Colombian-born Ximena Garnica and Japan native Shige Moriya are a multidisciplinary duo creating collaborative works ranging from sculptural, video, light, social and mixed-media installation art to contemporary performances, publications, and research projects. Since 2001, Garnica and Moriya’s works have been presented at leading arts venues such as BAM, HERE, The Brooklyn Museum, Japan Society, The Czech Center New York, The New Museum, The Watermill Center, The Asian Museum of San Francisco, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California Riverside; and in large and small public spaces such as Times Square, NYRP Community Gardens, and NYC streets, among many other spaces in the US and abroad in Japan, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Mexico and Colombia. Their work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Theater Drama Review (TDR), The New Yorker, Art News, and Hyperallergic, among others. Shige has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Rest Artis, and Scope Art New York. Ximena received the Van Lier Fellowship for extraordinary stage directors, and was recently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California Riverside and they have been nominated for the USA Artists Fellowship and the Herb Alpert Award. 

Ximena and Shige are based in Brooklyn at their live-work space, CAVE, where they founded LEIMAY and the LEIMAY Ensemble. The word LEIMAY is a Japanese term symbolizing the changing moment between darkness and the light of dawn or the change between one era to another. As an organization, LEIMAY stimulates dialogue between performing, visual, and live arts and offers a plethora of art programs that attract, provoke, and support exchange and generative confrontation among culturally diverse audiences and artists.

The LEIMAY Ensemble is a group of national and international dancers and performers who work regularly throughout the year creating body-rooted works and developing the LEIMAY LUDUS practice, which explores methods to physically condition the body of the performers and develop a sensitivity to the “in-between space.” Since LEIMAY’s origins at CAVE, one of the pioneer art spaces of Brooklyn’s underground gallery scene in the mid-90’s, through the founding and producing of international and local performance festivals, residencies, fellowships and educational projects, LEIMAY transverses artistic praxes and continues to be an incubator for the work of Ximena, Shige, the LEIMAY Ensemble, and a rotating group of artists. LEIMAY is constantly transforming as a living organism open to new challenges, constantly re-shaping in response to internal and external dynamics.

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation has awarded a grant to Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya in support of the first two borough premiers of Correspondences. 

Correspondences is a sculptural performance installation envisioned as a hyper-local work that will tour each of NYC’s five boroughs. The installation offers spectators multiple entry points to engage with questions of being, interdependence, and coexistence. 

As part of Correspondences, single bodies are enclosed inside transparent chambers partially filled with sand. Bodies are donned with gas masks as they try, time and again, to rise to a standing position. At intervals, machines attached to the chambers trigger a blast of sand causing the performers to lose their footing, sinking them back down into the ground. This seemingly perpetual eruption repeats throughout daily performance activation periods of Correspondences, both with and without performers.  In Correspondences, performer, observer, machines, natural elements, and the urban square mingle in an entangled poetic microcosm while opening inquiries into animate life and environmental ethics. 

How can we reconcile existential tensions between the flow and currents of the animate life of environments in contrast to the human-centered occupation of the world? What happens to our bodies when we encounter the unknown? How are we reshaping environmental ethics? Why are existential questions of being, interdependence, and coexistence, vital in these times of readjustment of powers and values? These are some of the questions Ximena and Shige are asking as New Yorkers, as immigrants from eastern and western hemispheres, as a couple who share a life and artistic partnership, and through the poetic entangled microcosm of Correspondences.

Correspondences first view in Manhattan’s Astor Place from October 1–4, 2020 is presented by the OBIE-winning HERE and LEIMAY, and supported by The Village Alliance.  Audiences can safely engage with the installation at any time and also witness 35-minute activations performed by members of the LEIMAY Ensemble. Correspondences was first developed at LEIMAY's studio in South Williamsburg, with in-progress performances at the Watermill Center in the summer of 2019.

During the first borough premier a series of ancillary actions, running September 21 - November 30, 2020 will also take place and include:

Correspondences -The Audience Files: A growing oral and written interactive archive for audiences to engage with over conversation by sharing their responses to questions of being, interdependence, connectivity, and environmental ethics. QR codes located at various tables across the plaza guide audiences to participate both on-site and on-line. Correspondences Audience Files will be open to the public to engage for 30 days starting a week prior to the installation launch. (September 21, 2020 | www.correspondencesfiles.leimay.org)

Correspondences On-Demand:  For a limited period of time, two different art films capturing the meditative nature of Correspondences will be available for on-demand access. (October 1st to November 30 at www.ondemand.leimay.org)

Correspondences Talks: A conversation with guest activists, scholars, designers, and scientists to discuss what “decentering the human” means for them and how this action relates to issues of environmental ethics and social justice. (November 6th, 2020)

Dancing for the Environment:  In support of local and international, indigenous, and immigrant-led organizations working to create a more just world, from the Amazons to the Bronx to LEIMAY’s home neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Correspondences inaugural site East Village. Learn more at www.dancingfor.leimay.org)

Please visit LEIMAY’s Instagram, Facebook, and their website for more information.

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