foolish journeys

Posted on April 21, 2011 by cityperson

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 this unforeseeable future, this Other, every day in chance encounters with strangers on the city’s streets.

Using the tarot as city guide, Foolish Journeys asks: how might I best prepare myself to meet l’avenir–to meet the city yet to come?

fairytale

Posted on April 18, 2011 by cityperson

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 of art.

–Ai Weiwei (source)

Ai Weiwei ended up with a whole bunch of regular working people, from cities, from small towns and villages, whom he picked from web applications, off the street, through community groups and through friends and acquaintances. His main criteria was that the candidates be unlikely to have the opportunity to take this kind of trip under normal conditions. The people were put up for a week in a refurbished former factory building in Kassel. Ai worked with filmmakers like Li Pengfei to document the trip. The resulting film is, according to Ai, “a truly realistic documentary about the current spiritual conditions of various Chinese people.”

What impresses me most about this work is the humor at the heart of the challenge to national and global politics which make travel and movement for leisure and pleasure a privilege only those with certain passports and economic means can enjoy. There is heartbreaking beauty in the immensity of taking (and finding, flying, housing, feeding, filming) 1001 people on vacation. The work cost about $4.1 million to produce. The size of that figure is dwarfed by the absurdity of our global systems, which make movement a matter of life or death for many, rendering it almost impossible for most people on earth to say, attend a world art fair in Germany. Is “Fairytale” art?

Fairytale is a work which relates to social, political and cultural aspects… I don’t even care whether it is an art work. –AW

FREE AI WEIWEI!

the living room is open

Posted on April 17, 2011 by cityperson

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 event!

shhh! geographer at work

Posted on April 4, 2011 by cityperson

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 by cityperson

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, (a.k.a the city’s cultural gate-keepers.) This panel critically examines these past strategies and contemporary work within the LI/SI vein.

Participating panelists: Ethan Spigland, Adeola Enigbokan, Dillon De Give/Blake Morris & The Walk Study Group, and Wilfried Hou Je Bek

don’t take the money. just run!

Posted on March 27, 2011 by cityperson

“See, if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing”

terrible karma

Posted on March 22, 2011 by cityperson

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 and I will be out this Friday morning and afternoon (10-2) in downtown Manhattan, at Cooper Square, and near the location of the fire, at Washington Place and Greene Street. Follow the path on the map, and look out for our UHAUL truck, containing the audio-visual installation above. If you’re in town, drop by and spend some time in the back of the truck, feeling the reverberations of the fire, 100 years later.

let’s explode the frame

Posted on March 21, 2011 by cityperson

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, and of art after painting, can be seen as the action of leaving the frame, of moving beyond, and pressing against the frame, the frame exploding through the movement it can no longer contain.

--Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth

ARCHIVING THE CITY

for the city yet to come

Tag Archives: method