The Sirens Are Calling

The Sirens are Calling—Project 2025 is a 25-hour community action and education marathon focused on Project 2025. Over the last few weeks, we have seen how the Trump Administration has implemented or tried to implement elements of Project 2025, a plan The Heritage Foundation developed in preparation for a second Trump presidency.

Project 2025 was primarily overlooked until the final stages of the presidential campaign. To truly understand where this administration intends to lead the country and what that means for us, it’s essential that we examine the plan in detail.

This is a siren call! We hope members of our neighborhoods, artists, community leaders, activists, and scholars will read key sections of Project 2025 out loud and discuss and respond to its propositions. Given the rapid roll out of Project 2025, we recognize that some of us may feel vulnerable and so we seek to offer a space where preferences for anonymity are respected. It is important to create spaces for open and safe conversation.

The reading will go on for 25 hours, broken up into 1-2 hour sessions covering specific sections of the 900+ pages of the plan. We hope that engaging with this plan through reading circles where we can offer mutual support, outrage, and hope will build a greater sense of power and help some of us with people who are already clearly engaged in building strategies to protect democracy and build solidarity.

We want to create a space where different perspectives, understandings, responses, and questions can be voiced respectfully and with care for each other. The goal is to contextualize, dissect, learn about, and disseminate Project 2025, the plan driving the Trump Administration's actions. We need to process all the emotions—grief, anger, and disbelief—in a place where our voices are heard, safe, and empowered by each other.

People are invited to come and go as they please or stay for the entire event. Facilitators will talk and lead micro sessions within the space to discuss initiatives further. Additionally, there will be a separate room where people will be welcome to nap, sleep, dream, and reset - because rest is the best form of resistance. The event culminates in a series of performances inspired by the action as a part of the 2025 Grace Exhibition Space Spring Season opening.

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The Sirens are Calling - Project 2025 is the brainchild of Raquel and Susanna, a scholar whose work focuses on the neoliberalization and privatization of urban governance. The idea germinated in motion during a walk they both were on and thier conversation after the election. Frustrated, discouraged, angry, and hopeless in isolation, they decided to create a space, a moment, to talk about Project 2025, which is the blueprint for the Republican administration, to understand how the Republicans will exercise power and operate. In their eyes, this community covening is an act of resistance, of resiliency, of solidarity.

Lead Artist Raquel Du Toit is a Mexican-American arts administrator, artist, curator, and mother. For the past 11 years, she has led, established, and sustained a variety of innovative programming for the public, community, and virtual audiences within nonprofit art cultural organizations, museums, and gallery spaces. Raquel works within multiple disciplines (specializing in performance art practices) and has shown her work at the Tate Modern, Queens Museum, and Bronx Museum. She curated the first extensive survey exhibition of contemporary artists from Mexico City in Brooklyn, and her other curatorial projects focusing on performance art and sound-based work have been showcased in Chicago, Detroit, and Upstate New York.

Volunteer to facilitate a reading! Sign-up here

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Grace Exhibition Space, 182 Avenue C, New York, United States