ARCHIVING THE CITY

for the city yet to come

Posts tagged “method

speaking with specters

Posted on May 28, 2011

Luis Camnitzer, Last Words (2008). Excerpts from the final statements of death row prisoners, taken from website of the Texas Department of Justice. What seems almost impossible is to speak always of the specter, to speak to the specter, to speak with it, therefore especially to make or to let a spirit speak. And the thing seems even more difficult for a reader, an expert, a professor, and interpreter, in short, for what Marcellus calls a “scholar.” Perhaps for a spectator in general. Finally, the last one to whom a specter can appear, address itself, or pay attention is a spectator as such. At the theater or at school. The reasons for this are essential. As theoreticians or witnesses, spectators, observers, and intellectuals, scholars…

foolish journeys

Posted on April 21, 2011

This evening, April 21, as part of Urban Undercurrents at the New School, I am presenting “Foolish Journeys,” a participatory performance, in which I will read tarot cards for inquiring hearts. Foolish Journeys begins from Jacques Derrida’s distinction between the future and l’avenir: “the future is… predictable, programmed, scheduled, forseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected…totally unpredictable. The Other…” The tarot is also called “The Fool’s Journey,” in which a seeker sets out in blissful ignorance, to meet the Other and reach the World. The tarot is a guide to encountering l’avenir. If l’avenir is the meeting with the Other, the unknown, the unpredictable future, then we might lock eyes with…

fairytale

Posted on April 18, 2011

In 2007, for his invited exhibition at the art fair, Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei did a strange thing. He put out a call on his blog (which was shut down in 2009 by Chinese authorities) asking for 1001 Chinese people to accompany him to the art fair in Kassel. When I was invited by Documenta, I didn’t want to do a conventional work like painting or sculpture, but rather do a work which directly relates to the real lives of ordinary people… Then the idea came to bring 1,001 Chinese people to view the exhibition as audience, and create a work of itself. The basic concept behind the work is to create a condition which encourages self experience and extends people’s participation…

the living room is open

Posted on April 17, 2011

The Living Room(s), a “non-space for exhibitions, performance and discursive events in Amsterdam West,” is an exciting new venture of my friends, musicians Anat Spiegel and Thomas Mymel, along with curator, Yael Messer and writer, Gilad Reich. According to their website,  The Livingroom(s) is not a modular space- adapting to host a variety of activities; but a variety of activities adapting to the diverse spaces offered to us by sympathetic property owners, shop owners, squatters, buurtcentrums, and artists: like-minded people with a burning desire to see the cohesion of the neighborhood grow. Together we can critically examine our surroundings, create new relationships with our neighbors, and revel in the knowledge of each others perspective. If you are in Amsterdam Saturday, April 23, check out their kickoff…

shhh! geographer at work

Posted on April 4, 2011

Last week, my friend Tom Croll-Knight, sent out this recording, which was played on the BBC. Tom is a researcher, sound artist, producer and DJ, currently living in Paris and working on the doctorate in Human Geography at The University of Sheffield, UK. This particular recording includes his field recordings of various locations in Paris, along with his own commentary, in rhyme no less! Listen up: Now this is urban research we can all get down with!

re-inscribing the city

Posted on April 2, 2011

Hey New York, I’m participating in this panel discussion next weekend, which promises to be interesting. Come out and participate, if you’re in town! Re-Inscribing the City: Unitary Urbanism and it’s Legacy Panel Discussion April 9th , 4:15-5:45pm WHERE: Judson Memorial Church (balcony) 55 Washington Square South, NYC A panel for the 5th Annual Anarchist Book Fair. From the late 1950s until about the early 1970s, a group of poets, artists, architects, students and troublemakers known as the Lettrrist/Situationist International (LI/SI) made a desperate attempt to re-inscribe the European city so that its inhabitants could break free from the bleak urban routine of work and consumption. Today some artists are still attempting to break from urban alienation, while operating on the periphery of the establishment,…

terrible karma

Posted on March 22, 2011

Friday, March 25, 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which claimed the lives of 146 garment workers trapped at their machines. Most of the people who died, either consumed by flames, or jumping out of the windows on the ninth floor, were young women, recent immigrants. This is the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of New York City. Terrible Karma is project Merle Patchett and I put together. The title - Terrible Karma – refers to both the title of a protest song sung by Cambodian female garment workers at a union rally in Phnom Penh (July 2010) and to the idea that events of the garment industry past continue to haunt the present, that they are always coming back. Merle…

let’s explode the frame

Posted on March 21, 2011

Like architecture, art is not only the movement of territorialization, the movement of joining the body to the chaos of the universe itself according to the body’s needs and interests; it is also the converse movement, that of deterritorialization, of cutting through territories, breaking up systems of enclosure and performance, traversing territory in order to retouch chaos, enabling something mad, asystematic, something of the chaotic outside to reassert and restore itself in and the through the body. If framing creates the very condition for the plane of composition and thus of any particular works of art, art itself is equally a project that disjars, distends and transforms frames, that focuses on the intervals and conjunctions between frames. In this sense the history of painting,…

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