MAIN GALLERY:

ERIN COONEY: AIRE LIBRE

MARCH 29 - MaY 24, 2025

A live performance featuring CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Company and vocalist Carmina Escobar, performers featured in Erin Cooney’s Aire Libre will take place in TAM’s entrance courtyard at on Saturday, March 29th at 7 PM.

Aire Libre is a single-channel video installation about environmental injustice in South Los Angeles made in collaboration with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, a community advocacy group based in Commerce and Long Beach.


Aire Libre is a single-channel video installation about environmental injustice in South Los Angeles made in collaboration with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, a community advocacy group based in Commerce and Long Beach. Central to the project are oral histories the artist recorded with East Yard members who are directly impacted by toxic pollution emanating from the petrochemical, transportation, and manufacturing infrastructures underpinning our capitalist, fossil-fuel-based economy. Collaborating LA-based poet Rocío Carlos wove the oral histories into a spoken-word performance, which she voices in the piece alongside East Yard members. Dance plays a central role in Aire Libre as a means to materialize the physical relationship we share with the air we breathe and the soil we tread. Dancers belonging to CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Company, another project collaborator, perform in the video piece in various locations including the 6th Street Bridge in Boyle Heights, Bandini Park beneath the 710 freeway in Vernon, the residential streets of East LA, and the concrete banks of the LA River in South LA. Aire Libre depicts ports, freeways, rail yards, warehouses, factories, rendering facilities, refineries, and oil derricks, as well as the parks and residential neighborhoods embedded within these networks of commerce and production. In collaboration with East Yard, Aire Libre will be projected onto diverse industrial sites within the community, to shine a light on infrastructures of harm while reclaiming and reoccupying these sites of extraction and oppression with the vibrant bodies of CONTRA-TIEMPO dancers and East Yard community members.