Remaining Connected

For a year spent locking down, there’s been an awful lot of talk  about moving. New Yorkers are supposedly fleeing the city in droves (or  so the story goes). The flipside of this narrative, of course, is forced  removal: a looming eviction crisis that is set to disproportionately  impact the city’s most vulnerable. Amid the upheaval, a long-standing  arts organization is settling into a new space in Bedford-Stuyvesant —  and engaging directly with what it means to put down roots in a  neighborhood undergoing contentious changes. The Laundromat Project may have started as an itinerant endeavor, but  it’s always been anchored in the city’s communities of color. Through  fellowships, residencies, and place-based art projects (many hosted by  actual laundromats), the Laundromat Project has been supporting artists  whose work deals with site-specific issues impacting the city’s Black  and brown residents: gentrification and displacement; policing and  community safety; climate change and food injustice. For the last five  years, the organization been sharing space in a two-bedroom-apartment-turned-community-hub in the South Bronx; but when it came time to find a more permanent home,  they looked to their own history. Founded 15 years ago in Bed-Stuy, the  Laundromat Project is returning to set up shop in a storefront on  Fulton Street. We hear from the LP’s Hatuey Ramos-Fermin, Cievel Xicotenchatl and Erica Rawles about the challenges of moving in and meeting the neighbors in the  short term, and how they are working to build a shared vision with their  community for the next ten years.