Silvia Calderoni / Ilenia Caleo

After the decline of the shipping industry in New York City, the piers stood empty and decayed, but quickly found new life as venues of artistic and sexual expression (cruising) for New York’s gay men. The photographs and accounts from that time bear witness to that brief historical period when queerness could finally be lived with pride and the debauchery of gay sexuality was still untainted by the public stigma of HIV. Together with her performers, the exceptional actress and director Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo, a researcher in gender studies and a dramaturge, examine the lore of these places with regard to the potential they hold for a community of bodies without norms, which is characterised by a longing search for community, a caring in the midst of strangers, but also by excess and freedom of rules. THE PRESENT IS NOT ENOUGH is the contemplation of a “past that becomes a foretaste of the future”.