MFJ 61 is here
Amie Siegel. Provenance (still), 2013. HD video, color, sound; 40 min., 30 sec.
Millennium Film Journal #61, World Views, is out and it includes my review of Amie Siegel’s terrific video installation Provenance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Fluid Histories, Neighborhood Practices: Rehearsing a Changing Waterfront
We had a great time at this year’s iLAND symposium: Fluid Histories, Neighborhood Practices: Rehearsing a Changing Waterfront – a gathering around movement, science and the environment in New York City.
Our workshop, The Urban Backstage took people through a series of actions, spaces and prompts (or mini scores) to explore the boundary between performance and backstage, both within the urban landscape and infrastructure and in people’s everyday gestures and emotions. The final presentations of the movements generated from “rehearsing” the series of scores were fantastic.
In the photo of Eric Sanderson of The Welikia Project during his presentation at the panel he is gesturing at Collect Pond, one of our favorite topics.
Fish Stories Community Cookbook
We’ve been commissioned to do a project for Paths to Pier 42, the Fish Stories Community Cookbook. We’re collecting recipes, stories and drawings from residents of the Lower East Side plus ecological info about local fish and the East River Waterfront for a spiral-bound cookbook to be handed back to participants in October. We’re holding workshops and tabling at local events. The cookbook is meant to celebrate local cultures while activating a relationship with the incredible local estuary.
Public events at Pier 42 are May 9, July 18 and October 25. On May 9th we’ll be offering fish drawing for kids and be on site to talk about our project.
Fish Stories Community Cookbook website
Fish Stories Community Cookbook flyer
Stream catalog + Stream 2
The catalog for last summer’s Stream exhibition is here. You can see and read about all the site-specific projects around a stream in southern Vermont. Thanks to Cindy Smith and Wolfgang Berkowski for their great work on the exhibition and the catalog.
Planning for Stream II, which will happen in August, 2015, has begun. My solar-powered Survivalist Cinema will return, but this year I am curating a program of video on the posthuman and the anthropocene.
iLAND collaborative residency
I am super excited to be participating in a process-intensive, collaborative residency with iLAND (Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance). Meeting periodically over the space of a year with five collaborators, our Urban Backstage group is exploring the East River Waterfront in Lower Manhattan and the surrrounding urban landscape with an ear for ecological infrastructure, among other things. So far we have made a tour of the former Collect Pond that lives beneath the civil, criminal and family court buildings as well as the former Five Points neighborhood, explored the Lenape myth of the Corn Maiden and talked a lot about CSOs (combined sewer overflows). Between us our interdisciplinary activities span landscape architecture, dance, musical theater, playwriting, media art, socially engaged practice and we will collaborate with scientists. We will have at least one public engagement event, which will be on July 18th, 2015. Thanks to LMCC for collaborating with iLAND to form the three research groups. (The other two are Water and Immigration and Embodied Mapping)