Nautical art crew Swimming Cities is closing in on their goal to sail the Ganges River in India this April, so come to the closing reception tomorrow at Gallery 151 for serenades, storytelling, performance and afterpartying. Pick up the latest vagina-esque couture, art and Tod Seelie prints at the Silent Auction. It will make your voyeurism come April even sweeter. Feb 26, 7pm-1am, Gallery 151, NYC.

Here are the highlights from the crew’s recent, under-reported Radioactivism Talk at the Abandon Normal Devices Festival in the UK, as spied from their live feed:

0100101110101101.ORG’s Eva and Franco Mattes showed up in smelly Hazmat suits they’ve been wearing for two months. For their show and tell, they brought bags of contaminated material and even Chernobyl Vodka samples for the audience (Their Zone guides told them it’s good for keeping away the radiation).

Eva and Franco Mattes explain: Pripyat’s former population of 600,000 is at a constantly transient 4000 now. The town will stay radioactive for 55,000 years, but the hot spots are invisible to people and animals. The radiation spikes the meters (and abortion rates: the 300X the national average), but nature has gone wild on Pripyat with mutated trees and happy forest creatures and cats more radioactive than the ground everywhere.

There are scavengers there, searching for scrap metal, helicopter parts and motors – the city itself sold its vehicle graveyard to China. A city amusement park for the proletariat was about to open right before the Chernobyl disaster struck. So, Plan C took to scavenging too, sawing off bed frames from leaky abandoned hospitals and various loose parts to build a carnival ride. Somehow, they convinced the health and safety authorities and border guards of six countries (bribes?) and hauled the Chernobyl junk chain carousel to Manchester. Passerby were invited to take a spin. And they did. And that’s that. “Nothing lofty.”

Plan C was a project from Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Oakland machine artists Steve Valdez and Ryan C Doyle, NYC photog champ Tod Seelie, filmmaker Todd Chandler and DIY artist Jeff Stark and was inspired by Tarkovsky’s The Stalker.

Come see the world premiere of Todd Chandler’s Flood Tide tomorrow at L.I.C.’s Socrates Sculpture Park as it kicks off its free summer outside cinema series. With a live score by Dark Dark Dark, the film will take you on a semi-fictional adventure on an armada of trash rafts down Hudson River with artists and musicians.

Familiar connections: this film was a collaborative project with Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea that were started by Swoon, were documented by Tod Seelie and once awesomely crashed the Venice Biennial. One of the raft riders is Monica Canilao, hoarder enchanted.

Pre-screening events start at 7pm. Film screens at sundown. Go. Support. Find out more.

Almost 500 people attended last year and with this year’s coinciding L Magazine’s Northside Festival in proximity, you’ve got even more excuses to go outside. |Image: Tod Seelie|

Over the summer, Swoon’s Swimming Cities of Serenissima successfully crashed the Venice Biennale in what art critic Jerry Saltz calls “the most moving moment I had.” Hosted by Anonymous Gallery, a retrospective of this hand built boating expedition takes places at Collective Hardware tonight. Named after the Italian villagers bestowed on the project, “Pankabestia: Punk Beasts of the Swimming Cities of Serenissima” will feature massive wall drawings, trash barge installations, flotsam from the Adriatic Sea and other crew art. See more of Tod Seelie’s photos from the Mediterranean trip below.

“Pankabestia: Punk Beasts of the Swimming Cities of Serenissima,” November 20 – January 1, Anonymous Gallery @ Collective Hardware, 169 Bowery

Photos by Tod Seelie