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Dear Readers,

I haven’t posted in a while, because I have been in the throes of transitioning to my new life in MOSCOW! Archiving the City will be published out of this icy city for the next 9 months, despite the threat of frostbitten digits.

Why am I in Moscow, you might ask? Well, I am doing an extended research residency at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. Strelka Institute is a two-year old initiative of local media oligarchs and publishers and architects, who would like to transform the discourse around urbanism in Moscow. It’s a tall order, and I am one of a few foreigners who has been invited to participate in interdisciplinary research with early-career Russian architects, social scientists and artists. The entire progam of research is organized and led by Rem Koolhaas’ Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and its mirror research entity, AMO. The research can take a variety of creative forms, and the results will be exhibited, published and otherwise disseminated in the Russian press at the end of next summer. An excellent opportunity, and right up my alley, clearly.

So far, life here has been a whirlwind of lectures by local city officials, architects, academics, tours of construction projects, parks, Moscow suburbs, museums, galleries, and even a local primary school. As you can see me and my new friend, architect Carlos Medellin of Bogota, Colombia, just LOVE school! Check out some of Carlos’ work (it might take some time to load, but worth the wait).

Expect a barrage of Moscow-related posts over the next months, as I become even stranger in this wild city, and work out how to archive this experience.

This may be of interest for those of you in New York this fall. Starts tomorrow, Friday September 23, 2011:

Yes Lab Fridays

Starting Friday, Sept. 23, the NYU Yes Lab will involve students, faculty, local activists, and the occasional government official in strategizing and accomplishing funny media-getting actions. The first session will be Friday, Sept. 23, 10am, at the Hemispheric Institute, 20 Cooper Square, 5th floor, New York. Anyone is welcome to show up for this first session, though we’re asking that you email us at nyu@yeslab.org and tell us about yourself, your interests, and your skills. Subsequent sessions (every Friday thereafter) will be open to those who commit to actively help carry out particular projects.

This fall’s Yes Lab projects will focus on the problem of income disparity and the rich-poor divide, locally and globally. Participants will join “action groups” to come up with funny media actions around manifestations of income disparity; specific focuses will include immigration, corporate tax cheats, military spending, and environmental injustice in Long Island City.

If you would like to propose an “action group” focus (that has something to do with income disparity), you’ll need to (a) commit to put in a lot of work yourself, every Friday; (b) have an activist organization in mind to help guide the group; and (c) pre-establish contact with that organization before the first Friday, and if possible confirmation that they are interested in collaboration. Please write to us about it, and show up on the first Friday ready to present your focus.

http://www.yeslab.org/nyu

On Wednesday, July 27 I conducted another iteration of my Foolish Journeys project at El Museo del Barrio, as part of the museum’s ongoing biennial, The (S) Files 2011. The intervention was developed in collaboration with my friend Juan Betancurth, a New York-based performance and installation artist whose work is featured in the biennial. (Juan and I met when he received a tarot reading as a participant in my first performance of Foolish Journeys). Juan’s installation at El Museo, entitled Chamber of Delights, is a re-creation, from childhood memories, of his aunt’s living room in Colombia composed using elements of his studio space in New York.

Appearing to be a lived-in space, filled with used personal objects, family photos, and well-worn furniture made of smooth dark woods, and augmented with soft animal skins and lace doilies, the piece defines an almost oppositional place within the museum’s crisp and colorful modern interior. The Chamber of Delights works neither for nor against the spatial structure of El Museo. Instead, it demands a different form of engagement. The visitor is asked to enter, sit down and touch, and they do–initially with hesitation and eventually with delight.

To add to the interactivity of the space, Juan is inviting various friends to perform in the space, creating situations to engage viewers. In this capacity, we worked together to re-create Foolish Journeys for the space of El Museo.

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Visitors to the museum were invited to enter the Chamber of Delights and receive a three-card reading. As part of the reading, each visitor was asked to select a destination within East Harlem (El Barrio), towards which to take a stroll, immediately after the reading. Each destination was a former site of El Museo del Barrio (see map). Each visitor was asked to return from the trip with an “offering”–an object found along the walk–to leave in the installation, as part of the ongoing exhibit. He or she then marked a master map with the location of encounter with the offering. This location, at which the participant is struck by the significance of a discarded object, marks a moment of becoming strange in the city.