As part of our Future Migration exhibition, Proteus is pleased to present two Brooklyn artists, Sara Bouchard and James Leonard, performing narrative works in music, reading and film that move us from the present to the future and back.

Sara Bouchard’s song cycle The News: Monday-Friday is a futuristic folk tale of migration which she performs on acoustic guitar, mandolin and autoharp. Collaging words and phrases from five consecutive days of news, Sara has created a historical account of a future civilization, in ten songs. Uprooted from their homeland by a string of natural disasters, a community of fictional characters is forced to journey into the unknown and adapt to their new surroundings, wondering: how can we maintain a permanent home when the waters keep rising? Listen here.

Addressed to “Whomever Finds This Note,” James Leonard’s un-Suicide Note serves as an open ended cry for connection with an indifferent planet, as he contemplates his own relationships to time and history; the living, the dead and the unborn; and the inevitability of his own survival from one day to the next. Leonard will be giving a rare public reading of the un-Suicide Note along with a once in a lifetime reading of a new work, Letter to My Nephew, before it is sealed as a time capsule to be opened privately by his nephew years from now on his twelfth birthday.