Swimming Towards Each Other

“I’m not a choreographer of things, I’m a teacher. So I like to make a forum and then inside of that forum, chaos can happen. I’m interested in the unpredictable results of creating some kind of frame many people can work within.”

– Nora Almeida

I met artist and activist Nora Almeida at a workshop she was facilitating with members of the Hydrofeminist Map Collective this summer in Brooklyn, New York. During this workshop we considered what embodied water practices could look like in an urban space. We circled the same block three times while paying attention to the water of our bodies and water systems of the city around us. Individually we roamed, letting our curiosity and senses guide our pathways while simultaneously subverting the conventions of the street. We ended our investigation collectively, small drops slowly pouring into the streets, flowing around construction workers and impatient pedestrians. On Fulton Street that day, we became something powerful and fluid, everchanging together. 

The looping and noticing practice of the workshop was familiar to me as a lap swimmer where each seemingly mundane lap holds new information if you let it. I’ve long been interested in the swimming pool as a site of possibility and exchange. Throughout my life the pool has been my hobby, my workplace, my obsession, my therapy, my people, and now – with the beginning of a self-initiated Artist In Residence project at my local public pool – my studio. So I was delighted to learn that Nora too was a swimmer and became eager to know more about how she brings her work into the open water. This fall we sat down to paddle through ideas around swimming as a tool for meeting your neighbors, making art, and questioning the systems at play.

---

Clara Harlow: I’m curious about your swimming history. Where did your swimming practice begin and how did it start to intersect with your organizing, art, and writing practices?

Nora Almeida: I grew up in Rhode Island on the bay swimming competitively. So when I went to sleep, I could hear the tide. I’m a water person, it’s like a part of my body, I guess. So I’ve been swimming for a long time and I’m really interested in public infrastructure. My background is in poetry and I’ve been a librarian now for a long time, so back in 2015 I wrote an essay about the municipal pools in New York City because I was interested in them, but I don’t think that swimming became more present in my art practice until about five years ago. I live in Gowanus [in Brooklyn, NY] in a building that floods when it rains pretty regularly, and I just became obsessed with water and started getting really involved in activism around the canal and the rezoning of this neighborhood.

So I have that historic water relationship from growing up, but swimming became a different thing to me in the pandemic because I couldn’t regularly access water. When all the pools closed, I was just like, What will I do? I swim every day. So I started swimming outside, but it was really hard because they were policing the beach at Coney [Island]. I swam a couple times anyway and just gave the cops the finger. But then I went to the National seashore, which wasn’t policed because it’s the National Parks Department and started swimming there. 

So it just became this different thing to me. It became more like a way to understand an ecosystem. After being in water for 20 minutes your body actually starts to like change, like your body temperature adjusts and you start to understand the conditions of the water, like how the current is moving. It’s very meditative, like you connect with the ecosystem in different ways. There’s also a lot of fear, but in an exciting way.

Clara:  Do you feel more drawn to open water swimming than swimming in a pool these days? 

Nora: Yeah, I do now, but there are a lot of unpredictable elements in open water swimming too and you always feel a little bit afraid. But then when you can leave your fear around being out in the ocean, you leave all your other fears. You know what I mean? Like, I bring a lot of my fear and sadness to the ocean, and then once you’re in the water for a while you lose a lot of perspective and start to become farther away from your terrestrial self the longer that you go. I mostly swim at Brighton Beach now, and it just feels really free. 

Clara: I feel so inspired by your open water practice. I grew up swimming mainly in pools and lakes in the Midwest, and it really does feel so different in the body and in the brain swimming across a lake and back versus the repetition of the lane. I’d love to open water swim with you when I’m back in New York!

Nora: Yeah, please come! I’m hoping to make it until November this year, I don’t know if I can be a polar bear plunger. I mean, I’m in neoprene already, but we’ll see how it goes. 

Clara: Do you find that you’ve been able to cultivate a more organic community through the open water swimming at Brighton Beach versus swimming at a pool or community center in New York?

Nora: Yeah it’s more of a social community, because it’s the beach, so people are just hanging out and swimming. One person always brings donuts. Last weekend I had extra cyanotype, so I brought it to the beach and everyone laid on it, and we made a swimmer cyanotype and then went swimming. On the weekends, you can go there anytime between 7:30 am and 3 pm and there are people there. Or you meet someone and you’re like, Oh, we’re the same pace. Let’s go swimming together again! and you exchange numbers. 

Clara: Yeah that makes sense to me, it’s such a natural gathering place. I joined St John’s community center in my neighborhood in Brooklyn earlier in the pandemic with the hopes of making some connections and getting out of my bubble a little bit, but I found people were really there to swim their laps, like clock in and clock out. It was hard to make buddies in the lanes, although I had a bit more luck in the locker room with the older women going to aqua aerobics. I was kind of surprised how much people were “staying in their lane,” as the saying goes. That’s not the community center pool culture I’m used to back in the Midwest.

Now I go to my community center in Portland pretty regularly, and for various reasons, people seem to have a softer schedule and are down to dish in the lanes and the hot tub more. That’s been a really nice shift because I agree, at the beach or lake it’s much easier to make friends. There’s something about the intensity of the swimming workout and getting your laps in that doesn’t always leave a lot of space for making connections. Which is the thing that I love the most about the pool – the community that can happen organically. Like, I love swimming too, but I’m really interested in what can happen in the container of swimming. 

What’s happening in the container of swimming in your practice lately?

Nora: For the past few years I’ve been working on site specific investigations and oral histories near ecologically disturbed waterways where there’s large public housing populations. I was working in Red Hook, Brooklyn for like a year just like popping up in public parks with a sign that said, “Would you swim here?” and “What if this Park was Underwater?” and then doing interviews, talking to people about their relationship with water and swimming and that opened a lot of doors.

And then last year while I was on sabbatical, I went swimming as research. So I was in South America and in Mexico City for most of the time and I wanted to find out how people swim in other places. I tried to find a public place to swim wherever I went, if possible. I also swam in open water whenever I could and it was interesting, because all the places that I went to had different problems with water. Some places had drought, but pretty much every place I went to did not have water that was safe to drink and there were a lot of problems with the privatization and regulation of water, or the government seizing community-owned land. They don’t have government protected land in a lot of places, so if the government’s like, we want to take this land, or a rich person is like, I want to buy this land, they basically just push local people out. So I learned a lot about water and the environmental struggles kind of around that.

Clara: I love that idea of swimming as research. I always try to find a place to swim when I’m traveling too. You really can find so much information about the place in these sites of recreation and play. 

How does collaboration function in your practice?

Nora: I’ve been doing some long term collaboration at Coney Island Creek. I’ve spent a couple years down there working mostly with a videographer, iki nakagawa, who’s documenting acts of care for the land, and has a dance and embodiment background, so she brings that into her videography practice. So I’ve been working with her, and we’ve been doing a lot of community events, beach cleanups, and screenprinting down there in conjunction with local organizers. 

And I would say that most of my work, regardless of what it is, is about this question of urban or spatial transformation and an attempt at the ephemeral, usually. But like, to me, that can be just cleaning, you know what I mean? It’s a great way to get to know people, because people are like, Oh, are you cleaning the beach? And you’re like, Yes! and they’re like, Thank you, or they tell you about what they’re doing. But it can also be a big performance art piece. 

And then there’s my Open Water project, where I do my oral histories. My friend Jordan Packer does a map, so people can map the water they see the most. That’s usually the entry point for the oral histories, like, what water do you see the most in your day to day life? And would you swim there? And then it kind of gets things going. People can mark it on the map with different color codes for fear, memories, feelings, wildlife, you know. 

Then I developed this idea to do some embodied mapping with Jordan, andrea haenggi, a body-based interdisciplinary artist who I’ve done previous collaborations with, and Estephania Mompean Botais who’s doing a PhD in Switzerland and using Gowanus as a case study. Estephania’s dissertation is about the state of emergency, and she was interested in how maps are used as a land management tool, and how everyone trusts a map and sees it as truth. So we were like let’s do an embodied map, let’s do a feminist map. Let’s bring the map into the body, like transforming the space by making a human a live map, and then documenting the process of mapping as an annotation, and that being representational, so then you have this critique of what a map looks like and how it’s created. Usually it’s created by one person for economic land management purposes, so kind of like countering that.

Clara: Tell me about the mapping event the Hydrofeminist Map Collective has coming up in Gowanus.

Nora: So I basically was doing some performance artwork around the Gowanus Canal and some of the redevelopment of my neighborhood, and ecological problems that were more focused on urban activism and urban erasure and autonomy. The fact that there is a lot of regulation and lack of access to water and swimming education was part of my performance and activism work. Swimming was always my thing but they started to intersect more when I started getting interested in doing more experimental embodied work, in part because of some of my collaborators. 

I’m like, Yay, people to just do stuff with. I don’t really do a lot of didactic collaboration. I’m not a choreographer of things, I’m a teacher. So I like to make a forum and then inside of that forum, chaos can happen. I’m interested in the unpredictable results of creating some kind of frame many people can work within. Same with collaboration, I think it’s interesting when people bring their practice, I learn a lot from them. 

So we’re doing this live mapping in Gowanus, and asking questions around emergency and the idea of feeling water that’s erased. And thinking about water and flooding as a memory that you can connect to your own experience and memories, and thinking about all the water in your own body, and connections to waterways. With the Gowanus Canal I can’t ask the same questions. No one can swim there [because it’s so toxic], I don’t have to ask about urban development. All around us is the intrusion of high rise apartment buildings. So I was like, what’s actually the thing you need to think about in Gowanus? How can I even get people to think about this water as alive? So many people talk to me about Gowanus because it’s the grossest body of water.

Clara: Right, it’s a punchline in New York. 

Nora: So how can we make people think about the water as alive, especially since now there’s no place to access it? So that’s part of what we’ve been trying to do with the Hydrofeminist MapCollective. Creating a sensory experience of connecting to the water as a living body that’s also connected to other bodies of water where things are still alive in it. 

What kind of swimming projects have you been up to?

Clara: This year, I’m starting a project that functions as a self-appointed Artist In Residence of sorts at my community pool in Portland. This residency doesn’t exist already, and I haven’t worked with an institution in this way before so I’m kind of navigating whether to go a bureaucratic route or do my own thing in the space. 

I love living in Portland, but it’s been really different trying to meet neighbors here. Because in New York, we live in a giant pre-war building, you know, six floors, and we have a dog, so we’re always in and out of the apartment, meeting people. But here everyone’s spread further apart in houses and we’re pretty much the only renters on our block, so the public pool has been the one place where I really have been able to meet a lot of my neighbors organically. 

Nora: Yeah, it’s really hard. I mean, here [in New York] especially. The stuff we’ve been doing at Coney Island Creek has happened in this much more municipal way, in a way that is limiting to me. iki is really interested in the bureaucracy, but I’ve been a public employee for 17 years, so I like my guerilla stuff. It’s interesting to me, when you need to respect the work that’s already happening there and work in a more bureaucratic way with a permit. Next week when we do a shoreline cleanup and printing workshop, the Parks Department is there, and I have a permit, so there’s those kinds of differences in the way that you can organize.

Clara: Yeah, it’s been interesting thinking about what we can do with or without permission in public or semi-public space and how that changes whether it’s just you or you’re part of a group. That was something I was thinking about a lot when participating in your workshop this September. How does being part of a collective allow you to access public space in a way that you wouldn’t be able to on your own? 

Nora: Yeah exercising urban autonomy is a big part of it, transforming space with other people. And you need other people to really do it at a large scale. 

Clara: Totally, and it’s just more fun that way. 

---

Nora Almeida is an urban swimmer, performance artist, educator, and activist based in Lenapehoking. Her art explores intersections of archiving, environmental investigation, and spatial disruption. Recent public artworks—Last Street End in Gowanus (2021), Land Use Intervention Library (2022), Creek: Two Cavities of the Heart (ongoing), and Open Water (ongoing)—focus on relationships between people and environmentally disturbed, post-industrial waterfront spaces.

Clara Harlow (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and former preschool teacher from Omaha, Nebraska. Her work operates as an invitation into themes of celebration, play, exchange, and alternative ways of measuring time and value. Through experiential events and interactive objects geared towards the public, Clara is interested in how we can turn the dilemmas of the everyday into an opportunity for experimental problem solving and collective delight. You can most likely find her at the local swimming pool in Brooklyn, New York or Portland, Oregon.