Category Archives: Uncategorized

model memorial

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Here is Pradeep Jeganathan’s proposal for a giant model, dedicated to remembering all who died in Sri Lanka’s long civil war. Imagine what it would be have a model like this made for your own city. It is an amazing idea:

Let us layout a large map made of concrete or granite somewhere in the country. It must be to scale with all its mountains and valleys, rivers and reservoirs, forests and cites. Let it be, say, 500 metres in length or more. Let us mark on this map the place of every violent event that took place within its shores from the April 5, 1971 to the May 19, 2009. It cannot be comprehensive of course, but it can be representative, no ‘sides,’ but in the sense of a random statistical sample. Identify survivors of these selected events. Record what they remember, not about politics, not about violence, nor about who did what to whom, but about their loved ones died in that place. That’s all, a narrative of their love and attachment, which will also be a narrative of loss, pain and grief. Let us take these recordings made in the language the survivor chooses, and translate them also in to the other two languages of our country.
The idea is to place these recordings on the map of our country so that any one, especially, our children can listen to them. This map then will be filled with markers, of stone also, simple and yet distinct from the terrain it represents of death.

Violent death
Let us walk on this map– it is a large map, remember, and we can walk on it; respectfully of course — as we walk our country, and we can visit and revisit, in some small way, at each place someone died.
As we walk this map, then, with simple portable playback device with pre-recorded disk, yes, like a iPod, and a pair of supplied head phones, which we obtain from the administrator of the site as one does in some museums now, we should be able to listen at each place that is marked, by selecting number, like k324 on the device to a narrative of a survivor that pertains to that place.
Listen, take it in, and perhaps move on to another spot. It will take hours, of course, perhaps days, to traverse this map.

I do not offer panaceas; nor can I foretell the future. But I do think this may be a better way for us Sri Lankans to reconcile ourselves to our violent past.

aeroport

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After three weeks of organized field trips and official lectures, some of us Strelkans* decide to take a detour off the tourist path. On the last Sunday in October we take the green metro line into northwest Moscow, and get out at the Aeroport stop. After a half-hour walk, across an 18-lane boulevard, through a massive sports complex, across a large open field filled with friendly stray dogs, over a section of crackled tarmac, which has been converted into a makeshift amateur stunt driving course, and through a hole cut into a chain-and-barbed-wire fence, we arrive at a graveyard of Soviet aeronautical ambition.

In a field of tall grass, lie the remains of dream jets. Children play among the ruins of an empire, climbing onto wings and into cockpits with the help of their parents. Single enthusiasts roam with their cameras, taking pictures of the grounded giants. Teenagers dare each other to climb the rickety watchtower, which sways even with light breeze. Carlos and I walk together, taking pictures and video. We are dazzled by these magnifications of childhood toys. We close in on the same details: a flattened landing tire, wire innards spilling out of a plane’s ripped side panel, graffiti honoring a local football team and the defunct CCCP in the same breath, the cigarette wrappers and beer bottles tucked into the planes’ open holds, the oil-slick rainbow discolorations of the cockpit windows.

After a week of discussing public spaces in the city, this is the first truly public space we have found: this hinterland between a newly built financial center, and an endless sea of residential high-rises. Here are children and parents and grandparents, and tourists, and lone weirdos, and neighborhood residents. Here are multiple uses. Here is play. Here is evidence of another life at night, after the children go home. Most importantly, it is free, in all senses, and an absolute joy to discover.

*Strelkan (n., v.): 1. One who participates in Strelka Institute’s 9 month research program. 2. Describing an approach to urban research and design, as yet to be defined.

**all photos by Carlos Medellin

gorky park

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all images by Carlos Medellin

moscow madness

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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.

Yes Lab at NYU, Fall 2011

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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

foolish journeys @ el museo

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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.

nypd rapes again

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Another New York City cop is under arrest for accosting a woman at gunpoint on Friday morning and raping her in a backyard near her apartment. The 25 year old teacher was on her way to work. The plainclothes cop stopped her to “ask directions,” then showed his gun, put his arm around her and said, “You’re coming with me.” Jesus Christ, when are we going to disarm this band of bloodthirsty thugs roaming our city streets and preying on us?

Read the whole story here.