and heatwaves impact public health. He also serves as an Expert Consultant for the UN's Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health.

Daphne Lundi is the Managing Director of Urban Ocean Lab and an urban planner and policymaker focused on urban resilience, equity, and stormwater management. She has held climate and planning roles at FEMA, the NYC Department of City Planning, and the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, and has taught at Columbia University, Hunter College, and the City College of New York. She is also a founding board member of BlackSpace, a collective of Black urbanists working to center Black culture, heritage, and equity in city planning.

Karen Dawn Blondel is a trusted and respected local community leader and longtime resident of public housing in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She has been widely recognized and honored at the community, city, and state level for her grassroots community organizing efforts and unwavering commitment to social justice, environmental health, and housing equity. In her home neighborhood of Red Hook, she helped lead recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy and confronted the effects of climate change on her community and on NYCHA residents in particular.

Kiran Gandhi, who performs as Madame Gandhi, is an award-winning artist and activist known for her uplifting, percussive electronic music and message of personal power. A former drummer for Grammy-nominated artist M.I.A., she has been recognized as a TED Fellow, Forbes 30 Under 30 in Music, and by BBC 100 Women. While pursuing a Master's in Music, Science and Technology at Stanford University, she traveled to Antarctica to record melting glaciers—using sound to inspire empathy around climate change—and has partnered with Earth Percent’s Sounds Right program to credit NATURE as an artist on her latest recordings, redirecting streaming royalties to planetary conservation.

OceanX Education Art Residents

Supported by a residency partnership with OceanX with generous support from Dalio Philanthropies, the evening will feature immersive activations by OceanX Education Residents LaJuné McMillian, Memo Akten, Katie Hofstadter, and Matt McCorkle. Rooted in direct engagement with OceanX research, data, and scientific expertise, the residents’ projects use extended reality, artificial intelligence, performance, spatial audio, and interactive storytelling to make complex ocean systems tangible, inviting audiences to encounter marine discovery through embodied, imaginative, and collective experience.

LaJuné McMillian is a multidisciplinary artist and educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our contemporary forms of communication. They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black Realities and the Black Imagination. McMillian has had the opportunity to show and speak about their work at National Sawdust, Tribeca Film Festival, Times Square, and the Guggenheim Museum. They were previously the Director of Skating at Figure Skating in Harlem, where they integrated STEAM and figure skating to teach girls of color about movement and technology. They have continued their research on Blackness, movement, and technology during residencies and fellowships at the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, NYU ITP, Onassis ONX, NEW INC, and Barnard College.

Memo Akten and Katie Hofstadter are Southern California-based interdisciplinary artists and researchers whose work investigates the entanglements of technology, embodiment, consciousness, and culture. Merging backgrounds in dance, writing, poetry, drawing, sculpture, computer science, artificial intelligence, computational art, and public practice, they create speculative simulations, data dramatizations, immersive installations, and narrative experiments that probe the human condition in an age of artificial intelligence and accelerating transformation.

Matt McCorkle is an Emmy-nominated digital artist and systems thinker working at the intersection of sound, immersive technology, ecology, and human experience. His current practice focuses on building large-scale XR and AI-driven storyworlds.

About our Sponsors

Wellcome is a global charitable foundation, based in the UK, that supports science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone. Wellcome supports discovery research into life, health, and wellbeing, and is taking on three worldwide health challenges: mental health, infectious disease, and climate and health.

At Climate Week NYC, Wellcome is creating opportunities for people to explore what they think and feel about climate and health. In partnership with the creative and cultural sectors, they are sharing insights into science and health in ways that are meaningful and accessible to all.

FLOODLINES is made possible by Wellcome. The Pioneer Works Ocean Season is supported by funding from Dalio Philanthropies.