terrible karma documentation

Posted on April 17, 2011

Here are some images of Terrible Karma, the project I did in collaboration with geographer and curator Merle Patchett, on March 25, 2011, as part of the citywide commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, the deadliest industrial disaster in New York history. All photos were taken by Merle Patchett. For more images of the event, visit her site.

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Tagged: archival practice, Art, collaboration, encounter, labor, memory, New York, stranger, street art, streets, Terrible Karma

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…

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Tagged: archival practice, Art, fashion, memory, method, mobile, New York, street art, streets, Terrible Karma, women, work

tel aviv in wartime

Posted on January 21, 2011

It is July 2006, and Israel is at war again with Lebanon. Terrible waves of shelling sweep over densely populated south Beirut and the Israeli army enters southern Lebanon. Small mines, shaped and colored like toys rain from Israeli planes into farmer’s fields, making a deadly harvest. Each day, missiles assail the northern Israeli towns closest to the border. There is little protection for Arab Israelis. Their communities are hit hard. An overwhelming silence about Lebanese casualties engulfs the country—a wall of support-our-troops-bomb-them-into-the-next-century rises up into the air. On Israeli television a few heartfelt cries to please stop the bombing come from Arab Israelis standing in the ruins of their neighborhood, places forgotten long before the war. I am in Tel Aviv, “Israel’s urban…

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Tagged: Art, memory, street art, streets, tel aviv, walking, war

Read the writing on the walls

Posted on July 18, 2010

Tel Aviv July, 2009 Neve Tzedek and Florentine are unlike many other parts of the city, in that the walls of these neighborhoods are covered in all kinds of “writing.” Ranging from graffiti to street art, posters and flyers, this writing screams and whispers for the attention of passers-by. Reading walls while walking both requires and trains a sense of the city that is difficult to get by perusing the statistics of the planning department, or attending community meetings. The discourse on the walls is of a different character—a kind of ubiquitous white noise, noticeable in an otherwise clean, “white” city. Let’s take up the task of reading while walking this city. Because the writings on the walls, and the experience of reading them,…

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Tagged: good writing, graffiti, politics, street art, tel aviv, walls