The Vanderbilt Republic × The People Movers proudly present The Middle Passage — a four-week performance art narrative in site-specific camera obscura at Open Source Gallery.

The Middle Passage is a performance art series curated by George Del Barrio & Kate Ladenheim at Open Source, remade as a focused camera obscura with multiple projections of the world outside the gallery
as surface-mapped stages — upside-down and backwards.

The obscura presents inside the gallery what is outside of the gallery; our world, and specifically, a gentrifying Brooklyn block in a neighborhood that is undergoing modern day colonization. These are the rippling effects of the middle passage: cruelty, entitlement, disregard for communities. The obscura presents and subverts these images, and makes it clear that they are subject to our own perspective and manipulation.