Event details
Saturday, March 29, 2025
12–3 pm

Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street
New York, New York

Free. Spaces are limited; register here.

Poet and vocalist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs debuts a new multimedia project comprising the publication In Search of Sugarcane and the video The Break-Up (both 2025) as part of a “memorial service” at Dia Chelsea. The publication draws from Diggs’s book Village (2023) and magnifies it with a hybrid essay documenting the purchase of a five-story postwar building in Central Harlem as well as its surrounding block and community. Meanwhile, in The Break-Up, made in collaboration with Gabri Christa and modeled on the works of Theo Anthony and Chris Marker, a native Harlemite is determined to fight and remain in a rent-stabilized apartment despite the ghosts and memories that speak through the sounds of active demolition, water leaks, and unwelcome visitors. A performative installation—featuring the video, an altar to Diggs’s Apartment 5RE, and the accompanying publication—takes inspiration from the state of tenant rights in New York and the mysterious phenomena known as “UEO” (unidentified European owner) to call for awareness to the national housing crisis, displacement, and the embodied impact of spatial and communal memory. Using text, performance, and moving-image, Diggs poses the questions: When is home no longer home? What are the dilemmas and legacies that perplex the native Harlemite? Why are UEOs like the Loch Ness Monster? 

The viewing starts at 12 pm and the service begins at 2 pm.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs was born and raised in New York. She is an interdisciplinary poet, sound artist, and author of TwERK (2013) and Village (2023), among other titles. Diggs’s work is truly hybrid: Languages and modes are grafted together and furl out insistently from each bound splice. Diggs has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2015), a Whiting Award (2016), and a C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art (2020), as well as grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, Creative Capital, Howard Foundation, and the Japan–United States Friendship Commission. Diggs has performed at an array of venues from CalArts, Valencia, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to poetry festivals in Denmark and Romania. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, she has presented events for BAMCafé, Brooklyn; Lincoln Center Out of Doors, New York; and El Museo del Barrio, New York. She teaches at Brooklyn and Barnard Colleges and lives in New York.

Gabri Christa was born and raised in Curaçao. She is a transdisciplinary artist whose work explores social issues through a postcolonial and experimental lens, and her creative practice centers multigenerational work. Her award-winning films have been screened at international festivals, museums, and galleries, and her latest screendance film, KANKANTRI (Silk Cotton Tree, 2024), is touring to various festivals worldwide. Christa was named one of the world’s 100 best filmmakers at Pangea Day (2008), a TED project, and awards for her choreography include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1999). An Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Global Brain Health, she is an associate professor of professional practice at Barnard College, New York, as well as founding director of the college’s Movement Lab, and founder of the Moving Body – Moving Image Festival. Christa lives in New York and is on the city’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission.