Jenna Bliss, Into this Recovery Center (2015)

Jenna Bliss, Into this Recovery Center, 2015. Still from video
Jenna Bliss, Into this Recovery Center, 2015. Still from video
Jenna Bliss, Into this Recovery Center, 2015. Still from video
Jenna Bliss, Into this Recovery Center, 2015. Still from video
Jenna Bliss, Into this Recovery Center, 2015. Still from video
Jenna Bliss, Into this Recovery Center, 2015. Still from video

Nottingham Contemporary. Part of Acting Out Nottingham 2015

8 April 2015

For this new performance Jenna Bliss draws on the history of the Lincoln Detox Center in the South Bronx, New York. In the 1960s and 70s the South Bronx was one of the poorest communities in the United States and consumed by drug abuse. As a result in 1970 the Lincoln Detox Center was initiated, following the occupation of Lincoln Hospital by local addicts, Think Lincoln a group of doctors from the hospital, and the Young Lords community health workers from the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement (HRUM), together they launched a drug detox programme.

In an anxious society, drugs are what we internalise to effect our way of ‘being here’ (or ‘there’). In this performance, Bliss looks at what society considers as drugs, and how state law, foreign policy and agencies such as the CIA, influence the definition and availability of drugs. Bliss brings together diverse elements that trace the history of Lincoln Detox Center to the present day, allowing spheres of social engagement to be exposed, disrupted and reassembled. The performance will use some Eastern practices to think through our own anxiety.

Jenna Bliss (b.1984 Yonkers, NY) is an artist and filmmaker living in New York.

 

Into this Recovery Center was commissioned with the South London Gallery.