1. Connelly Theatre, 220 East 4th Street, between Avenue A and B
Welcome, welcome! I’m Nadine Botha – your host, your guide, your unreliable narrator. This is my very first time in New York City, which makes me the perfect person to lead you through it. Why perfect? Because this is not about the New York – it’s about my New York.
I grew up dreaming of this place from the southernmost tip of Africa, stitching it together from sitcom reruns, novels, gossip, and fragments. A city spliced together from memory, invention, projection, and desire…
Not unlike Albrecht Dürer’s famous rhinoceros – drawn in the 1500s without ever having seen one. No European had. He cobbled it together from letters and hearsay. Armored plates, spikes, impossible horn – stranger than the real animal, but for centuries everyone believed this monstrous beast was real.
That’s why we begin here, at the Connelly Theatre, where the Raqs Media Collective once staged The Last International, starring Dürer’s runaway rhino at Performa 13. I like to think it’s still on the loose, trampling the streets of New York.
So today, I invite you to follow me – not on a tour of monuments, but through a series of intersections. Please pop in your earphones – I’ll be your voice in your head, your Virgil through the East Village.
Ready? Let’s walk.
While walking along East 4th Street, and turning into Avenue A:
So, this is “out,” “out in New York.” “Out” as opposed to “in,” slumped on the sofa with Netflix, meal prepping, video calling, half-working on laptops. Out – as Seinfeld so memorably riffed – is the pinnacle of contemporary life. The whole point of working, saving, grooming friendships, collecting novelty – to engineer the optimum moment of being “out.”
And no city stages this ideal of contemporary life more than New York: Seinfeld, Friends, Sex and the City, Broad City, Girls… It feels to me like simply walking on this NEW YORK pavement next to these NEW YORK recycling depots is OUT compared to being IN the rest of the world!
::walk walk walk::
Of course, as Jerry Seinfeld goes on, if everyone in New York is always out… no one is ever home. Which meant, at least back in the 1980s and 90s, there’s always an answering machine waiting, tape reels spinning, little red light blinking. The shrine of absence. Messages piling up: love confessions, rambles from friends, the awkward half-second silences of someone who couldn’t bring themselves to speak but still kept trying to call.
2. East 4th or 5th Street and Avenue A intersection
Let’s pause here. Look at the intersection. The lines painted on the asphalt, the signals blinking, the constant possibility of crossing. The choreography of bodies and cars and glances.
Intersections aren’t just about traffic – they’re about desire. Who goes, who waits, who yields, who risks stepping out when it isn’t their turn.
Now listen.
::play answering-machine recording::
A woman – an aspiring writer – works as a ticket-taker in a porn theatre. Her boyfriend mansplains about his serious investigative journalism, then half-asks how she is. She answers by narrating the porn film in front of her, voice steady, like late-night radio. Detached, unnerving. They never touch. He leaves her with her own voice.
Desire curdles, turns sideways. She begins stalking a man from the theatre, circling him, circling herself. The film withholds climax, and finally it halts here – at an intersection. Empty. No embrace, no collapse. Just a woman stalled in her own voyeurism, nursing her uncanny rhino. A rhino sees movement but not detail – like us, staring at lights and bodies, filling in blanks with desire.
In Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983, scripted by Kathy Acker), as Amy Taubin writes, the problem of objectification wasn’t just the display of the female body, but who owns the story – who controls how desire unfolds, or whether it resolves at all. That’s why Variety ends on an intersection: a place of suspension, stalled between directions. No resolution, only the persistence of female desire, unclaimed and uncontained.
But the backdrop matters too. For many women artists in the late 1970s and 80s, working in New York, desire itself wasn’t considered serious material. Their work was dismissed as indulgent, minor. To fund their practice, they slipped into the economy of male desire – topless bars, porn shoots, sex work. Meanwhile, men in the same circle converted the very same material into art-world credibility. As Chris Kraus notes, women’s desire was objectified, denigrated – useful only when it could pay the rent.
3. Tompkins Square Park corner, East 7th Street and Avenue A
We’re here at the corner of Tompkins Square Park. Pause a moment – look around. Mid-1990s, this was a
stage.
Chloë Sevigny was nineteen then. Already immortalized by a New Yorker profile simply for drifting – between couches, raves, thrift-store jobs. Eating a salad at Stingy Lulu’s on St Mark’s while two girls circled, asking about her jelly sandals.
One minute Chloë was in a club bathroom, the next Harmony Korine had written her into a script. And Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) turned this park into a set.
And the trick with Chloë was always projection. People looked at her and saw what they wanted: innocence, danger, style, authenticity. She mostly shrugged, lit a cigarette, and kept moving.
That’s all you need to hold here: how quickly a girl, a corner, a park becomes a screen for other people’s fantasies.
While walking along East 7th Street toward 2nd Avenue:
7th Street. This is where Audre Lorde lived for seven years – the amount of time, she writes, it takes for the human body to completely renew itself, cell by living cell. She left this apartment a new woman.
Up in a sunny walk-up with Rhea, she remade herself, in the company of women. She called it “a bridge and field of women” – Zami – women weaving survival together, making possibility with their hands, their bodies, their conversations.
It wasn’t easy: Black, female, gay, out in the 1950s, in a white neighborhood.
Already you can sense her uses of erotic stirring – not as sex, but lifeforce, fuel for survival, that binds women into a network, even in the hardest conditions.
4. East 7th Street and 2nd Avenue intersection
This corner. Picture Audre Lorde, standing right here, waiting for the bus. Heart BROKEN. Late summer, the kind of day when the city feels indifferent to your pain.
She steps one foot onto the bus, and boom – an angelic chorus detonates inside her head.
::Play track: ‘Gonna die this death on Calvary… BUT AIN’T GONNA DIE NO MORE!’::
It was so real she turned, scanning for the choir. But everyone else was silent, blank, ordinary. Only she could hear it. For her, the sky itself was spelling her name in music. ZAMI.
That’s the erotic at full voltage. Not sex, not titillation – but the surge that turns pain into revelation. When desire speaks, it doesn’t whisper, it thunders… Like a rhinoceros charging: 1,000kg at thirty miles per hour. And once it starts, it doesn’t swerve. It barrels straight through you.
And then she takes us to the crossroads. Not the nihilistic intersection of Variety, where desire collapses into loneliness. For Audre, crossroads mean union. Crossroads are where women’s bodies meet. She writes: “The sound of our bodies meeting is the prayer of all strangers and sisters, that the discarded evils, abandoned at all crossroads, will not follow us upon our
journeys.”
That’s not collapse – that’s salvation. Desire as a force field. Protecting, connecting, promising something beyond the ordinary.
While walking along 2nd Avenue:
Audre had always known how to turn desire into ritual. Even as a kid: three and a half, head down, brand-new eyeglasses, holding her mother’s hand – counting every single horizontal line in the pavement.
She made herself a spell: if she could step on every line in one day, then by nightfall a little sister would be waiting in her bed. Of course, it never worked. Someone pulled her arm, the wind rushed her along, a line got skipped. No sister. But the point wasn’t success – it was the game. The way desire could be given rules, rhythm, choreography.
So try it now. Step on each horizontal line. This is slightly different to the cracks game that we’re all familiar with, it’s about matching your gait and your sexy hip sway to the distance between the slabs. See if you can keep the spell alive, see if your desire – whatever it is – can take form in the rhythm of your steps.
Desire doesn’t have to be fulfilled to be real. It just has to move you.
5. Pause around 93 2nd Avenue to notice the big logo
6. Pause around 5th Street, half a block after the logo, where there are lots of New York cabs
Oh, the iconic yellow New York cabs!
The “I ♥︎NY” logo was born in the backseat of one, Milton Glaser scrawling it in red crayon on a torn envelope, 1977. He said he was thinking of lovers carving initials into trees. He just removed the arrow.
The city then was a mess – blackouts, crime, unemployment. Gotham without a Batman. The brief was to rebrand, to make people feel good about New York again. And Glaser did it pro bono. His “love letter to the city.”
But the magic of the logo isn’t just design. It’s speech. It’s what philosophers call a performative speech act. Like when you say “I promise.” Or “I do.” Or “I love you.” By saying it, you enact it. The words don’t describe reality – they create it.
That’s what “I♥NY” did. When New Yorkers wore it, they weren’t saying “this is a lovely city.” They were making it so. Claiming it. Owning it. Saying: this is my city, no matter how broken.
Of course, the logo has since gone everywhere: I♥Paris. I ♥Trihuahuas. I♥Chump. Desire mass produced, fran-chised, hollowed out.
And here’s the underbelly: that ownership flips. From intimate claim to neoliberal grab. If you love me, you own me, you will capitalize on me. And so the love for a city becomes capital: spare rooms, passenger seats, sidewalks, parks, desires – all turned into currency. So yes, it’s a love letter. But it’s also a contract. And once you sign, New York will take everything you’ve got.
7. 3rd Street, while walking down 2nd Avenue
And then – Chris Kraus. Picture her gunning her truck down this very avenue, letters to Dick forming in her head. When she writes I Love Dick (1997) – does she love Dick, or does she want to own him?
It wasn’t just about a man, it was about a position. Kraus recognized that desire itself could be a creative force. Women’s desire – always derided, always cringey, always a little disgusting in the eyes of men – could be method.
But here in the East Village, where she had lived for years, Kraus found herself estranged. Realizing she was just a plus-one to someone else’s intellectual circle, a name on someone else’s guest list. She refused to play that role – the appendage to the intellectual luminary, the romantic idyll to the cowboy hunk.
She turned the tables instead. She exposed how her desire was mocked and shamed, while all around her art and literature were built on men projecting their fantasies onto women, coercive or not.
I Love Dick is embarrassing, yes. It’s adolescent, obsessive, shameless. But that’s the point. It cracks open the dialectic between the real and the fantasy that male canons flatten. She turns shame into propulsion. Vulnerability into philosophy. Desire into form.
Kraus knew the rhinoceros trick: thick skinned, armored, but still tender underneath – able to be pierced by shame, then charge forward with it. Chris Kraus charging down 2nd Avenue isn’t just about a man. It’s about women claiming their own projection, their desires, as a theoretical position.
While walking down the last stretch of 2nd Avenue:
Kraus isn’t alone. The city has always been crowded with women who wouldn’t behave. Dorothy Parker, who sharpened her tongue until it drew blood. Erica Jong, who gave us the zipless fuck. Ana Mendieta, who left her own body outlined in blood on a New York sidewalk. Valerie Solanas, who wrote the SCUM Manifesto (1967)and shot Andy Warhol. Kathy Acker, half-myth, half-body, who pierced her own clitoris so she could come on a motorcycle. Radha Blank, who refuses her plays being gentrified, rising as the rapper RadhaMUSPrime. These are not stories of propriety, but of women turning desire into method, into muscle.
In Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Nola Darling sits under projection – three lovers, a housemate, her parents, even her shrink, all certain they know her best. Trying to explain away her insatiable desire. At the end she just says: maybe they know parts of me. That’s all they get. Refusal becomes her power.
Even Rory Gilmore, television’s model daughter, has to bunk school, slip into the city with a rebel poet to find her sex drive. As if New York itself were the hormone shot, the dangerous stimulant.
8. Houston and 2nd Avenue, at the entrance to Roosevelt Park
Look around. Every intersection is a spiderweb. Lines running north, south, east, west – cars, bikes, bodies, signals – threads that hold us in place, or fling us somewhere else.
Carlos Amorales’s Spider Galaxy for Performa 07 inverted the web. Not the threads but the gaps, the traffic islands. The negative space. The absences that hold the whole thing together.
And isn’t that how desire feels? Not only in what we touch, but in what slips through. The unanswered call. The button that never works. The sister Audre never conjures. The love letter Dick never answers. Desire composed of voids.
But these voids don’t just frustrate. They open. They multiply. They invite speculation – maybe, maybe, maybe. That’s the logic of quantum theory: not certainty, but probability. Not one outcome, but a whole suspended field.
And New York makes that field visible. Here desire isn’t just private, it’s put to work. The “I” becomes brand, hustle, commodity. Which is why autotheory starts here – because the only way to survive is to flip it. To turn the “I” itself into material. The self as method. Desire as theory. The longing for the rhino is the position, is the creation.
So stand here, in this intersection, in the negative space. Don’t resolve it yet. Just hold it open – a speculative web of all the lives, all the desires, all the crossings still possible.
While walking through Roosevelt Park along Chrystie Street (the Spider-Man game):
Let’s try another game. Look up. It’s the Spider galaxy… Imagine yourself as Spider-Man. If you had to swing across right now – where would you anchor your web? That ledge? That fire escape? That lamppost?
From here, every line we might take multiplies – uptown, downtown, across, back, detouring. A choreography of potential lines, vectors of desire mapped across the city. Desire doesn’t just pull us forward; it multiplies directions, multiples universes. Each imagined trajectory valid, each one alive.
9. At 187 Chrystie Street (Peter Parker’s apartment, Gwen Stacy)
This is Peter Parker’s original apartment. A modest beginning for the boy who becomes Spider-Man. But here’s the twist: the Spiderverse didn’t begin with him.
It began with Gwen Stacy. Peter’s first girlfriend. In the original comic, she dies – snapped mid-air as he tries to save her. Readers were furious. Their desire for her survival was so strong, Marvel split the canon. One universe where Gwen dies, another where she lives. For ten years there were two comic book trajectories.
Later, when the Spiderverse was introduced, there is literally one universe in which Gwen, not Peter, is bitten, and she becomes Spider-Woman.
So Gwen is the origin of the Spiderverse. The first rupture, the proof that desire can fracture even the most guarded storyline. That refusal to accept her death could remake the universe itself.
And that’s the point. Any of us could be Spider-Man. Or Spider-Woman. Or Spider-being. Each of us at the center of our own universe of desire, each web crossing another, tangling, multiplying.
So I turn to you here, and ask you all to turn to each other and point, and ask: Are you Spider-Man? Are you the rhinoceros?
The rhinoceros again. Not projection this time, but rupture. Remember, Dürer’s beast wasn’t real – but once drawn, it tore through Europe’s imagination, rewriting what a rhino even was.
That’s desire in New York: monstrous, armored, excessive. It doesn’t just inhabit the canon – it breaks it open. Like Gwen Stacy surviving in one universe, or becoming Spider-Woman in another. Like Kraus turning shame into philosophy. Like Lorde conjuring erotic from survival. Desire ruptures the story, spawns another thread, another life.
The rhinoceros is New York. Is desire. Is the canon-breaking multiverse. Impossible, imaginary, but once unleashed, it can’t be put back.
