The New School Urban Festival and The New School Academic Urban Committee present
Thursday April 21, 2011, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
6 West 12th Street, room 002 (in the basement)
Urban Undercurrents (an extension of the New School course, The City through the Body) explores sensuous encounters in and with the city with the understanding that particular smells, sounds, visions, textures and tastes mark cities as sensory environments that cultivate hedonism, pleasure, imagination and desire. The event’s installations, performances and activities ask: How can we enact mystical and imaginative readings of the city? How might these readings divine what lies beneath the surface?
Taking cities as sensory sites, Urban Undercurrents engages strategies we can use to explore the corporeal poetics (and politics) of being in the city. These ‘methods’ highlight our unconscious desire for experience and consider both the routine and the ritualistic in their search for those things that may not be clearly visible, yet palpably register as experience in the city.
As part of the event, Juan Betancurth and Todd Shalom of conceptual walks organization, Elastic City will offer a ‘special preview’ of their walk, 4ever 21. This walk will restore your natural radiance for eternal youth. Participants will ask for and receive timeless tips from Manhattan’s landmarks and lodestars as the group engages in a series of site-specific rites in Midtown. (For the walk, meet on the NE corner of 47th and 6th at 6:30 p.m. See http://elastic-city.com/walks/4ever-21 for more details. RSVP required for the walk: info@elastic-city.com).
On site at 66 West 12th Street (room 002), there will be a number of installations and performances including tarot readings by Adeola Enigbokan. These readings enact a method for feeling out resonances (in a manner analogous to the way emergency first responders might search for vital signs) between urban spaces and the affective experiences that relate people to these spaces (think for example of Cléo’s tarot reading in Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7). Mariana Luna will present her multimedia installation, Ventanas, a meditation on voyeurism, presence, and absence. The installation, a sensorial work-in-progress, sees windows as an interface to reflect on the ways cities manifest in layers and can act as mirrors of the social and the perceptual. Xavi Acarin will present the result of many walks in the city with a series of images that capture the haunted qualities and subtle violence of urban space. David Peppas will provide music and will show 16mm found footage. The event will also engage participants in Jennie Kaufman’s interactive game that explores urban experience via various registers—the imaginative, the corporeal, the sensorial, and the aspirational. Refreshments will be served.
Participants:
Xavi Acarin was born in Barcelona and currently lives in New York City. As an art producer he has worked for several artists and art institutions including Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Site Santa Fe and Creative Time. He studied Art History in Barcelona and Museum Studies at New York University. Xavi’s research and writings have brought him to center his interest on art and experience. http://www.xaawie.blogspot.com/
Barbara Adams studies the creative practices of artists, curators, and social scientists with a particular interest in the ways in which creative practitioners grapple with and diagnose contemporary unease through their work. Barbara studied social sciences at the University of Amsterdam and is now working on her dissertation at the New School for Social Research. She has taught courses in urban studies, cultural theory and social sciences including the course The City through the Body that inspired this event. http://inhabitingimagination.wordpress.com/
Juan Betancurth blurs dreamlife, memory and the present through sculpture, installation and performance. He creates installations to frame his performance work and draws upon poetry, witchcraft, religious rites and domestic routines to both re-configure roles within family and offer a place of community to participants. Born in Manizales, Colombia, Juan now resides in Brooklyn, NY. http://www.juanbetancurth.com/
Adeola Enigbokan is an artist, researcher, writer and teacher based in New York City. Her work is all about the experience of living in cities today. She has presented work in diverse venues: at the ConfluxCity Festival, Anthology Film Archive in New York, The Royal Institute for British Architects, London and the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem. She teaches Urban Studies, Media Studies, Sociology and Anthropology at universities in New York City, while completing a doctorate in Environmental Psychology at the City University of New York. http://archivingthecity.com/
Jennie Kaufman is a writer, editor, and student living in Brooklyn. She currently studies social sciences at the New School for General Studies. Jennie has written fiction, screenplays, essays, and magazine articles. Her work has appeared in Ancestry, VerbSap, and Eclectica. Her novel The Ark was Whiskey Woman Press’s first publication in 2003. She has completed another novel, Cartoon Gravity, and is beginning to research the next one. Jennie has worked as an editor, proofreader, and typesetter and has an extensive background in book production and is webmaster for http://www.kabogroup.com/.
don quijote a.k.a. Mariana Luna, Lorca & other aliases, is the recipient of the 2010 Jane Young Memorial Award for her writing. She has won CUNY awards in critical and creative writing. Her collection of poetry, Snakes and Rebellious Breaths, and her collaborative sound art production of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky were featured at the 2010 Poets House showcase, and remain in their permanent collection. The primary themes in her work include: the intersections/borders of history, myth, memory, identity/biography, and the slippage of ‘truth’ inherent in them. Current work includes a novella version of the libretto for a folk opera that will be published in summer 2011 followed by the performance piece that will open in New York in the winter. Her multi-media installation Ventanas, begins a traveling exhibition by first appearing in the Urban Festival in April. http://gangofbirds.com/
David Peppas is a sociologist, teacher, and musician based in New York. He is currently working on his dissertation as part of his PhD work at the New School for Social Research. David’s research includes exploration of city sites and phenomena in relation to haunting and the sacred along with work on human interaction with robots and nonhuman animals. He currently teaches a variety of sociology courses at CUNY and at St. Joseph’s College. He is also a member of the band Echolepsy. http://www.myspace.com/echolepsy
Todd Shalom is the founder and director of Elastic City. He works with text, sound and image. He performs and makes installations to re-contextualize the body in space using vocabulary of the everyday. In this pursuit, Shalom often collaborates with performance artist/director Niegel Smith. Together, as Permiso, they conceive and stage interactive rituals in public and private environments. Todd’s solo work includes improvisational music performances, soundwalks, poetry readings, installations, photography and sleepovers. He is an active member of the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology. http://www.toddshalom.com/
