ARCHIVING THE CITY

for the city yet to come

Archive for July, 2010

everything is everything

Posted on July 19, 2010

Remember this music video, in which New York city is imagined as record on a turntable? The Empire State at the center, anchoring the spinning city, the steadiness of the needle’s shadow. Lauryn’s movement is classic New York: a woman on foot in elevated shoes–sometimes it seems/we’ll touch that dream. “Change will come eventually.” The city is accessible just by going out and walking it, all the parts are connected. New York is the spinning record, and sometimes we get scratched.

Art chat: Hakan Topal of xurban_collective

Posted on July 18, 2010

this is a continuation of an earlier interview ArchivingtheCity: I’m talking to people about their practice; people who I think of loosely as having any kind of archival practice, and who are connected to or interested in the experience of living in cities. I want to find out about their “process.” So we can talk about some your projects that I saw on your website— Hakan Topal: Do you want me to talk about the collective first, a little bit? A: Sure! H: We started this collective when I first moved to New York, from Ankara. I had a very close friend and we were doing these projects together, traveling to different sites in Turkey doing photography. And I collaborated with him on multiple…

Read the writing on the walls

Posted on July 18, 2010

Tel Aviv July, 2009 Neve Tzedek and Florentine are unlike many other parts of the city, in that the walls of these neighborhoods are covered in all kinds of “writing.” Ranging from graffiti to street art, posters and flyers, this writing screams and whispers for the attention of passers-by. Reading walls while walking both requires and trains a sense of the city that is difficult to get by perusing the statistics of the planning department, or attending community meetings. The discourse on the walls is of a different character—a kind of ubiquitous white noise, noticeable in an otherwise clean, “white” city. Let’s take up the task of reading while walking this city. Because the writings on the walls, and the experience of reading them,…

The real revolution is love

Posted on July 10, 2010

The Real Revolution Is Love, I argue with Roberto on the slick-tiled patio where houseplants as big as elms sway in a samba breeze at four or five in the Managua morning after too many Yerbabuenas and as many shots of golden rum. And watch Pedro follow Diane up her brown arm, over the shoulder of her cool dress, the valleys of her neck to the place inside her ear where he isn’t speaking revolution. And Alonzo tosses in the rhetoric made of too much rum and the burden of being an American in a country he no longer belongs to. What we are dealing with here are ideological differences, political power, he says to impress a woman who is gorgeously intelligent and who reminds me of…

So what are you doing this for?

Posted on July 8, 2010

On Monday, June 28th I had a great conversation with Hakan Topal, member of xurban_collective and doctoral student in Sociology at the New School for Social Research, here in New York. Hakan is from Ankara, Turkey, and was an engineer in a former life. He is an artist and a researcher. A research artist? This conversation reminded me of how important it is to keep speaking with people we admire, who share our struggles with life and work, and who are dedicated to finding creative ways to move in the world. Here is one part of our conversation, with many more to come. Hakan asks the first question. H: So what are you doing this research for? For your thesis? For the magazine? Or…

  

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