Explore photobooks from the ICP Library and connect with fellow photobook enthusiasts at ICP's Photobook Club. Each month, browse hand-picked selections from special guests and ICP community members. This month, explore selections from artists Geraldine Barón, Sylvia Gorelick, and Naima Green during a special presentation of Rehearsal for a Family, a reading, performance, and exhibition series that reimagines notions of kinship, family, and belonging.
About Rehearsal for a Family
Rehearsal for a Family is a reading, performance, and exhibition series that reimagines notions of kinship, family, and belonging. Assembling artists, poets, playwrights, dancers, parents, and children within domestic and cultural spaces between New York City and Buenos Aires, the series invites participants to share new or in-progress work, in both English and Spanish. This series enacts a practice of assembly and queer family-making, politicizing the often-invisible and historically feminized space of the home. In an ongoing commitment to rehearsing transformative constellations of care, family, and poetics, this series gets to the heart of social poiesis, asking: how can we assemble differently amid the ongoing crises, genocides, and atrocities of late capitalism? How might we relate anew and imagine making life otherwise?
Rehearsal for a Family is situated in the feminist tradition of breaking down the divide between private and public, putting a new sociality into practice—one that honors the expansive creative force of making life, making art, and making community. In this spirit, the host or visiting artist at each reading prepares a communal meal to provide care and foster connection between all who are gathered.
Co-organized by Geraldine Barón and Sylvia Gorelick, the reading series has featured artists and collaborators including Alexis Almeida, Mirene Arsanios, Gauri Awasthi, Lorenzo Bueno, Corina Copp, Denise Groesman, Benjamin Krusling, Laura Henriksen, Agostina Luz Lopez, Lucía Reissig, Florencia Vecino, and Morgan Vô, Simone White, Lila Zemborain, among others.
Through collective praxis, rehearsal, and determined nonarrival, Rehearsal for a Family works to undermine the capitalist structures that rely on the exploitation of social reproductive labor. The series privileges the ephemeral, the domestic, the marginal, the daily, the unfinished, the small, the queer, the precise material that nurtures desire and makes life, again and again.
About the speakers
Geraldine Barón is an Argentine writer, artist, and filmmaker living and working between New York City and Buenos Aires. Her practice spans photography, video, writing, and curation, and explores the construct of family as a field of study, focusing on the relationships between image and text, rehearsal and performance. Her process is open and reciprocal: the act of making work becomes inseparable from the act of making family itself. For the past eighteen years, Geraldine has been working on an ongoing series titled Rehearsal for a Family, comprising photographs and texts that explore family-making and its constitutive elements of intimacy, queerness, language, labor, and storytelling. Both diary and portal, the project documents the evolving lives of both immediate and chosen families. Her writing traverses the material and porous expanse between Spanish and English, moving through the spaces of translation, placelessness, and belonging. Since 2023, she has hosted a bilingual series of readings, performances, and exhibitions—also titled Rehearsal for a Family. Geraldine holds a BA in Comparative Literature and French & Francophone Studies from UCLA, and an MFA in Film Directing and Screenwriting from Columbia University. She is an alumna of the Artists Program at the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas and the Cinema Lab at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Her photography has been exhibited in both the U.S. and Argentina, and her writing has appeared in publications such as A Magazine Curated By. Her short films have screened at festivals internationally, and her film Hotel Y received Best Director Award from INCAA. As a casting director, Geraldine has collaborated with filmmakers such as Pedro Almodóvar, Jane Schoenbrun, Eliza Hittman, Savanah Leaf, and the Safdie brothers, on series such as HBO’s Euphoria, and with theater directors including Richard Maxwell and Lola Arias. She received a BIFA nomination for her work on the film Earth Mama. She is currently working on a short film titled Audition, which draws from her cinematic background and the unconventional methodologies honed through her casting practice. The film blurs the lines between casting a film and casting a donor during IVF, investigating the relationship between performance, identity, and reproductive labor.
Sylvia Gorelick is a poet, translator, performer, and educator living in New York City, their hometown. Sylvia holds a BA in Philosophy from Bard College, a Maîtrise in Philosophy from Paris X Nanterre, and PhD in Comparative Literature from NYU. They currently teach Media Studies at Fordham University. Sylvia’s scholarly work focuses on queer and feminist intimacies among artists in the US, Cuba, and France. They have translated several books from French including The Book by Stéphane Mallarmé (Exact Change, 2018) and are currently translating the poetry of Cuban American activist and writer Lourdes Casal from Spanish. Sylvia’s writing has appeared in (among others) The Poetry Project Newsletter, the tiny, Venti, and The Brooklyn Rail, where they curated a reading for the newspaper’s Radical Poetry Reading series in 2022. Their most recent chapbook, Vampire Poem, came out from Cul-de-sac of Blood in 2024, and their work has been published in anthologies and exhibition catalogues including Dispersed Holdings’ Speed of Resin (2019) and the Drawing Center’s Jackson Mac Low: Lines—Letters—Words (2017). In 2024, Sylvia created and taught a series of poetry workshops for public school educators at the Museum of the City of New York titled Poetry as Pedagogy. Sylvia has performed in plays by Richard Maxwell (2024-25) and Corina Copp (2025), and appeared in the short film Byron and Shelley: Illuminati Detectives directed by Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey in 2022. Sylvia is currently working on a long poem about queer love letters, grief, and poetry’s urban geographies.
Naima Green is an artist and educator who pictures individuals and communities to document their vibrant relationships to place and pleasure. She engages with various photographic forms, sound, and experimental film. Throughout her collaborative practice, Green accesses and prioritizes the nature of intimacy, safety, and self-recognition. Often working in lush and watery environments, she presents windows into multidimensional experiences of seawater and its pathways: beauty, buoyancy, overwhelm, and submersion. Oral and written histories are critical to her process; by synthesizing archival research with outreach and conversation with current sitters, she frames picture-making as a continuum and her still images as kinetic, living histories.
Image by Pasinee Pramunwong