Fall and Rebound: Le Petit Versailles on Community, Queer Memory, and the Future of a Garden
A recorded conversation with Peter Cramer, Jack Waters, and Jason Llaguno
Inside Out / STRATUM Conversations
Recorded at Le Petit Versailles, New York City
October 10, 2026, 4:00 PM
During Entangled Garden | New York Experimental Arts Festival 2026
Interview conducted by Valkyrie Yao for ELSEHERE
Published by STRATUM Journal, a publication of ELSEHERE International Arts Nexus
Introduction
On the third afternoon of Entangled Garden | New York Experimental Arts Festival 2026, ELSEHERE sat down with Peter Cramer, Jack Waters, and Jason Llaguno at Le Petit Versailles, the Lower East Side community garden and arts space that hosted the festival.
Founded by Cramer and Waters in the mid-1990s and developed from a former rubble lot, Le Petit Versailles has spent three decades occupying an unusual position between garden, public space, performance venue, exhibition site, archive, and gathering place. Its history is inseparable from Allied Productions, the artist-run organization Cramer and Waters co-founded in 1981, and from a broader network of downtown artistic and activist formations extending through ABC No Rio, experimental film, performance, AIDS activism, queer nightlife, and New York’s community garden movement.
The conversation took place in the garden itself, surrounded by traces of past projects and works installed for Entangled Garden. Rather than approaching the site only as a venue, the discussion returned repeatedly to questions of duration: what allows an artist-run space to survive; what gardening can teach about artistic practice; how community changes without disappearing; how queer histories pass between generations; and what it might mean for a place to endure without remaining unchanged.
The title, Fall and Rebound, emerged spontaneously at the end of the conversation, alongside two other possibilities offered by the speakers: Contemplating the Future and Planting Seeds.
Watch the Conversation
Edited Transcript
ELSEHERE: Before we begin, could each of you introduce yourselves and say a little about your practice and your relationship to the garden?
Peter Cramer: I’m Peter Cramer. I’ve been a New Yorker since 1978. I came here to become a dancer and met Jack through a dance company. The two of us eventually started our own performance collective, moved to the Lower East Side, and in the mid-1990s began developing Le Petit Versailles.
Jason Llaguno: I’m Jason Llaguno. I’m originally from Los Angeles and moved to New York in 2017. My background is primarily in film and photography, particularly cinematography and documentary. I’ve been working with Allied Productions for about a year now.
Jack Waters: I’m Jack Waters. Like Peter, I initially came to New York to study dance. With a number of collaborators, I helped form the dance collective POOL, of which Peter was a member. Peter and I live next door to where we’re sitting now.
For a period, Peter, myself, and a group of friends and colleagues also ran ABC No Rio, very close to here. Eventually we transformed this site from a rubble lot into a place for performance, film, exhibitions, spoken word, music and, in the best circumstances, all of those things at once. It became the primary venue of Allied Productions.
The Identity of the Garden
ELSEHERE: Le Petit Versailles is clearly more than a garden or an arts venue. After all these years, how do you understand what this space actually is? Has that understanding changed over time?
Peter Cramer: The garden represents the arts communities that we have been involved with since we came to New York, whether that is dance, film, or other forms of artistic work. But it is not limited to art. Activism has always been part of it as well.
We were members of ACT UP. We were involved with groups of gardeners who fought the city when it was attempting to sell off community gardens. The garden reflects that energy: the relationship between artistic expression, activism, and the need to maintain a public space.
On Founding and Sustaining
ELSEHERE: A lot of people know how to begin an artistic project, but far fewer know how to keep one alive. What has it taken to sustain an artist-run garden and arts space in New York for so long?
Jack Waters: Time and longevity are important questions because longevity was not necessarily something we were thinking about at the beginning, and I’m not even sure that longevity in itself is the primary goal now. There is always something about responding to the present moment.
One reason places like this survive is because there is a need for them.
That applies to the garden, but also to many of the groups and institutions we have intersected with over the years: the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Millennium Film Workshop, MIX NYC, Printed Matter, and others. Some began as groupings of people and eventually became organizations.
Those relationships stretch over long periods of time, even when we only recognize the connections later.
Jason represents a much more recent generation within the current life of the garden, so his relationship to that continuity is different from ours.
Jason Llaguno: My relationship with the garden is obviously much more recent than Peter’s or Jack’s. But even in the time I’ve been here, I’ve watched artists come in and completely transform the space according to a project or an idea.
The garden can change very easily because of the people who enter it and decide to make something happen here. Its identity comes from the physical place, but also from the people who choose to use it to instigate something, show a film, make a performance, or share work.
When Jack mentioned the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, it made me think about all the organizations and communities Peter and Jack have crossed through in New York and internationally. From the outside, it can almost look as though there is some underground organism connecting the New York art world, where everybody somehow knows everybody else.
But really it is individual people whose paths keep crossing through spaces like Le Petit Versailles.
Art, Gardening, and Stewardship
ELSEHERE: What does gardening teach an artist that a traditional institutional venue cannot? How has caring for a living space shaped your understanding of artistic practice and responsibility?
Peter Cramer: That is a very essential question because it touches on the cycle of life and death.
For me personally, the garden became a refuge from the anxiety of whether I was going to survive. I seroconverted in the 1990s, during a period of tremendous uncertainty. By 1995 there were medications becoming available that could sustain the lives of people affected by HIV, and the garden was being established at roughly the same moment.
The elements that went into making the garden gave us a sense of belonging, but also a sense of opportunity and responsibility.
We had already been on the Lower East Side since the 1980s, and our practice had generally been collectivist. It was never only about our own work. It was also about engendering the work of others.
Jack Waters: There is an essential difference between gardening and working inside a traditional venue.
I often think of creativity and life itself through the metaphor of a garden. Things grow and things die. In the movement from life toward death, what dies becomes compost and fertilizer. I think our thoughts and ideas can operate in the same way. In the happiest circumstances, so do our bodies.
Peter and I came of age creatively at a moment when HIV and AIDS were considered a death sentence. Today that situation is very different because there are medications, information, and far greater knowledge about sustaining life.
At the time, however, an HIV-positive or AIDS identity also became entangled with politics: homophobia, healthcare rights, questions of race and class, and forms of solidarity. The virus did not define us, but it became part of a much larger political and social formation.
That is one of the fundamental differences of the garden. We are actually planting things. We are also composting.
Jason Llaguno: I also think about the garden in relation to the idea of the white-cube gallery, where art is often imagined as though it exists in a vacuum.
The garden occupies a very different position. Traces of former artists and former projects remain physically present here. A work made today exists in relation to those things and to the histories already embedded in the site.
Questions of the body, illness, the queer body, and autonomy become entangled with the works in this small plot of land in ways that are much harder to separate than they might be in spaces conventionally prioritized by the art world.
The basic act of gardening, of putting your hands into dirt and being on the ground, says something important in itself.
Community, Conflict, and Collective Care
ELSEHERE: “Community” is a word we use easily, but sustaining one involves real labor. What does community mean to you after decades of working with people? How do you navigate the tensions that come with keeping a space open and welcoming?
Peter Cramer: There is a great deal of complexity in that question.
This is a public space. We are part of the New York City Parks system, and in a sense I sometimes think of us as de facto workers for the city, or representatives of something the city has made available as a public resource.
One remarkable thing is that we can keep the garden open even when nobody is formally attending it. The neighborhood has changed enormously over the years, yet generally the space is left alone. Of course there are disruptions, and sometimes things happen here that are difficult, but overall the garden has been allowed to exist as a public place without excessive interference.
Jack Waters: Part of my chosen task has been to keep asking what “community” actually means.
Its meaning changes over time, and I think that change is itself important, even when it creates confusion, disagreement, or anger.
I sometimes think about the word through the idea of communing: being together. That also involves what we consume, not only food or nutrition but art, culture, and the forms through which culture is shared.
Even the garden itself is active when no people are present. It provides shelter. It cleans the air. It has an aesthetic presence. People use it simply as a passage between the streets it adjoins.
There is a fluidity here.
Unlike some community gardens, we do not divide the space into individual four-by-eight-foot plots where each person grows their own things. There is a broader design with smaller areas where someone can be alone, and then a shared central focus.
We deliberately do not call this a “stage.” We call it a platform, in the sense of a public square: a place where you are able to express yourself.
Jason Llaguno: Listening to Peter describe it, I almost prefer the word ecosystem to community.
Everything responds to everything else, while also being capable of moving independently.
I often think about Yoshiko Chuma, who has spoken about Peter and Jack as people who have spent decades building an art world through their work and through the people around them. In that sense, the building of community itself becomes an artwork. It generates future works and future collaborations.
You can also see that history through things Allied has produced, such as LPV TV, which compiled performances, artworks, activism, and the larger history of community gardens in New York.
The archive shows that community is something produced over time through repeated acts.
Queer History and Artistic Continuity
ELSEHERE: Your earlier work with POOL and the history of Allied Productions connect artistic experimentation with questions of identity and politics. Do you see Le Petit Versailles as a continuation of those impulses? What role has the garden played in queer cultural memory?
Jack Waters: POOL was the collective Peter and I formed during our early years of knowing one another and working collaboratively.
It functioned as a cooperative. We came from relatively formal concert-dance traditions, so some of our early work happened on stages and in white-box spaces. But very quickly, because of what was available and because of our interests, we were drawn to nightclubs, street performances, abandoned buildings, galleries, wherever we could work.
A friend of ours uses the term “availabism”: making use of what is available. It is more than opportunism because what becomes available also produces the aesthetic. The materials, location, and social relationships become part of the work itself.
POOL performed at the Pyramid Club, and at one point we considered ourselves its resident company. Earlier, Peter and I had also danced in a much more conventional company that described itself as the resident company of Wall Street. Those two worlds could hardly have been more different, yet they existed simultaneously.
POOL was about pooling creativity. Individual members choreographed work, we performed in one another’s pieces, and different combinations of people could collaborate in everything from choreographic construction to full improvisation. There was a core group, but it was also porous. Whoever was present could potentially become part of that pool.
When we began, we did not necessarily identify ourselves as “queer artists.” We were not even necessarily foregrounding a gay identity.
The AIDS crisis, ACT UP, MIX, and the political conditions surrounding them changed that. Claiming an identity became important because that identity could help shape what would become possible for future generations.
We now have roughly forty-five years of making work. Over that period the garden has also become a place where other queer communities have presented work.
That history has moved in waves. There were periods when queer programming here was particularly intense, followed by moments of dispersal as younger communities moved into Brooklyn and elsewhere because the Lower East Side became increasingly unaffordable.
Our structure remains open. We work through proposals and invitations, and different generations continue to enter the garden.
That raises a question we are thinking about very seriously now because the garden is approaching a significant renovation. What will it become afterward? Will it still be the Le Petit Versailles that we began, or does it enter another chapter?
The queer dimension of our practice has always moved in waves as well. We eventually stopped calling ourselves POOL. Years passed. Younger people came to the garden, discovered that we had been dancers, and asked us to teach them.
At first we said we would teach but would not perform. We were interested in the act of making movement itself, without necessarily turning everything into spectacle.
Inevitably, though, those relationships generated new work. People connected to circus and burlesque entered the picture. Movement, striptease, performance, and forms outside traditional concert dance became part of what happened here. Eventually we were performing again.
That is part of the cycle.
Legacy and the Future
ELSEHERE: When you think about the future of Le Petit Versailles, what do you hope will endure? Beyond individual events and artworks, what would you want future generations to remember about what this place stood for?
Jason Llaguno: It is interesting to talk about remembrance because I’ve been working with the archive lately, so I spend a lot of time looking backward.
At the same time, I firmly believe that this garden has many future shows still to produce.
I wasn’t even born when the garden was established. Coming to New York as a younger queer artist, I sometimes felt that I lacked a history, or a sense of queer artistic ancestry. Allied Productions and Le Petit Versailles have given me access to that history: different queer media, different approaches to art, and practices people have been developing for decades.
It has expanded what I understand when someone says “queer art,” “avant-garde art,” or “experimental art.”
For me, it comes down to an approach toward meaning.
Many of the artists I have seen enter this garden carry an ethos of wanting to say something or to make the world somehow better. I don’t think art is obligated to do that. But it matters when artists recognize a place where they can say or do something and know that somebody else might be there to encounter it and think, I feel that too.
I have had that experience many times here.
What I hope continues is precisely that possibility.
Jack Waters: I would close with the idea that this particular space, this particular time, these particular bodies and people all matter, but the spirit of something is also what gives it its essence.
The garden needs renovation. There are structural things that need renewal. Renewal is important.
The same is true in my own life. I have done a great deal of work in many different ways, and I look forward to change. Welcoming new ideas and new people does not mean that I disappear. But it does mean that my contribution and my experience can, and should, substantially shift.
We spent much of the last year actively thinking about transition and transformation. It was not easy. Some of it was painful, but it was also illuminating.
We have worked in other gardens. We helped establish other spaces. We had our history at ABC No Rio and connections to Performance Space New York. Things do not have to survive only by remaining attached to one location. They can reverberate. They can leave a place and return in another form.
Peter Cramer: You cannot take a place like this for granted.
Its continuation depends on civic engagement. You cannot isolate yourself inside the art world and assume that the garden will simply sustain itself.
A garden needs protection if it is threatened by development. Look at the number of buildings that have appeared around us. We used to feel as though we were on the edge of the city. Now the city encompasses us.
Someone has to know how to engage local government. Someone has to remain civically minded. The garden has to remain inclusive of the wider community because this is not a private space.
We have to willingly, and joyfully, accommodate the broad reflection of the community in which we live.
And that puts some of it into your hands.
We are all somebody’s next generation.
Once you begin collecting these histories and this knowledge, the question becomes: what will you do with them beyond a one-off encounter? How will you incorporate that knowledge into your own work? How will your own group understand it and make it your own?
That is the important question.
Not only with this garden, but with other gardens, other spaces, and other examples of what can be created.
The whole world, really.
Afterword
At the close of the conversation, ELSEHERE asked the three participants what title they might give the interview.
Jason Llaguno: Contemplating the Future.
Peter Cramer: Seeds. Planting Seeds.
Jack Waters: Fall and Rebound.
Rather than choosing among them, the three titles seemed to describe different movements within the same history: looking forward, placing something in the ground, falling, and finding a way to rise again.
About the Participants
Peter Cramer
Peter Cramer is an artist and co-founder of Allied Productions and Le Petit Versailles. His cross-disciplinary practice encompasses experimental film, documentary, photography, video, installation, and performance, often engaging socio-political questions, sexual and gender identity, AIDS activism, and archival histories. With longtime collaborator Jack Waters, he co-directed ABC No Rio during the 1980s and has remained a central figure within New York’s artist-run and experimental cultural networks.
Jack Waters
Jack Waters is an artist, filmmaker, curator, writer, performer, and co-founder of Allied Productions and Le Petit Versailles. His work moves across performance, film, visual art, choreography, writing, and cultural organizing. A founding member of the performance collective POOL, Waters has worked across New York’s experimental art, queer cultural, and activist communities for more than four decades.
Jason Llaguno
Jason Llaguno is Media Coordinator at Allied Productions, where they manage event photography and videography and contribute to the organization’s ongoing archival and media work. Their broader practice intersects film, photography, documentary, performance, and visual storytelling, connecting contemporary artistic production with the histories and communities surrounding Le Petit Versailles.
About Le Petit Versailles
Le Petit Versailles is a community garden, performance space, exhibition site, music venue, and public forum on New York’s Lower East Side. Developed by Peter Cramer and Jack Waters beginning in the mid-1990s on a former auto-body site, the garden has hosted decades of performances, screenings, exhibitions, readings, workshops, activism, and community gatherings.
Le Petit Versailles is a project of Allied Productions and part of the New York City Parks GreenThumb community garden system.
Editorial Note
This transcript has been edited from the original recorded conversation for clarity and readability. Verbal fillers, repetition, false starts, and incidental interruptions have been reduced, and obvious errors in the automatically generated transcript have been corrected. The sequence, substance, and individual character of the speakers’ responses have been preserved.
The full video recording remains available through ELSEHERE’s Inside Out series.
Interview by: Valkyrie Yao for ELSEHERE
Video recorded and edited by: Glo Li
Transcript edited by: STRATUM Editorial Team
Participants: Peter Cramer, Jack Waters, Jason Llaguno
Recorded: October 10, 2026, 4:00 PM
Location: Le Petit Versailles, New York City
Occasion: Entangled Garden | New York Experimental Arts Festival 2026
Series: Inside Out
Published by: STRATUM Journal, a publication of ELSEHERE International Arts Nexus
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