Events

Thursday, October 14, 7:30pm
w/ Greg Sholette, Shaun Slifer and Jim Constanzo
@ No-Space (formerly known as The Change You Want To See)

At the beginning of this series we announced plans to change the name of our venue from The Change You Want To See Gallery to No-Space. This week’s event offers us as good a time as any to formalize this, as the notion of the No-Space relates nicely to artist/theorist Greg Sholette’s description of Dark Matter.

No-Space is an aspect of architecture, a systematically overlooked invisible and absent variable that gives form to every structure. A room is made up of walls, a floor, a ceiling, and also the space in between. You can't draw this space on its own, it’s nothing after all, but it's something at the same time, one of the somethings that define a room.

In his forthcoming book Sholette describes a related concept of Dark Matter. In cosmology this unseen matter constitutes most of the universe. In terms of cultural production, an invisible world of artistic activity gives shape to the recognized art world. It has a gravitational pull and a power overlooked.

On Thursday we consider the role of dark matter as it applies to history and the city. Through interventions in urban space, art collectives Repo History, Howling Mob Society, and the Aaron Burr Society map excluded histories, radical readings of what is there but unseen. Ultimately these are cartographic projects, as architect Eyal Weizman suggests: geography as defining history in space. Through authorized and unauthorized means, they explore the exchange between media and the cityscape, between the past and the present, and a power that lurks in the shadows.

ABOUT THE PROJECTS
REPOhistory began in Manhattan in 1989 as a study group of artists, scholars, teachers, and writers focused on the relationship of history to contemporary society. It grew into a forum for developing public art projects based on history and a platform for creating them. For more than ten years REPOhistory's goal was "to retrieve and relocate absent historical narratives at specific locations in the New York City area through counter-monuments, actions, and events". Uncomfortable memories of New York's half-forgotten past were written directly on the skin of a gentrified city using its own system of public signage.  REPOhistory's subject matter included workers, abolitionists, slaves, radicals, native Americans and children whose lives were lost in sweat shops and streets that 'drank their tender tears.' As global neoliberalism turned urban spaces into zones of managed consumption and ubiquitous surveillance, REPOhistory believed the battle for public memory had to be played out from within the city’s own repertoire of semiotic management. Eventually REPOhistory ran afoul of municipal and cultural authorities. By the end of the 1990's its subaltern archive was slammed shut once more. http://www.repohistory.org

The Howling Mob Society was a collaboration of artists, activists and amateur historians who convened in 2007 with a commitment to unearthing stories neglected by mainstream history. HMS hoped to bring increased visibility to the radical history of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania through a series of independently researched and installed historical markers with a focus on The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, a national uprising that saw some of its most dramatic moments in our city. While the mainstream media—both past and present—frame events in terms of their effect on national economic interests, the Howling Mob investigated history through the experiences of common, working people. http://howlingmobsociety.org

The 2nd Whiskey Rebellion is the Aaron Burr Society’s latest public artwork designed to expose the Myth of the Free Market and rewrite American history. The original Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 was a referendum on the Constitution and its two-tiered economic system that privileged Alexander Hamilton’s northeastern oligarchy and Thomas Jefferson’s southern plantations. Prior to the 2nd Whiskey Rebellion, the Aaron Burr Society initiated the Free Money Movement by spending paper currency stamped “Slave of Wall Street” on one side and “Free Money” on the other. Both the Whiskey Rebellion and the Free Money Movement are not metaphorical but symbolic. By this we mean that it is not “like” or “as” a rebellion but a symbol for a revolt against Wall Street, Oil, Coal and their corporate cronies to save the planet. http://aaronburrsociety.org

Thursday, October 28, 7:30pm

Parallel Lines is a collaborative project that looks critically at the impact of the construction of the High Line park in Manhattan's west side. Since the High Line opened to the public in June 2009, it has become a frequently celebrated example of public space for community, culture, innovative design, and urban renewal. As the High Line becomes a public space, Parallel Lines critically investigates its processes and structure, its surrounding neighborhoods and history. Through dialogue, observation, research and action, the project works to illuminate the blind spots of unchecked gentrification and find ways to occupy the city in a manner that is conscious, creative and vigilant.

Join us this Thursday as we continue our series on Open Sourcing The City with a screening and performance titled A Public Hearing, by members of the Parallel Lines project. A Public Hearing borrows from the physical and communicative structure of public hearings -- open forums held in New York City to introduce community input into urban development and planning processes. The performance aggregates a number of documents from the public record, to consider developments regarding the High Line and its surrounding neighborhoods. These documents form part of Parallel Line's ongoing research into changes affecting neighborhoods such as the West Village, Chelsea, Meatpacking and Hells Kitchen, and include records and board meeting minutes of public hearings and community input forums, legal depositions, newspaper articles, and fundraising publicity over the past five years. Selections from these sources will be read aloud, to explore how communities struggle over space, perform public speech, and produce notions of “the public record.” This research is conducted at a time when neoliberal urban development and its racial, gendered and economic distributions are increasingly uneven and contradictory.