Category Archives: Architecture

Alan Michelson, Mantle (2018)

This work sits at Richmond’s Capitol Square Park in Virginia. The spiral shaped walking path honors the original inhabitants of the region, especially seventeenth-century Chief Powhatan (d. 1618) who united thirty-four Algonquian tribes. The site incorporates cast images of corn, squash, and bean plants around the edge of a reflecting pool, and is surrounded by groves of trees native to the area. The site requires active participation, unlike a statue on a plinth, thereby becoming a reflective activation of this space of reintroduced Native life and cultural memory.

— Michelson, Alan. “Mantle, 2018,” Alan Michelson. Accessed June 25, 2022: https://www.alanmichelson.com/mantle

Alex Villar, Temporary Occupations (2001)

man jumping fences and fitting into narrow passages

Alex Villar, Temporary Occupations, 2001, USA, miniDV, colour, silent, 4 min. excerpt of 6 min.

“Drawing from interdisciplinary theoretical sources and employing video-performance, installation and photography, I have developed a practice that concentrates on matters of social space. My interventions are done primarily in public spaces. They consist in positioning the body of the performer in situations where the codes that regulate everyday activity can be made explicit. The body is made to conform to the limitations of claustrophobic spaces, therefore accentuating arbitrary boundaries and possibly subverting them. A sense of absurdity permeates the work, counterpoising irrational behaviour to the instrumental logic of the city’s design.
Theoretical references cover the extensive work done on the problematic of space, especially the works of Foucault and de Certeau, which describe panopticon and heterotopic spaces as well as the potentialities for everyday re-writings of urban space. Aesthetic traditions foregrounding my work go from the sixties and seventies performative-based sculpture and installations by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Cildo Meirelles, to the urban strategies of the Situationists and the anarchitecture of Gordon Matta-Clark. Like the in-between activities it seeks to investigate, my work lives between various fields: part nomadic architecture, part intangible sculpture and part performance without spectacle.

Temporary Occupations from alex villar on Vimeo.

Temporary Occupations depicts a person running on the sidewalk in New York while ignoring the city’s spatial codes and therefore resisting their effects upon the organization of everyday experience. The clips in the video register situations of temporary invasion and occupation of private spaces located in a public setting. The action simply articulates the continuity of these spaces with the remaining areas from which they were extricated, drawing attention to, and possibly subverting, the boundaries that demarcate them.
This piece is part of a long-term investigation and articulation of potential spaces of dissent in the urban landscape, which has often taken the form of an exploration of negative spaces in architecture.” (credit)

Hui-min Tsen, The Pedway (2009-13)

brochure

published 2013 by Green Lantern Press | Specs: 18 pages, 4.2 x 0.2 x 9 inches

“Deep beneath the surface of the city, a tangled ribbon of corridors runs throughout 40 blocks of downtown Chicago. This meandering passage appears to have grown up organically as if it were an animal’s burrow or a donkey’s path.  Its route is illogical: the corridors exist outside of known space, and its hidden entrances lead to mysterious destinations. What is this place?  It is the Chicago Pedway, an intricate non-system of pedestrian tunnels built to separate the citizens of the city from the dangers and foul weather encountered on the street.

On the Trail of a Disorderly Future was an interdisciplinary project consisting of a walking tour of Chicago’s Pedway, ephemera given and sold to tour participants as souvenirs, and a book for a “self-guided” tour of the Chicago Pedway. The project told a story across 36 points-of-interest, weaving together mythic and historical tales to tell the story of urban development, utopian impulses, and fears of the city from the Renaissance until now.

Details: Active from 2009-2013 | performance (90-minute walking tour), ephemera (postcards, map, website), book” (credit)

Agatha Gothe-Snape, We all walk out in the end (2012/18)

“Walking connects our body to time and space whilst giving us time to survey place. Walking moves us surely, from one place to another. There is no guarantee, however, that the room we walk out of is any different to the one we walk into.” [from catalog, From Here to There: Australian Art and Walking]

Carolee Schneeman, Labyrinth (1960)

“I had composed my first live outdoor event, Labyrinth, 1960, after a tornado blew through our fragile cottage in Illinois, bringing down trees and raising mud, dirt, and rocks from the streambed. Friends were invited to follow instructions written on cards to crawl, climb, and interact with the landscape. The passage was initiated by my cat walking through a smashed kitchen window, in acceptance of this altered space. As a landscape painter, I recognized this gesture as breaking the traditional frame, which would soon lead me to develop movement principles within the Judson Dance Theater.” [credit]

Saleh Khannah, In Between Camps (2012)

A more recent walking artwork highlighting the intersection of walking and race is In Between Camps (2012), which consisted of a group of six researchers and artists, Ismael Al-bis, Fabio Franz, Matteo Guidi, Thayer Hastings, Ibrahim Jawabreh, Saleh Khannah, Sara Pelligrini, Giuliana Racco, and Diego Segatto, walking across the West Bank from the springs of al-Arroub to Solomon’s Pools (three massive stone reservoirs) south of Bethlehem in search of an ancient Roman waterway, the Arrub Aqueduct. The project originated from the Campus in Camps program developed by Al-Quds University, an experimental education program in the Palestinian refugee camp of al-Dheisheh. The purpose of the project was to both reactivate the water system’s source, and imagine a time-frame before the contemporary apartheid-reality of walls, colonial land parceling, and occupation of Palestine. While they were hiking, the group was stopped by Israeli soldiers who were suspicious of the Palestinian participants due to their skin tone and dress. The international participants intervened and explained the trip, their search of the aqueduct, and showed them the map, engaging in a type of information overload tactic, not unlike the tactics Codogan described for minimizing the perception of criminality. After the walk, the group created a booklet (Booklet ) reflecting on the history of the site, their experience, and how the various layers of race-based rule and exclusion are projected on the land.

—

Hastings, Thayer. “Tracing a Line Through a Fractured Palestine, from al-Arroub to Bethlehem,” Walking Art / Walking Aesthetics. Accessed May 16, 2022: https://walkingart.interartive.org/2018/12/thayer-palestine

Marsad Drâa, Project Qafila (caravan), (2016-)

camels and person

Marsad Drâa (founded by Carlos Pérez Marin in 2013) is a transdisciplinary research group (university students and professionals from Morocco and abroad) studying lifestyles and cultures of desert regions as a way to better understand contemporary challenges related to sociology, architecture, agriculture, urban planing, visual arts, performing arts, history. Given the complexity of the disciplines, teams are usually multidisciplinary (architects, artists, engineers, biologists, sociologists, historians, archaeologists …) and they always work in association with local associations. Thus, they organize workshops (sometimes virtual ones on the Internet) in several regions of the Moroccan desert, with the aim of providing solutions to contemporary issues, based on tangible and intangible heritage.

“project Qafila is a (open) transdisciplinary research platform on Saharan caravans founded by Marsad Drâa that develops a series of practical researches on caravans with several aims: to learn about nomad ways of life nowadays, to walk through the routes used by caravans from the 8th to the 20th centuries, to​ analyze the caravan heritage and the actual situation from a contemporary perspective in the Sahara desert.” [credit]

person and camel
“Beyond Qafila Thania brings together researchers from Sudan, Morocco, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands researching in architecture, sociology and the visual arts actively approaching the cultural, social and geopolitical space of the Sahara desert. Tracing back the stories of the old caravans, learning about its influence in current day cultures and societies.

Beyond Qafila Thania facilitates an inspiring frame to exchange and research further on the participants on going projects focusing on topics such as contemporary nomad culture and architecture, current immigration routes, history of slave trade, race issues  [and the concept of blackness],  and trans-Saharan book trade and the mobility of Knowledges within the Mediterranean, Sahel and West Africa.

Beyond Qafila Thania develops through different stages:

– Research and archiving.
– Site visits: Departing from Marrakech to Agdz with research visits to different oases, kasbahs and ksars between Agdz and M’hamid El Ghizlane (22nd to 27th October 2017).
– Attendance at the Taragalte Festival, a gathering of musicians from the Saharan region, Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Mali and Niger (27th to 30th October 2017).
– A nomadic walking residency from M’hamid to Akka (30th October to 10th November 2017) and from Akka to Tighmert (11th to 23rd November)
– Beyond Qafila Thania Round table in Le18, Marrakech (13th November 2017)
– Presentation of the project as part of KIBRIT Final exhibition and publication event  (15th December 2017).

The participant artists and researchers selected to be part of Beyond Qafila Thania are Amado Alfadni (Sudan), M’barek Bouhchichi (Morocco), Pau Cata (Catalonia),  Carlos Perez Marin (Spain) and  Heidi Vogels (The Netherlands). For the first stage of the project they will be joined by Olì Bonzanigo (Italy), Laila Hida (Morocco), Francesca Masoero (Italy) and Leire Vergara (Spain).” [credit]

Robert Smithson, The Monuments of Passaic (1967)

“Six photographs of unremarkable industrial landscapes in Passaic, New Jersey depict evidence of man-made history, yet the title of “monument” seems ironic. Stripped of any apparent artistic agenda, the images appear photojournalistic—without an accompanying news article to inform our perception. Smithson was perpetually intrigued by suburbia; in its sameness he saw a version of eternity defined by formal repetition rather than temporal longevity. By framing the mundane sites as “monuments,” Smithson challenges the conceptions of aesthetic merit and historical significance.  Monuments of Passaic exists as three manifestations: a published article in Artforum, a photowork, and a photographic series.” [credit]

Robert Smithson – A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic (PDF)

He drew further attention to site-specificity and the passage of time via his walk along the river and industrial sites.

Renée Green, Walking in NYL (2016)

This film depicts a combination of New York and Lisbon’s urban spaces via the artist’s wanderings, where she discovers past lives in the landscape. “The viewer seems to meander through the city alongside the artist. Walking in NYL distorts time and place by shuttling between New York and Lisbon – the hectic pace of the former cued by the honking of Midtown cabs, the latter’s ramble down steeply cobbled streets. The videos slow down when Green pauses to look at details, such as the tawny stone exposed by chipped paint.” [credit]

The work touches on issues of multi-layered histories and spaces, beginnings, home, senses of national or cultural origin, unstable identities, stories of past and present, individual versus collective, and crossings. Imagery focuses on water and the artist’s movements. [credit: Ana Balona de Oliveiera, Third Text, 2016. Vol. 30, Nos. 1-2, 43-59.]