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Jacob Riis Beach has been known as a queer haven in Queens, NY since the 1940s. The conditions that allowed for this place to become what it is stem from its location: the undesirable periphery of the Neponsit Hospital. At its core, The People’s Beach is a time capsule that aims to capture the people who visit this beach, as well as the remnants of violence, destruction, celebration and resistance dotted along the landscape.
The Neponsit Hospital, which was abandoned for over two decades, provided a sene of safety and a literal physical barrier. Having been demolished in Spring 2024, questions surrounding the future of this queer enclave have arisen.
Through what’s washed up to shore like seaweed, dead jellyfish, shells and foam and then retreats back into the water, the ocean is a place in which the passage of time feels especially present. Sand has been eroded, reformed and in constant movement for millenia, creating this consistent reset. Sand lends itself to a malleability, for which its been exploited to advance projects dealing with capital and growth, but something this work questions is how much nature can truly be controlled.
In the same way that meiosis, a biological process that is simultaneously generative and destructive, creates new cells through tearing itself apart in order to lead the way for the next cells and generation, the conditions that allowed for this queer beach to exist are being torn down and replaced by something new. This doesn’t mean the queer haven will cease to exist – instead it will regenerate because ultimately queerness is the process of shapeshifting. For the past eight decades, functioning on the margins meant finding pockets of liberation amongst ruins in this constantly shifting shoreline.
This tension of simultaneous addition and eradication of land is at the crux of this project. The violence at the center of the building’s slow erasure is intertwined with the uninhibited freedom and joy that beachgoers experience. The People’s Beach speaks to tenderness, sexuality, intimacy and resistance inside of a larger story that aims to disassemble or disrupt that.