Listen to the text of this chapter:

andrea haenggi (*This Is Not A Drill* Community Fellow), bladderwrack with Dan Phiffer

bladderwrack (to be with the shore is all we ask), 2023

Interactive Website, LED Screen, Wall Map, bladderwrack, stones, salt, annotated CWP-book

bladderwrack, a fluid outpost of the intertidal zone of Lenapehoking (New York and New Jersey), is an embodied, research-based, and participatory platform. It was created in collaboration with the indigenous seaweed bladderwrack and is hosted both in NYU's Bobst Library and at tobewiththeshoreisallweask.care/bladderwrack.

bladderwrack digitally archives real and imaginative experiences with a focus on the endurance of the bladderwrack species, an indigenous seaweed living within the intertidal zone (between the low and high tide mark) along Lenapehoking's shoreline. The project is an urgent call to (re-)connect with the ebb and flow of our shoreline and the more-than-human beings that live there (and could live there) to find pathways for multispecies communities that can thrive and be flexible.

Since colonization, the urban coastal ecosystem in the United States has experienced neglect, alteration, landfill, and land grab. The project underscores the ecosystem's flexibility in confronting these challenges while seeking a future where the shore holds decision-making significance and is valued as an integral component of an urbanized island, rather than just being subjected to harm and disregard.

Through its interactive intertidal interface, bladderwrack invites the audience to become a beta tester in the effort of bringing the coastal ecosystem into the homes of people. Audience members follow a text and video log which recorded the intertidal zone with bladderwrack in July 2023, the hottest month on record.

The quasi-personal text and video logbook documents andrea haenggi's collaboration with bladderwrack and bladderwrack's own voice at the Marsha P. Johnson State Park's shoreline. Additionally, the logbook includes urban ecological information, image descriptions, and questions that prompt the audience to tell their own shore stories.

Against the dire backdrop of rising sea levels and warming oceans, this interaction underscores the pressing need to listen to the dynamic shoreline, where in low tide it is land and in high tide it becomes sea.

bladderwrack incorporates tangible elements such as a map, the community-annotated New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan book, as well as stones, salt, and bladderwrack. These items are brought into the NYU Bobst library, a space that bridges virtual and physical realms, through a procession that begins at the threatened shore of the East River Park in the environmental justice neighborhood of Lower East Side.

bladderwrack is part of a 10-year project that is still ongoing and that is called to be with the shore is all we ask. It started in 2021 in response to the city's waterfront plan to transform the shoreline. Rather than working with nature that is already present, the city's plan is human-centered and focused on hardening the shoreline and, therefore, will further destroy shoreline ecosystems and as well take more land from the sea.

This research work was created on the unceded lands in Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenni-Lenape People, and the Canarsie and Munsee Nations. The artist underlines that "we stand for the protection of these territories and offer this work as a gesture of care to all of our relations, past, present, and future." The artist deeply thanks bladderwrack for calling them to pay attention. They also thank their collaborator, artist and web developer Dan Phiffer, creative and accessibility consultant mora williams, and dramaturge Tanya Marquardt, as well as the team of *This is Not a Drill* for making this research possible.