What?

A guided walk tracing how queer and marginalized communities have reclaimed New York’s sports spaces, from surveillance and resistance at the West Side YMCA, to early Pride routes, to the Gay Games celebrations in Central Park.

How?

In dialogue with the Performa Archive, the route nods to Paulo Bruscky’s Collective Football Game and Mike Kelley’s examinations of American sports culture, linking historical and speculative practices of play to contemporary artistic inquiry.

Why?

Framed through team play as a microcosm of society, the walk looks at how inclusion/exclusion, leadership/collaboration, and individual drive/collective care play out on courts, fields, and running paths, and how those lessons travel beyond the game.
The premise is simple and hopeful: if teams can be reorganized with joy and care, so can cities; turning play into a small rehearsal for new ways of being together.