Category Archives: Collectives

Modelab, Ghost Walker (2014-15)

“Like photography negatives, urban design comprises information on what is not visible and only can be inferred by its contours. In this manner, urban geography becomes a catalogue of defeats and absences that can be interpreted from what once existed.

Based on Mexico City maps from 1867 and 1892, superposed on a 2014 Google map of the Juarez and Cuauhtémoc neighbourhoods, this project seeks to create an appropriation of histories through an artistic and scholar exploration of a specific street that ceased to exist more than a century ago.

Following the techniques of the Situationist’s dérive and Andrei Monastyrsky’s work with the Collective Actions Group, Ghost Walker: An Impossible Walk Through Mexico City’s History is a longitudinal study of a specific urban space, witness of a myriad of processes and modifications throughout 150 years

Ghost Walker (2014-15) has been presented at Muca Roma in Mexico City (2016), and as part of the group exhibition “Walk With Us” at the Rochester Arts Center (2022).

Participants: Sandra Calvo, Ramiro Chaves, Erick Meyenberg, Raul Ortega Ayala, Sergio Miranda Pacheco, Manuel Rocha Iturbide, Modelab.

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Modelab is an artistic initiative aiming to promote interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of public space, history, and cartography.

Formed in 2014 by Claudia Arozqueta and Rodrigo Azaola, Modelab projects have taken place in streets, parks, billboards, beaches, museums, vacant retail stores, and other spaces in Australia, New Zealand, France, Mexico, Taiwan, and the Philippines.” (credit)

ACT UP, Crash the Market (1997)

“Formed in New York City in 1987, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (more commonly known as ACT UP) brought widespread attention to the AIDS epidemic and helped make significant advances in AIDS research.

ACT UP’s first-ever demonstration in 1987 — as well as three others in 1988, 1989, and 1997 — took place on Wall Street, the world’s leading financial center, and targeted pharmaceutical companies that were profiteering from the epidemic.” (credit)

While not all ACT UP actions included walking and marching, their 10th anniversary demonstration did:

newspaper from 1997

Newspaper advertisement for a 10th anniversary march organized by ACT UP. The ad appeared in the Village Voice, March 25, 1997 issue, and features a black and white photograph taken by Robert D. Farber in 1990 called “Fight AIDS.” The photograph features several men holding a banner that says “Fight AIDS!” on the roof of a building.

Tenth Anniversary of the 1987 Demonstration
On March 24, 1997, the ten-year anniversary of ACT UP’s first demonstration, the group returned to Wall Street. The action, called “Crash the Market,” again protested the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies, but also cutbacks in Medicaid funding. ACT UP chapters from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Oberlin, Ohio, brought over 500 activists, who gathered at 7:30 a.m. by the fountain in City Hall Park. They then marched south to Wall Street, chanting “We die — they make money” and “Wall Street trades on people with AIDS!” Demands for Congressional hearings on the price of AIDS drugs were also made. Protesters rushed the doors of the Stock Exchange or sat down in the streets. During the demonstration, 73 people (mostly women) were arrested for acts of civil disobedience.” (credit)

Los Carpinteros, Sandalia (2004)

two scuptural flip flops

Two cast rubber sculptures
Each sandal: 12-3/4 x 5-3/4 x 2-1/2 inches

Edition: 60

“The sculpture multiple Sandalia is an edition of 60. The object is produced from a rapid prototype model and cast in rubber. By producing a limited edition of rubber sandals with relief maps of Havana neighborhoods on the soles, the artists adapted an ordinary object of mass production into a customized and poeticized icon that speaks of place, identity and culture. Sandalia derives from a series of watercolor drawings of sandals with maps. The right sandal depicts Old Havana, the left Vedado.”

“Over the past decade, Los Carpinteros (Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodriguez) have collaborated to develop their own poetic direction that functions in the imprecise boundary between art and craft traditions. Their carefully constructed works use humor to exploit a visual syntax that sets up contradictions among object, function and language.

Los Carpinteros have emerged as a vital force in the new, expanded terrain of global art. They live and work in Havana and Madrid and continue to travel and exhibit globally. For example: a major wall drawing was included in Drawing Now at the Museum of Modern Art-Queens, New York; their Transportable City was exhibited at the 7th Havana Biennial and at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Art Museum of Hawaii in Honolulu. In March, 2004 they exhibited a new body of work including drawings and large-scale wood sculptures at Anthony Grant, Inc. in New York City. In 2005 their exhibition Inventing the World premiered at the USF Contemporary Art Museum.”

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TH&B, TH&B: Beachcombers (2016)

four men standing outdoors

“Project Description:

In TH&B: Beachcombers, Hamilton collective TH&B (composed of artists Simon Frank, Dave Hind, Ivan Jurakic, and Tor Lukasik-Foss) stage an urban camping expedition at Ontario Place. In this durational performance, the group explores the West Island on foot and by canoe, producing an artwork that encompasses their process, their camp, and an installation built during their time there. A tongue-in-cheek response to narratives of wilderness exploration and discovery, TH&B: Beachcombers revels in the absurdity of scouring an artificial island, with the aim of collecting materials to create a rescue beacon. Referencing the 1970s kitsch exemplified by the Canadian TV show Beachcombers, TH&B’s performance combines industriousness, outdoor-savvy, and a healthy dose of humour.

Biography:

TH&B is the creative partnership of Simon Frank, Dave Hind, Ivan Jurakic and Tor Lukasik-Foss, a group of visual artists working out of Hamilton, Ontario. Resuscitating the moniker of the defunct railway that once serviced the Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo rail corridor from 1895-1987 as a geographic marker, the team develops projects that response to site, context and history. Collaborating on all aspects of authorship and production TH&B investigates the intersection of rural, urban and industrial environments in the Great Lakes region.” [credit]

Hamilton Perambulatory Unit, Mall Walk (2014)

mall walk collage

[credit]

The Hamilton Perambulatory Unit is a group of artists, writers and educators, co-founded in 2014 by Donna Akrey, Taien Ng-Chan and Sarah E. Truman. The HPU orchestrates participatory events to engage with historical and current ideas around perambulation, and to explore walking in conjunction with artistic practices and research-creation. Our methodologies have included stratigraphic cartography, locative media experimentation, sensory synesthesia poetry-writing, and found material sculpture-making. HPU has given walks in Montreal, Toronto, Windsor, Buffalo NY, Sydney Australia, London England, Galway Ireland, Memphis TN, Tokyo Japan, the online sphere of Zoom, and our home base of Hamilton Ontario.

MJ Hunter Brueggemann, Vanessa Thomas, Ding Wang, Lickable Cities (2014-2017)

person licking statue

“Lickable Cities is a research project that responds to the recent and overwhelming abundance of non-calls for gustatory exploration of urban spaces. In this paper, we share experiences from nearly three years of nonrepresentational, absurdist, and impractical research. During that time, we licked hundreds of surfaces, infrastructures, and interfaces in cities around the world. We encountered many challenges from thinking with, designing for, and interfacing through taste, including: how can and should we grapple with contamination?, and how might lickable interfaces influence more-than-humans? We discuss these challenges to compassionately question the existing framework for designing with taste in [Human-Computer Interaction].” [credit]

 

Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon, D’Fence Cuts (2001)

“Heath Bunting emerged from the 1980s art scene committed to building open, democratic communications systems and social contexts. Throughout his career, he has explored multiple media including graffiti and performance art and has staged numerous interventionist projects, as well as being a pioneer in the field of Internet Art. Bunting began collaborating with artist Kyle Brandon in 2001.” [credit]

These artists devised a circular tour (see map), and by night stealthily cut some fences as part of their Borderxing project. BorderXing serves as a pratical guide to crossing major international borders, legally or illegally. It was a type of physical hacking of space, cutting anything that impeded their walk – D’Fence Cuts. Below is an excerpt from their tour de fence catalog:

“tour de fence is the answer to your real needs. while the internet promised to level out all barriers, tour de fence enables you to surmount the fences out there that people erect to obstruct your way every day. from wire netting to ru­ stic fence, from steel door to close security system, tour de fence offers you the necessary know-how for unhampered movement. tour de fence is the direct way.

learn offroad mobility within high security architecture. cross over stretches of land in the right direction. penetrate the underground area of your city. tour de fence puts an end to the relocation of your movements into virtual space. use the tour de fence! become a tour de fence amateur team. pass this handbook on to others. propagate tour de fence.

by doing so you will become part of the international tour de fence community. as a reader, a free-climber or by sending one of the 24 tour de fence postcard in this book.

participate now! tour de fence’s vision is to do what we want.

tour de fence acknowledges fence as metaphor for private property. fence as a supposedly temporary, often mobile barrier performing functions of inclusion and exclusion, entrapment and guided freedom, decoration, safety, user boun­ dary, protection from hazard, flow control, visual screening and user separation.

fence is a permeable filter system defining permitted use and users. light, wind, insects, water, plants and sound pass unhindered while high order life forms such as·humans, fish, cattle and cars are engaged:

development of fence.

up to now the vertical has generally been private while the horizontal public. increasingly, vertical fences are being rotated to the horizontal and enlarged over large areas of land, as all use and users are embraced in total control.

tour de fence recognises the transformation of framed freedom into restricted open-range roaming; the re-alignment of unknown possibilities into known re­ peatables. users are permitted to skate across flattened surface of fence, but not to pass through – the fence is everywhere.” (credit)

Global Performance Art Walks (2009-)

“This project brings together artists from around the world who regularly take to the streets to do walking performances.

WHAT’S THIS ABOUT?

To investigate the possible intersections between Performance Art and Walking, exploring the performative expressivity of the act of walking, considering the bipedal nomadism as a performance art itself.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE?

Each walk is an open exploration in the public space. Could be a group or solo walk, in the city, in the woods or in the beach. The walk itself could be the central stimulus of the performative action, or the performative action -previously defined- could be the stimulus for the walk. Read the participation guidelines here.

HISTORY

Started in 2009 in Caracas, Venezuela, by the venezuelans performance artists Kevin Orellanes, Renny Barrios, Yosmaira Silva, Aidana Rico, Jose Leonardo Guaglianone, Julian Higuerey, Adriana Rondon, Ania Varez and Ignacio Perez.

Our initial motivation: take to the streets to perform collectively. After a first attempt stopped by the local police, we asked ourselves “how can we make performance on the streets within nothing that stop us?”. Our answer was simple: by walking. With this idea we returned to the street, initiating what we called “Performance Tours”. So, for several months, we toured the city of Caracas performing on sidewalks, traffic lights at intersections, in parks, squares, streets and avenues, using a very simple method: to walk a predefined route and experience each encounter spontaneously at every step.

In 2010 the project expanded worldwide inviting other performance artists from other regions to participate. Since then many artists have participated from South America and North America, Europe and Middle East. Currently we are a large and growing international community. Join us!

Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/globalperformanceartwalks
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/bipedformance/inspirational-walks/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/channels/bipedart” [credit]

Glowlab, One Block Radius (2004)

screenshot of a blog

Glowlab, One Block Radius (2004)

“Beginning in January 2004, artists Christina Ray and Dave Mandi-known as Glowlab – have been examining the block on which our new building will rise (Bowery to Chrystie Street and from Stanton Street to Rivington Street). Glowlab’s project, One Block Radius…provides an in-depth focus on this specific microcosm of New York City. This feature-rich urban record will include personal perspectives from diverse sources such as city workers, children, street performers and architectural historian. Engaging a variety of tools and media such as blogs, video documentation, field recordings and interviews, Glowlab will create a multi-layered portrait of the block as it has never been seen before.” [credit]

“One Block Radius, a project of Brooklyn artists Christina Ray and Dave Mandl [known collaboratively as Glowlab], is an extensive psychogeographic survey of the block where New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art will build a new facility in late 2004. Engaging a variety of tools and media such as blogs, video documentation, maps, field recordings & interviews, Glowlab creates a multi-layered portrait of the block as it has never been seen before [and will never be seen again]. This website is an interactive archive for the project, which will continue to grow over time as we build a dense data-map of the block. The information collected is organized into three categories: observation, interaction & response. Click on each category to begin exploring the block.” [credit]

“While the block is bit-size in relation to the surrounding metropolis, the changes it is about to undergo are massive. One Block Radius plays with this idea of scale, aiming to zoom in and physically data-mine the tiny area for the amount of information one would normally find in a guide book for an entire city. This feature-rich urban record will include personal perspectives from diverse sources such as city workers, children, street performers, artists and architectural historians. ” [credit]

 

Stalker Collective (1995-), Rome, Italy

“Stalker is a collective of artists and architects, founded in 1995 in Rome, Italy, focused on local research and activities, with particular attention to marginal areas, mainly urban voids and spaces in transformation. Their practice is based on urban explorations, listening and interactions that enact a creative flow within the investigated area, its people and their collective memory and imagination. These processes aim at generating social and environmental relationships capable of self-organizing themselves and evolving. The activities of Stalker promote sharing of knowledge, collaborations and awareness-raising inside different communities towards their territory and their cultural environment.” [credit]

The 1996 Stalker Manifesto (by Lorenzo Romito) is available at the end of Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (2017). Stalker proposes the transurbance as a means of mapping the unique spatial and social conditions of the contemporary city.

Article about “EUR(H)OPE Charade,” Hidden Histories 2021, Roma

“Stalker is a collective of architects and researchers connected to the Roma Tre University who came together in the mid-1990s. In 2002, Stalker founded the research network Osservatorio Nomade (ON), which consists of architects, artists, activists and researchers working experimentally and engaging in actions to create self-organised spaces and situations.
Stalker have developed a specific methodology of urban research, using participative tools to construct a ‘collective imaginary’ for a place. In particular they have developed the method of collective walking to ‘actuate territories’, which for them is a process of bringing space into being. Stalker carry out their walks in the ‘indeterminate’ or void spaces of the city, which have long been disregarded or considered a problem in traditional architectural practice. Referring to their walking practice as ‘transurbance’, the group views it as a collective mode of expression and a tool for mapping the city and its transformations, of gathering stories, evoking memories and experiences, and immersing themselves with others in a place. They use this knowledge and experience to address urban planning and territorial issues, focusing especially on the interstices of the contemporary city-region. Starting with the edges of the Tiber river on the outskirts of Rome, Stalker have since used this method in many other cities including Milan, Paris, Berlin and Turin.” [credit]

“Since their early walks, Stalker/ON have developed an approach to architecture that is profoundly participatory. Using tactical and playful interventions, they aim at creating spatial transformations through engaging in social relations, because as they have observed, the built environment takes too long to respond to the needs and desires of those who inhabit it. Places on the periphery and communities that are marginal take centre stage in Stalker/ON’s projects, working with amongst others the Roma and gypsy populations of Europe, Kurdish migrants and the homeless. Their projects show a commitment to those that society abandons and their method collectively tries to build projects with them. Through listening, making use of creative tools of mapping, walking, interventions and participation, Stalker/ON initiate processes of self-organisation that create convivial, social spaces.” [credit]

Other Work

  • Francesco Careri, “Transborderline,” Architectural Design 71, no. 3 (2001): 87-91.
  • —, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aestheic Practice (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2003).
  • Francesco Careri and Lorenzo Romito, “Stalker and the Big Game of Campo Boario,” in Architecture and Participation, ed. Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till (Abingdon: Spon Press, 2007), 249-256.
  • Peter Lang, “Stalker on Location,” in Loose Space, ed. Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens (New York: Routledge, 2001).
  • Lorenzo Romito, “The Surreal Foil,” Architecural Design 71, no. 3 (2001): 20-23.
  • “Stalker – Laboratorio d’arte urbana – Roma,” StalkerLab, www.stalkerlab.it.

References About

Quotes

ON/Osservatorio Nomade is an interdisciplinary research project initiated and promoted by Stalker, which proposes ways of interventions based on spacial practices of exploration, listening, and ralation, activated through creative tools of interaction with the environment and the inhabitants and with the archives of memories. Such practice aims to catalize the development of self-organized evolutive processes, through the establishment of social and environmental relations. The interventions build up a sensible, complex and dynamic mapping of territories and communities, through an interdisciplinary approach, activating interest and easly accessible. Such operative practice is a unique tool for knowledge sharing and contributes to the dissemination and widening of communities conciusness towards their territory and cultural environment, able to draw effective feedbacks through creative participation in territorial and urban management.
– Stalker/ON website, http://www.osservatorionomade.net

Stalker’s fundamental thesis for their manifold interdisciplinary strategies is that architecture, as a solid mass, cannot “change as quickly as the community that lives within it”. That is why they are pursuing the route of participative work with the residents in order to initiate a process that will produce an adaptive understanding of architecture and urban planning – through a community that is interested in their buildings and in the opportunities for adapting them.
– Urban Drift, Talking Cities (2006), http://talkingcities.org/talkingcities/pages/180_en.html

The idea is to rediscover, in the metropolitan territory, a sense that springs from the experience of the present state of things with all its contradictions, from an unopinionated perspective, free of reassuring and at the same time frustrating historical or functional justifications.
– Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aestheic Practice (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2003); see also www.stalkerlab.it

Giulia Fiocca

Architect, independent researcher and activist on urban and social trasformation focusing on the marginal realities and communities, leftover spaces, informal urbanism and self-organised social and cultural practices. Based in Rome. Studies among Rome, Vienna and Barcelona (Master ‘Metropolis’ in Architecture and Urban Culture at UPC). Since 2006 part of Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade partecipating several projects: Campagnaromana (2006), Rieres//Rambles in Barcelona (2006), Campus Rom: learning from Roma people and back (Rome, Serbia and Macedonia) (2006-08). Since 2009 promoting with Lorenzo Romito Primaveraromana, a Common Design Project for Social Chance in Rome. Visiting professor at architecture faculty, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (2010). Co-founder of Stalker Walking School (2012).

Lorenzo Romito

Independent researcher on urban changes, artist and activist.Architect (1997), prix de Rome, Academie de France, Villa Medici, Rome (2000-1). Co -founder of Stalker in 1995 (www.stalkerlab.org), Osservatorio Nomade in 2001 (www.osservatorionomade.net), Primaveraromana in 2009 (primaveraromana.wordpress.com). Stalker Walking School in 2012 (walkingoutofcontemporary.com). Under those firms the work has been exposed and published worldwide.
Teaching experiences, walks, seminars and workshops with several schools including T.U. Delft, I.U.A.V. Venezia, H.E.A.D. Geneve, Parsons, the New School of Design New York, H.F.G. Karlsruhe, E.T.H. Zurich, Roma Tre Univ.

Aldo Innocenzi

was born in 1964 in Rome, where he lives and works. In 1995 he was among the founders of Stalker / ON. His work is centered on the creation of situations, which may favor changes in the urban fabric. Through strategies of participatory planning, his work re-qualifies spaces, relations and political practice.
Among his works: Stalker attraverso i territori dell’attuale (Roma,1995), Ararat-Campo Boario (Roma, 1999-2002), Immaginare Corviale (Roma, 2004-2006), Savorengo ker(Roma, 2008-2009), Museo Relazionale (Genazzano, 2012).

Pia Livia Di Tardo

Designer for public communications, specializing in graphic arts and visual communications. Di Tardo has a Law degree, and a Master’s degree in Multimedia Design from IED in Rome. She is Coordinator for public communications and web design for the Strategic Plan for the Metropolis and Region of Bari, Puglia, Italy.
Visual-graphic and web designer for the Laboratory of Urban Art Stalker / ON Rome, collaborated with the Faculty of Architecture of Roma Tre, the University IUAV of Venice (Arts and Design) and in the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and Frosinone.