I love parties. And I love party flyers. What would a collection of such beautiful, ephemeral things tell us about a city?
Brussels:
Paris:
Tel Aviv:
April 4, 2010
collect party flyers
Posted by cityperson under Uncategorized | Tags: Brussels, Budapest, Cape Town, dance, flyers, Kiev, music, paris, party, tel aviv |Leave a Comment
March 1, 2010
vendredi soir
Posted by cityperson under Uncategorized | Tags: affect, claire denis, film, geography, giuliana bruno, mapping, paris, pictures, psychic phenomena, vendredi soir |Leave a Comment
Vendredi Soir (Friday Night), dir. Claire Denis (2002)
Cinema is a materialization of our psychic life. It makes visibly tangible all psychic phenomena, including the work of memory and the imagination, the capacity for attention, the design of depth and movement, and the mapping of affects.
…Film repeatedly shows that pictures–moving pictures–are the current documents of our histories. Indeed, filmic memories–fragile yet enduring–are fragments of an archival process porously embedded in our path, part of our own shifting geography.
–Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (2007)
January 14, 2009
Trashing the city
Posted by cityperson under Uncategorized | Tags: Art, barricade, ecology, Examined Life, method, Naples, paris, sculpture, Slavoj Zizek, streets, The Morisons, trash, Walter Benjamin, Wellington |[2] Comments
On 14 december, 2009, on Stout Street, between Lambton Quay and Ballance Street, in the center of Wellington, New Zealand, there was a pile of rubbish blockading the entire road and making the street impassable for cars, pedestrians and cyclists. This impromptu blockade was a “One Day Sculpture” called Journee des Barricades by British artists, Heather and Ivan Morison. According to the artists’ statement:
Car wrecks, discarded furniture and other urban detritus barricaded a central city street in Wellington, New Zealand on Sunday 14th December 2008.
The temporary public artwork entitled Journée des barricades acts as a rupture in the everyday comings and goings of the city. In its barricade form, the sculpture might suggest associations with the history of political actions and social unrest, but as a collection of discarded consumer products it may also bring to mind questions about our environmental and economic future.
This street art in Wellington looks eerily like the streets of Naples looked last year (though probably not as smelly, and certainly not for the sake of art).
This artists’ collection of urban detritus also reminds me of the work of Walter Benjamin, especially the Arcades Project. (more…)
December 29, 2008
Tecktonik
Posted by cityperson under Uncategorized | Tags: dance, electro house, kids, music, paris |Leave a Comment
I love Tecktonik. These French kids rock hard. Tecktonik is a popular dance movement begun by youth from the suburbs of Paris, France. A combination of techno, house, hip hop and trance dance styles, the new movement is distinguished by its practitioners’ use of urban space. Individuals or teams of dancers “invade” a public space, sometimes a landmark, like the Eiffel Tower, or the Champs Élysées, other times a non-descript office plaza or industrial park,
and perform impromptu dances to electro-house music, in the distinctive Tecktonik style. Short segments of these dances are recorded using consumer-grade electronics, like mobile phones, or digital cameras. They are then edited, featuring the individual styles and personae of each dancer or team, and then uploaded to youtube.com.
Both the dance and the video might be considered archival.
And if you don’t know, now you know!
