Mother Nature to 9-11 Mourners: Eat My Dust

The grid system is so pervasive and so engrained in the minds and habits of New Yorkers that it is rarely questioned, indeed, rarely even thought about. -- The New York Psychogeography Association, A New Garden of Eden.

For an entire year after it took place, the destruction of the World Trade Center was consistently symbolized by right angles and straight lines: by either two rectangular boxes stacked next to each other in mimicry of the Twin Towers or by the number "11" in the date September 11, 2001. These rigid, unyielding shapes fit in well with the tough, "we will not be intimidated" rhetoric of the "war on terrorism" and with New York City's architecture and gridded-street plan, in which (almost) everything is in the shape of a square or a rectangle. In Manhattan, there are no circles, no "soft" symbols of the cycle of life, the movement of the sun or the earth itself. Everything is flat and hard.

And yet, at the moment of truth -- during the emotionally charged "Ground Zero" ceremonies that commemorated the one-year anniversary of the attacks -- the shape in which the mourners assembled and expressed their grief wasn't a box or a rectangle, but a circle or, rather, two circles, arranged concentrically, one within the other. We couldn't help but be reminded of the design of the community garden called "The Garden of Eden," which we have proposed should be rebuilt in place of the World Trade Center. In any event, the concentric circles of wreaths and mourners looked smashing; pictures of them filled the local newspapers the next day.

Almost all of these pictures emphasized the good weather, the presence of moderate temperatures and bright sunlight, all of which seemed to suggest that the ceremony was received favorably or at least tolerated by "God," Mother Nature or what-have-you, despite the reprehensible conduct of the United States since the attacks. (Self-avowed President George W. Bush used the grim occasion to call for war against Saddam Hussein.) Only the photograph taken by James Estrin and published in The New York Times on 12 September 2002 tells the truth. On the afternoon of the 9-11 memorial, Mother Nature swept through New York City with winds that gusted as high as 60 miles per hour. Down in the pit of Ground Zero, the winds stirred up the dust, which rose up in clouds and flew into the faces of those in attendance. The dust bowl got so bad that the ceremony had to be halted and work crews had to be brought in to spray the ground with water. Estrin's photograph was taken when the dust was at its worst; some of the mourners are completely obscured by it. No, Mother Nature wasn't having it; she rejected those particular circles.

-- the New York Psychogeographical Association, 13 September 2002.

http://www.notbored.org/wtc2.html

Fire Escape Performance Research

Another Conflux festival project that resembles ideas I've been having about performing in NYC:

Fire Escapes

Tom Peyton - DoTank:Brooklyn

Fire Escapes reveals and revels in the timbre of one of the most ubiquitous structures in New York City. A unique and enveloping soundtrack is generated through a fundamental element of the urban fabric.

6 drummers will play two fire escapes on E. 7th as instruments. Performers will be on a pair of structures facing each other on either side of the street. Utilizing interlocking patterns, Fire Escapes will accentuate the dynamic spatial characteristics of the vertically positioned ensemble. The piece will be cyclical, patient, and repetitive.

The piece expands on the existing exploration of New York residents into how fire escapes can serve everyday social purposes beyond their intended function. Currently, fire escapes become terraces, reading rooms, and sunbathing decks. Fire Escapes redefines these structures as performance spaces.

A performance I've just started thinking about involves developing a durational performance on the ubiquitous and quintessential New York Fire Escapes, sites we are all familiar with when imagining the urban landscape and language of NYC.

The particular Fire Escape I would be performing within would be the one just outside the back wall of Grace Exhibition Space, where the only access from within the GES is through a small porter door with a A4 white sheet scrawled in pencil saying 'Do Not Open Ever!!'. This sign however has nothing to do with GES and its author remains unknown.

So far current ideas are growing out of looking at the metal materiality of the site, the spaces and construction of the bars and the space- perhaps tying threading weaving material through the bars to create a shelter of some kind? a web or nest or bolthole? Other ideas involve creating a kind of 'community garden' of a more surreal nature whereby products as well as more conventional organic vegetables and food consumables would be buried in banana boxes laid out along the metal construction of the Fire Escapes, and my 'role'/performance would be to be a performance gardener and to 'garden' the products and give them away to the audience- or perhaps following on the trajectory of Chaw Ei Thein's (who has performed at Grace Exhibition Space) performance "Mobile Market", where she sold basic food consumables, such as rice, salt, spices at prices before inflation which generated a fantastic 'economic nostalgia' in her audience buying and selling- trading is what I mean! Therefore, I would 'sell' or trade the products for a lower price than is the current RRP in the USA for the products at supermarkets and deli stores.

However, as with all site specific work, as opposed to site dominant and purely interventional work, I would want the performance and installation to come out of my communication with the site i.e. spending time exploring the site, experimenting with materials and how the site is performing its function and how to use that as stating points for devising, and how to subvert and expound upon its present performativity.