Embodied Research in Coney Island Creek
by Jordan Packer
Coney Island is a site of unrelenting climate catastrophe and simultaneous development, redevelopment, and more redevelopment.
In Coney Island, layers of history and memories are washed away.
Washed away with gentrification and washed away with sea level rise.
If you look, if you listen, there are fragments, there are memories, there are pieces of every person left behind. Fragments are always left behind.
Last summer, I visited Coney Island Creek often as a collaborator of Nora Almeida's project, Open Water. Open Water is an embodied research project about swimming, water, flooding, and what it means to interact with water in the city.
We spent time on the beach, with each other, with the water, and with locals and visitors.
I smelled the briny sea air and watched kids play in the sand.
Some days, we walked up and down the beach, collecting bags of trash on our own. Other days, we hosted community events with formal agendas and partnerships. All summer, we experienced the physicality of Coney Island.
I created a map of New York City’s waterways and asked Coney Island Creek passersby to point out the body of water they see most often.
The map grounded conversations about their feelings and memories of water, wildlife sightings, and experience of disaster. People told stories of Hurricane Sandy- trudging through flooded streets, the water up to their knees- fishing excursions, dead bodies in the water, not knowing how to swim, knowing how to swim but not wanting to. We listened to these stories. We marked their experiences with color-coded stickers on our map. We created connections.
Every few weeks, we visited, and with every visit I learned more and felt closer to the Creek.
It was a hot, humid summer. I remember my sticky body. I remember being dehydrated despite drinking a full bottle of water. I remember the sunburn I got on the exposed patch of skin between my shirt and my hair.
I remember the day when Nora taught me that the bright pink plastic tubes on the beach were containers for fentanyl. One day, we saw so many dead animals on the beach that it was hard not to be emotional. The dead dog was the hardest. It was still wearing a collar.
In other moments, we recorded underwater sounds of Coney Island Creek. I loved the softness of the water moving—the occasional abrupt splash. We ate Italian ice on the train home and shared our favorite moments from the conversations we had.
I experienced and felt Coney Island. Embodied research is physically and emotionally exhausting, but also deeply rewarding. These fragments of memories are worth remembering, archiving, collecting.
When we walked the beach, we found items left behind:
A graffitied party boat
A princess purse
One flip flop
A mermaid figurine
Shells of horseshoe crabs
Half of a skateboard
At one event, we created art from trash we collected on the beach.
We first collected trash, thinking of it as trash to be removed from the beach.
We then collected trash, thinking of it as magic items to create something beautiful together.
We placed our magic items in a pile, savoring our selections.
We made light-sensitive, cyanotype, prints together.
We rushed to place our items atop the light-sensitive sheet and watched as the sun baked the print, changing it from a lime green to aqua blue to gray in minutes. After a quick soak in water, it became a deep blue. Our cyanotypes showed some recognizable trash shapes, but also transformed our individual items into a collective print-- a representation of our shared experience.
We collected memories.
We collected trash.
We collected these fragments of the past and held on to them.
On September 29, 2023, there was a big rainstorm in New York.
My basement flooded with about 10 inches of water, up to the second stair of the staircase.
The next day, we went to Coney Island Creek. We walked the beach. The sand was so saturated it felt like walking in mud.
We visited the graffitied party boat— the boat that we fondly discovered months earlier. The storm covered the boat in sand. It barely looked like a boat.
Time and space join together in my memory. While the landscape looks the same, months have passed, and the boat is almost unrecognizable.
Our map of New York City’s waterways — filled with feelings, memories, wildlife, disasters — now lives on the wall above my basement in my home. When I look at it, I think of the stories, places, memories that folks shared. I think of my own experiences with water in New York— with flooding, with sitting on the shore, with talking about water with passersby.
These are the fragments that remain. The fragments worth remembering.
Embodied Research in Coney Island Creek
alt text - from left to right, top to bottom
This piece is a collage with written and visual components. The photos correspond to the written component.
Image 1) An image of a map of New York City’s waterways mounted on poster board at Coney Island Creek on City of Water Day in July 2023.
Image 2) The background is a semi-transparent zoomed in version of the map with an overlay of found objects in Coney Island Creek. Coney Island Creek is marked on the map with a white pin.
Image 3) A mushroom growing in the sand.
Image 4) Jordan and collaborator, Iki Nakagawa, are standing on the beach, collecting trash in trash bags.
Image 5) On the left, Nora talks with a passerby in front of the map of NYC’s waterways behind a folding table. In front of the table, two signs read “would you swim here” and “what if this park was underwater.” The Coney Island Creek shore is in the background.
Image 6) Close-up of half of a skateboard on the sand.
Image 7) An abandoned, graffitied motor boat sits atop the sandy beach.
Image 8) Close-up of a plastic mermaid toy that is attached to a plastic wave and sprinkled with sand.
Image 9) A collection of the magic trash items that were collected, as described in written portion.
Image 10) An image of the lime green light sensitive fabric with our magic items atop it at the start of its sun exposure.
Image 11) An image of the same fabric as it begins to grey and react to the sunlight.
Image 12) The resulting deep blue cyanotype print with objects removed.
Image 13) A faded background image of the Coney Island Creek shore.
Image 14) A second cyanotype print in the making, featuring a plastic chair, bag of trash, and child posing in a star.
Image 15) The resulting deep blue cyanotype print. An outline of the child’s body is clear, along with the cross-hatching of the plastic chair.
Image 16) A duplicate photo of the abandoned, graffitied party boat from prior in the collage.
Image 17) The graffitied party boat after the big rainstorm, almost completely filled with sand. Only the rim of the motor boat and swim platform were exposed, no graffiti shows.
Image 17) A semi-transparent photo of Nora Almeida and Jordan collecting trash on the Coney Island Creek beach.
Image 18) A screenshot of my phone on September 29, 2023 at 9:23 a.m. with the words:“Emergency Alert: National Weather Service: A FLASH FLOOD WARNING.”
Image 19) An image of the flooding in my basement, taken from the stairs peering down into the basement below. The water is murky and 10 inches deep.
Image 20) A semi-transparent photo of the tide at Coney Island Creek is overlayed on a photo of my hallway with the map of NYC’s waterways on the wall on the right, above the stairs to my basement.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jordan Packer is an educator, urban ecologist, and data analyst based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her M.S. in design and urban ecologies from Parsons School of Design, where she studied land use activism. In her free moments, Jordan teaches at Parsons School of Design, volunteers at Interference Archive, and collaborates with the Solidarity Research Center.
Next Chapter in this Issue: Community and Climate Adaptation — Olive Toran
PUSH/PULL is an online journal published by Culture Push, a virtual venue that allows us to present a variety of perspectives on civic engagement, social practice, and other issues that need attention. PUSH/PULL helps to situate Fellows and Associated Artists and the work they do within a critical discourse, and acts as a forum for an ongoing dialogue between Culture Push artists, the Culture Push community, and the world at large.