On August 5, a group of New York based EU National Institutes of Culture’s led by the Lithuanian cultural attaché in New York Gražina Michnevičiūtė and a gallery Undercurrent launched “10001,” a collaborative virtual project that continues through September 12. 

Borrowing the zip code from both the Empire State Building and New York City’s Central Post Office, “10001” focuses on the collaboration of strangers and the narrative of their collective creative process using New York City as the linchpin. Coming from a variety of disciplines, twelve EU artists who have never met each other have been randomly paired, making up a total of six teams. Through a series of Zoom sessions, each team will spend a six-week period developing a single project that will reimagine NYC post March 20, 2020.

New York City has long been a blueprint for pop culture and fiction, a metropolis amongst vertical cities, and a plinth for diversity, culture, and the arts. It has weathered and survived many unforeseen catastrophes, and even now struggles on a variety of fronts after having been the world epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the most densely populated city in the United States, we will need to adapt and evolve as families, neighborhoods, communities, and boroughs. With shelter-in-place orders, social distancing, closed country borders, and global protests for justice and racial equality, communication, exchange, and collaboration are needed more than ever. This project imagines rehabilitating NYC through collaboration. As strangers, how do we work together with what we do not know for a hopeful and better tomorrow? 

As a gathering space for plural nations, cultures, languages, and beliefs, New York’s internationalist energy has flowed into the makeup of the artists in “10001.” Their practices range from moving and still visual and performing arts to music composition and film. Participating artists include: Anna Bera (Poland), Alex Camilleri (Malta), Mariella Cassar-Cordina (Malta), Saddie Choua (Flanders, Belgium), Nicola Ginzel (Austria), Justyna Górowska (Poland), Ada Van Hoorebeke (Flanders, Belgium), Ieva Mediodia (Lithuania), Luisa Muhr (Austria), Kira Nova (Lithuania), Jonas Tarm (Estonia), and Terttu Uibopuu (Estonia). 

This project was initiated by the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Consulate General of Estonia in New York and co-organized by Undercurrent and Arts Council Malta in New York, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, the General Delegation of the Government of Flanders to the USA, and the Polish Cultural Institute in New York.