MELT ICE MELT
Saturday, August 29th from Noon to 10pm
at Le Petit Versailles Garden - 247 E 2nd St, New York, NY 10009
🌧️ or ☀️ (Rain or Shine)
On the last Saturday of August, Le Petit Versailles will present MELT ICE MELT, a day of exploration prompting participants to expand their awareness of change through bodily, sonic, and political intervention. Come cool off the end of summer with this all day program as we MELT ICE MELT ICE MELT ICE MELT ICE MELT ICE MELT!
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
12 - 10pm
Starting at noon, the audience is invited to sit on the ice bench until it melts. Throughout the hot NYC day, garden visitors are welcome to take a break on the ice with the opportunity to experience the unusual bench as it slowly melts and hopefully contemplate the unique garden respite in solitude. Participants will be asked about notable changes that they have experienced. The bench will be recorded as it melts and visitors’ responses will also be recorded.
Robert Ladislas Derr is a visual artist making performances from live to intervention, videos, photographs, and multimedia installations. He has exhibited and performed widely at venues including, the Riga Performance Festival (Latvia), SomoS Art House(Germany), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (US), CanberraContemporary Art Space (Australia), Mendel Art Gallery (Canada), Schirn KunsthalleFrankfurt (Germany), Wexner Center for the Arts (US), LIVE Performance Art Biennale(Canada), Irish Film Institute (Ireland), and Le Petit Versailles (US) in 2006. Derr earned his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
Know Your Rights Training: Defending Against I.C.E.
5 - 7pm
Along with the FREE distribution of anti-I.C.E. resources and Know Your Rights material, Le Petite Versailles will be hosting a KNOW YOUR RIGHTS TRAINING with a focus on personal and collective defences against the coercive tactics of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. I.C.E.’s violence continues to escalate and so must our awareness and use of those universal rights afforded to all within the borders of the United States of America. Our facilitator will bring years of on the ground organizing and coordinated mutual aid to the garden, conveying best practices to keep ourselves and our neighbors safe amidst the U.S. government’s overreach of power.
This training is for all skill levels and involvement, any person with an interest in learning more about civil protections. This is not professional legal advice, rather an opportunity to equip oneself with better knowledge of both legal framework and practices to stay safe when participating in an action or simply existing as an immigrant. With numbers comes power so we are encouraging you to bring your friends, family, and any folks you know who would benefit from better knowing their rights. We invite you to come and engage with other participants, share your stories and learn from the many voices that comprise the melting pot of New York City.
Ice-Out SP (2017)
8 - 9:30pm
video: Katherine Liberovskaya (2016)
music: Phill Niblock "Stosspeng" (2007)
(from Touch Strings, Touch Records TO:79)
2017, 60 minutes, HD, color, stereo
Video screening joined by David Watson, live on electric guitar!
A 59 minute extreme close-up long take of ice cubes slowly melting until they become just water in a stainless steel sink to Niblock's composition "Stosspeng" (2007) featuring Susan Stenger and Robert Poss on guitars and bass guitars. This piece is part of the trilogy "Threshold of Predictability", a series of 3 contemplative video-audio works that each very slowly unfold a single predictable event over the duration of a long Niblock drone music piece (each 30 to 60 minutes). A zen experience for lovers of contemplation and drone music.
Katherine Liberovskaya is an intermedia artist based in NYC. Involved in experimental video since the 80s, she has produced numerous fixed videos, video installations and performances shown around the world. Since 2001 her work predominantly focuses on collaborations with composers and sound artists notably in live video+sound concert situations where she seeks to create "music" for the eyes. For over 22 years she collaborated on many projects with her partner composer/intermedia artist Phill Niblock as well as many other composer/musicians. Recent collaborators include Katie Porter, Laura Ortman, Sarah Bernstein, Keiko Uenishi, Mia Zabelka and Al Margolis. She is currently the artistic director of Experimental Intermedia NYC.
Phill Niblock (1933-2024) was an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video and computers. Since the mid-60's he was making music and intermedia performances which have been shown at numerous venues around the world. He made thick, loud drones of music, filled with microtones of instrumental timbres generating many other tones in the performance space. He was, since 1985, the director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation NYC where he had produced Music and Intermedia presentations from 1973 to 2023 and curated EI's XI Records label until 2023. Phill Niblock's music is available on the XI, Moikai, Mode, Matiere Memoire, Room 40, and Touch labels. DVDs of films and music are available on the Extreme label and Von Archive. In 2014, he was the recipient of the prestigious John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
David Watson is an experimental musician. His work encompasses improvisation, composition and scoring for film and dance. He plays guitar and bagpipes, and is known for creating a vocabulary for bagpipes as a new-music instrument. His double CD released on, Fingering an Idea was praised by Other Music as not simply academic microtonality, but a unique exploration of “how sounds rub up against each other in unusual ways”. Twenty years later Foxy Digitalis wrote about the CD Woven (duos with Matthew Welch) that “the music is almost unfathomable. Except that this kind of ground-shattering, forward-thinking music is just what Watson and Welch do”. He worked with Phill Niblock for 30 years, culminating in Exploratory.Watson (2021). For over twenty years his trio with Lee Ranaldo and Tony Buck, Glacial, has made slow moving sonic shifts and sheets of sound, documented by On Jones Beach (Three Lobed). Since 2016 he has organized and presented hundreds of new music concerts in New York under the auspices of WOrK, Shift, FourOneOne and now Striped Light. In 2025 the Foundation of Contemporary Arts awarded him the Alvin Lucier award for experimental music. https://davidwatsonmusic.net