PEERS

Canal Street Research Association was founded in 2020 in an empty storefront on Canal Street, New York’s counterfeit epicenter. Delving into the cultural and material ecologies of the street and its long history as a site that probes the limits of ownership and authorship, the association repurposes underused real estate as spaces for gathering ephemeral histories, mapping local lore, and tracing the flows and fissures of capital. 

They have occupied storefronts, empty office buildings, a storage unit, and most recently a basement under Canal Street. The fictional office entity is operated by Shanzhai Lyric (Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky), a poetic research and roving archival unit that take inspiration from 山寨 (shanzhai or counterfeit) goods to examine how bootlegs use mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies. 

For this project they are joined by Lucas Tatarsky, an urban geographer and educator committed to better understanding the effects of gentrification in the Lower East Side. Lucas’s work seeks solutions based on principles of participatory planning, popular education and community organizing in order to restore power to the city’s most marginalized residents in the face of development and commercial real estate interests.