after air

At South Street Seaport, Asia Stewart created a sonic landscape and transient memorial to honor the lives of the tens of thousands of enslaved Africans who were trafficked and brought to the port of New York between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Wearing a garment made of fishing nets and copper pipes (made in collaboration with fashion designer Sarah Wondrack), she transformed her clothing into a series of wind chimes. The force of the wind and motion of her body caused the chimes to continuously ring out into the air.

This performance became almost entirely participatory; Stewart directed audience members and passersby to tie copper pipes to the railings adjacent to Pier 11 and play the copper as instruments. After an hour, participants and Stewart produced a cacophony that crescendoed with the rising tide at sunset.

This performance is site-specific, acknowledging the seaport's role in the Transatlantic slave trade. Ships that carried enslaved Africans docked in the area now known as South Street Seaport. At that site, enslaved people, many of whom had been purchased with copper rods or guinea rods in West Africa, disembarked and were sold by white traders and traffickers at the slave market on the corner of Wall Street and Pearl Street. There are no physical monuments at South Street Seaport that acknowledge, mark, or record this history for public memory, but this performance attempts to create one.

Stewart used the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases available through the Slave Voyages Database to determine that nearly 11,000 enslaved people disembarked in New York between 1630 and 1775, a period spanning the development of the Dutch settlement New Amsterdam and its transformation into the British colonial port New York City. Many of the city's earliest mayors invested in ships that carried enslaved people, and by 1730, nearly half of the city's white settlers directly enslaved Black people. New York State abolished slavery in 1827, completing a gradual emancipation process that began decades prior in 1799. Still, New York City remained at the center of the illegal transatlantic slave trade well into the start of the Civil War. Although many incorrectly believe that slavery only occurred in the South, enslavement is a defining feature of New York City's history and development. Many of Manhattan's earliest roads, buildings, and structures, including sites on Governors Island and the 1653 wall that Wall Street is named after, are the products of enslaved labor.

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