Art + Exhibition News
AIRE LIBRE DEBUTS at the Torrance Art Museum
March 29 - May 24, 2025
opening reception:
March 29, 2025, 6-9 PM
**with a special performance by CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Company at 7 PM**
THE TORRANCE ART MUSEUM
3320 Civic Center Drive
Torrance, CA 90503
Erin Cooney’s Aire Libre is a dance-based video installation that examines air and soil pollution in Los Angeles County and its disproportionate effect on lower-income communities of color living amidst the heavy industry and infrastructure that underpin our capitalist, fossil-fuel-based economy.
Aire Libre is a collaborative project, bringing together East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Company, poet Rocío Carlos, and vocalists Carmina Escobar and Joung-A Monica Yum.
The dance performances by CONTRA-TIEMPO materialize the interconnectedness of our bodies with the air we breathe and the ground we tread, while Rocío Carlos's script intertwines her own poetry with the oral histories of East Yard community members, recounting their families' experiences with exposure to toxic air and soil.
Aire Libre showcases dancers performing in various locations, including the iconic 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. The footage captures a spectrum of settings, from ports, freeways, and rail yards to warehouse districts, refineries, and oil derricks, alongside parks and residential neighborhoods embedded within these infrastructures of commerce and production.
Aire Libre will also be publicly projected onto diverse industrial sites within the community in an activist manner, aiming to shine a light on the producers of harm, while reclaiming and reoccupying these sites of extraction and oppression with the vibrant bodies of dancers and faces of East Yard community members.