New Ideas CityHello Museum

Invisible Loisaida

Cover Image:

Courtesy Loisaida, Inc.

Part of the Street Program

The booth by Loisaida, Inc. will play with the visible and invisible tensions of rescued social spaces, their cultural output, and their lack of inclusion in the mainstream story line of the Lower East Side. Through a collaborative installation by resident artists Edgardo Tomás Larregui and Alejandro Epifanio, the booth will recreate the vernacular architecture of “seclusion” and social gathering elements of the traditional casita or urban community garden. Our casita also involves a strategy to render visible the reality of Loisaida, Inc., a social-cultural-artistic community (Latino/Puerto Rican Lower East Side), whose contributions to New York City and the downtown scene have usually remained unacknowledged, absent, and invisible to the hegemonic artistic and cultural narratives of New York City’s creative myth. The presentation will feature performances by ongoing Loisaida Center collaborators and projects: the Salvage Project; Flux Theater Ensemble; the Plenatorium, which nurtures and documents the “plena universe”; and Edwin Torres, a Nuyorican poet, performer, and downtown icon, who will explore the nonappearance of “No-isaida.”

Edwin Torres will perform at 5 PM in Sara D. Roosevelt Park near Houston Street. He is a bilingual poet rooted in the languages of sight and sound. He is the author of Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press, 2014), Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books, 2010), and The Popedology of an Ambient Language (Atelos Books, 2007), among other books.