Josh posted on Candy Chang‘s last project, I Wish This Was, late last year and it was really inspiring. Such a simple gesture is such a powerful tool for re-imagining a community.
Today, I saw Chang’s latest project, Before I Die in NOLA — another lovely participatory public art project. Perhaps not quite as transformative as I Wish This Was, but the density in this project perhaps makes up for it.
A 25 foot flag pole was installed on the UIC campus at 1240 W Harrison St. in front of Gallery 400 in May 2005. In October 2008, Philip von Zweck resumed the project on the UIC campus at 400 S. Peoria St. in front of the College of Architecture and the Arts building.
This space is open to anyone in the greater-Chicago area to use for one week.
With this project von Zweck seeks to provide the community with a democratized space that fosters expression free of the veil of anonymity.
Contact information for the author of every weekly flag encourages dialogue between the author of the flag and its visitors.
temporary allegiance by Philip von Zweck for Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago
Another day went by quickly here on the 400 block of Pelissier. I met another member of the Department of Unusual Certainties through Skype, The Breakroom celebrated its last day, Leesa painted some chalkboard paint on a few walls for her project, we found a blooming cactus in Andrea’s space and made some potato stamps with Jefferson.
Continue reading “SRSI, Day 7: A Blooming Cactus & Making Potato Stamps”
Sunday night was the first event of our Save the City project: Listen to the City, and it was incredible!!! We had an amazingly generous crowd of old friends and new faces come out to share their stories of Windsor with us and we recorded close to 8 hours of their hopes, concerns, and personal histories of the city.
We’ll be going through all of this material over the next little while to turn it into an audio documentary that we’ll distribute online, hopefully on some local airwaves, and also through a contribution of the final work to the Windsor Archives. We’re hoping that this documentary will serve as a marker in time that will have captured a very specific kind of conversation happening right now, and maybe happening for the first time. It’s going to be something very special.
We want to thank everyone who came out and participated — this literally could not have been possible without you! There’s a number of photos and some overview of the discussions after the jump of what was our absolute most favourite night of the year so far.
Continue reading “Listen to the City: Discovering the Histories of Windsor through Conversation”
I’m still trying to understand the relationship between Detroit UnReal Estate Agency and Power House (and maybe they’re the same thing and there’s no other relationship to understand), but at any rate, the Power House project is an incredible idea. In short, “The house is to act as cultural catalyst and opportunity for cultural exchanges through workshops and residencies. It will also provide lessons in wind, solar, and sustainable strategies by implementing these systems and introducing them to the community.”
Basically, there’s a neighbourhood in Detroit that has been informally adopted as a site for this cultural catalyst. Many homes in the area have been foreclosed or set on fire, or both. Empty lots are going for $500, while homes are going for $2000. So, the Power House group proposes to purchase these lots and homes and flip the area from a drain on the tax base, bank holdings, and the local economics to a community asset.
I think this could be an excellent group to connect with.
Next Tuesday night, December 2nd, at 7pm, Broken City Lab will be holding a Social Mapping Event, where we’ll use the tools Google gave us and highlight potential study areas (and broken points of interest)—the Google Map itself will be made public afterwards. We’ll also make a screencast of the process and make it available on the website afterwards.
So, if you’ve been meaning to come out to our weekly Office Hours, but haven’t had the time yet, clear your schedule for next Tuesday.
I’ve been pointed to Learning To Love You More on a number of occasions, though it’s only recently that I’ve dug into the site a little bit more. The project was initiated by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher in 2002 and works around the assignments that participants are supposed to complete and document and send back to be posted on the website (and sometimes included in a book, an exhibition, a screening, or a radio broadcast). The image above is from Assignment #63 – Make an Encouraging Banner. I think if I were to have made a banner, it might have been something like that one.
That the project does get a fair amount of participants is inspiring, but the thing I like the most are the ideas of the assignments themselves and the fact that they exist, that they were written down, thought about, and attempted. Making a list is, at the very least, a starting point of fixing something.