(In)Visible Guides is an art and research project created by Perfect City/The Catcalling Project and residents of a Lower East Side shelter for domestic violence survivors. The project combines map-making workshops, public art installations, convenings, and publishing designed to help survivors become public advocates for better protection alternatives to policing in public space. We believe everyone benefits when our most marginalized and least visible residents have more agency in the design of our neighborhoods and cities.

Destiny Mata is a Mexican American photographer and filmmaker based in her native New York City focusing on issues of subculture and community. After studying photojournalism at La Guardia Community College and San Antonio College, she spent two years as Director of Photography Programs at the Lower East Side Girls Club. Mata has had work published and featured in The New York Times, The Nation, Teen Vogue, i-D Magazine, Vibe Magazine, The Source Magazine. Mata has recently exhibited La Vida En Loisaida: Life on the Lower East Side at Photoville Festival 2020. She has taken part in a group exhibition at ICP Concerned Global Images for Global Crisis at the International Center of Photography 2020, Magnum Foundation US Dispatches Grantee 2020, Mexic-Arte Museum, Young Latino Artists 21: Amexican@ 2016 and in 2014 she exhibited photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy at the Museum of New York City’s, Rising Waters: Photographs of Sandy exhibition. She is currently preparing a series of documentary works continuing her exploration of the fabric of the communities around her.

Formed by Aaron Landsman in 2016, Perfect City is a multiracial, multigenerational working group that addresses the design, policy-making and zoning of cities. Much of our current work focuses on how the city often renders low-income women, families of color and trans people escaping domestic violence unsafe, even within the shelter system. Led by working group members Tiffany Zorrilla and Jahmorei Snipes, Perfect City’s offshoot The Catcalling Project looks at how the rhetoric of real estate development and that of street harassment both propagate displacement and a lack of safety for women of color. In 2019, Zorrilla and Snipes began to offer Avoidance Mapping workshops for residents at Henry Street Settlement’s Urban Family Center (UFC), a residential shelter with counseling and other services.

(In)Visible Guides Photo Exhibition is co-presented by Abrons Arts Center and Photoville, and commissioned by Abrons Arts Center with the support from Creatives Rebuild New York's Artist Employment Program, a NYSCA Individual Project Grant from The Architectural League of New York, LMCC’s Creative Engagement Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Prior contributors to Perfect City’s work include the Jerome Foundation, Rubin Foundation, Graham Foundation, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, and individual contributors.