The Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair

The Zip Code Memory Project (ZCMP), a New York-based project co-led by Taylor, hosted by Columbia University’s Centre for the Study of Social Difference (with several other sponsoring partners), focusing on “community-based ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods.”  

ZCMP invites people to re-imagine Zip Codes, not as zones of separation but as interrelated spaces for connectivity and mutual care. Covid-19 highlights how infection and death rates for the virus map onto New York Zip Codes. As part of this moment of reflection and healing, community members have created postcards responding to one or two questions: What have we lost and learned from Covid? How can we heal and grow together? 

Read more about the ZCMP and their current projects on their website: www.zcmp.org 

ZCMP is part of Hemispheric Encounters’ “Spatial Ecologies” project (within the Hemispheric Encounters Ecologies Cluster), which is co-organized by Co-Investigators Sérgio Andrade (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), Selena Couture (University of Alberta), and Diana Taylor (New York University). The Spatial Ecologies project examines artistic responses to the global pandemic, with a particular focus on ecologies of community care that have emerged within historically marginalized communities across rural, suburban and urban contexts.