In Search Of Sugarcane with LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs and Gabri Christa | The Break Up by Gabri Christa
The Movement Lab is pleased to present the film installation The Break-Up by Gabri Christa, from October 14 to 30, 2025. There will be a special talk, In Search Of Sugarcane, by collaborators LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs and Gabri Christa on October 16, 2025. An evening of screening, poetry, dance, and conversation. This is part of the Movement Lab Installation, Performance, and Talk Series.
“Over two decades of collaboration with LaTasha have deepened into both artistic exchange and friendship. LaTasha's fight against displacement inspired me to make The Break-up (2025), a 20-minute film installation weaving together footage, excerpts from LaTasha's book Village, and archival material to reflect both her struggle and the broader housing crisis in New York City.”
Performance & Talk:
In Search Of Sugarcane with LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs and Gabri Christa
October 16, 2025 | 6:00 PM (Doors 5:45 PM)
Film Installation: The Break-Up by Gabri Christa
October 14-16, 20-23, 27-30, 2025 | 1:00-4:00 PM
Artist Notes
“I have collaborated with Latasha for over two decades, beginning with Dominata (2004), followed by Landscape on Hold (2009), and Fire & Fire at Symphony Space. Over time, our artistic partnership has grown into a deep friendship, and I admire her profoundly as both an artist and a human being.
Just before the pandemic, LaTasha told me about the crisis in her rent-controlled building: sold to a foreign investor, tenants were pressured to leave, and she was the last of three tenants who stayed to fight. When I visited her during Covid for a surprise birthday Zoom, I climbed to her fifth-floor apartment through dark, gutted units—an eerie, war-zone-like experience that stayed with me. I began filming the empty apartments with just an iPhone, trying to capture the fear and isolation of that environment.
In 2023, after Latasha published her book Village, she was invited to present at Dia Art Foundation. I decided to transform my earlier footage, together with LaTasha’s own recordings and archival material, into a film installation. With editor and sound designer Eve Cuyén, we wove in passages from Village and created green-screen sequences of LaTasha inhabiting the space.
The result, The Break-up, is a 20-minute piece that reflects what two years of her struggle may have felt like, and serves as both a portrait of LaTasha’s fight and a broader story of housing in New York City. ”
from Gabri Christa
"During rainstorms, the roof leaks directly outside my door. Another leak appears in my smaller bedroom/office this year. Within minutes, the ceiling collapses. The last three holdouts are down to two (3RE has moved to Philly). I keep the disaster to myself. Don’t let them run you out. The Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 offers better shields. MCIs can no longer be used to grossly raise the rent. Granted, I am the sole tenant on the top floor with a hole in my ceiling. I am told by the owner’s rep that no amount of 311 complaints or phone calls from my city-council member would get them to fix the ceiling. How much longer do I hold down this fort?
A permit submitted to the city reveals plans to combine two apartments on the third door to make a three-bedroom, two-and-half-bathroom unit. This process, labeled as “Frankensteining,” establishes a “ first rent.” As the former apartment is erased, its rent history is no longer considered. The firm leading the renovation celebrates its incorporation of “sustainable” building practices that curiously omit sustaining older neighborhoods or homes occupied by living, breathing human beings. They make the “unusable, usable.” The mice take full residence. I imagine Kenosha’s ceiling, possessed by Mare or Krampus or Kludde, riding on my chest. Exhausted from this fight, I am no longer sleeping."
from In Search of Sugarcane by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Credit
The Break-Up (2025)
Director and producer: Gabri Christa
Performer, text, sound and voice: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs (Text from the book Village by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Coffee House Press, 2023)
Editor and sound designer: Eve Cuyen
Footage and camera by Gabri Christa, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Green screen by Guy de Lancey, Gabri Christa, with thanks to Barnard Movement Lab
Periwinkle for The Break-Up
Performed by Santiago Parra and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Engineered by Santiago Parra
Recorded Live at Surya Labs, El Barrio, Harlem
I'mGoingToHaveToAskYouToLEAVE
Production, guitar, and electronics by Vernon Reid
Vocals and real-time looping by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Drums by Billy” iLLyBeats” Martin
Supported by Dia Art Foundation
About Artists
Gabri Christa was born and raised in Curaçao. She is a transdisciplinary artist whose work explores social issues through a postcolonial and experimental lens, and her creative practice centers multigenerational work. Her award-winning films have been screened at international festivals, museums, and galleries, and her latest screendance film, KANKANTRI (Silk Cotton Tree, 2024), is touring to various festivals worldwide. Christa was named one of the world’s 100 best filmmakers at Pangea Day (2008), a TED project, and awards for her choreography include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1999). An Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Global Brain Health, she is an associate professor of professional practice at Barnard College, New York, as well as founder of the college’s Movement Lab, and founding director of the Moving Body – Moving Image Festival. Christa lives in New York and is on the city’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission.
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs was born and raised in New York. She is an interdisciplinary poet, sound artist, and author of TwERK (2013) and Village (2023), among other titles. Diggs’s work is truly hybrid: Languages and modes are grafted together and furl out insistently from each bound splice. Diggs has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2015), a Whiting Award (2016), a C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art (2020), and a Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize (2025), as well as grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, Creative Capital, Howard Foundation, and the Japan–United States Friendship Commission. She has been a poetry editor for the online arts journal exittheapple and, with writer Greg Tate, is a founding editor of Coon Bidness/YoYo/SO4 magazine. Diggs has performed at an array of venues from CalArts, Valencia, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to poetry festivals in Denmark and Romania. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, she has presented events for BAMCafé, Brooklyn; Lincoln Center Out of Doors, New York; and El Museo del Barrio, New York. She teaches at Brooklyn College and lives in New York.