Triple Canopy: Holes

Triple Canopy Website

Triple Canopy Instagram

Triple Canopy is a New York–based nonprofit magazine and collective founded in 2007. They publish digital works of art and literature, stage performances, host symposia, and collaborate on public conversations. Each issue centers on a set of critical questions or themes and unfolds over time in multiple media forms — essays, artworks, performances, installation, conversation. 

Triple Canopy’s philosophy is about sustained inquiry, resisting the rush of attention economy, and creating spaces where ideas can breathe. They intentionally blur boundaries—between text and performance, between online and offline, between art and criticism. Their projects often move between web, print, exhibitions, and performances. The idea is not to privilege one format but to let ideas travel across forms. 

For those interested in contributing or collaborating with Triple Canopy, the process is open yet intentional. Start by visiting their website and navigating to the “Participate” section. There, Triple Canopy regularly posts open calls for new projects, essays, and artworks tied to upcoming issues or public programs. These opportunities invite writers, artists, and thinkers to engage with the publication’s ongoing themes — exploring the intersections of art, media, and contemporary culture.

They also host an annual Publication Intensive, a free two-week program that treats publishing as a creative, collaborative, and political practice. Participants work closely with editors, artists, and designers to experiment with form and meaning. Applications for the Intensive typically open each spring, and the program is highly regarded for the depth of dialogue it fosters.

Triple Canopy’s most recent performance, Holes, held at Roulette in Brooklyn, explored the dynamics of communication, silence, and collective expression through movement and spoken word. The program unfolded as a series of loosely connected vignettes, each approaching the theme through a distinct medium: poetry, movement, music, and performance art.

Louis Osmosis opened the evening with a quiet, durational action — tracing chalk circles around holes in the ground while a camera strapped to his head projected his movements in real time. The act blurred documentation and ritual, turning observation itself into performance. It was obsessive yet methodical, an act of mapping the void — turning the hole from an object into a participant.

Zoe Hopkin followed with a reading that was reflective, speculative, and strangely tender, exploring the idea of the hole as both a wound and a form of freedom. She spoke about “the possibility of escape” and “the desire to vanish without being lost,” reframing emptiness not as erasure but as choice. Zoe’s piece also hinted at the spiritual, suggesting that nothingness itself could be a kind of belonging — that to release control might be its own liberation.

Muyassar Kurdi’s sound performance shifted the tone entirely. Without words, she used layered, interpretive vocals to move through emotions of dread, fear, confusion, and eventual release — evoking a siren song that oscillated between chaos and transcendence. 

Maya Martinez performed the final scene from her play about a bottomless hole in a Party City parking lot — a monologue that touched on jealousy, longing, and the absurdity of seeking paradise in descent. “How silly to think this hole is me,” she said, intertwining humor, ecstasy, and existential yearning.

Lucas de Lima’s poetry brought the focus back to the body, exploring identity, desire, and vulnerability. His work reframed the hole as both a physical and metaphorical site — touching on queer sexuality, mortality, and the history of AIDS. It was pointed, intimate, and unflinching, grounding the conceptual exploration of the evening in lived experience and cultural memory.

The evening closed with a conversation led by Greg Bordowitz, which tied together the political and bodily threads of the performances. He and the ensemble explicitly connected BDS with BDSM, using the metaphor of the hole to explore desire, power, and complicity. They also reflected on fascism and the frameworks we all inherit, showing how social and political systems shape behavior and choice. Bordowitz’s remark — “May you open your hand and satisfy the desire of all living things” — lingered as both challenge and meditation, framing the night in ethical, political, and philosophical terms.