TEMPORARY OCCUPATIONS | ALEX VILLAR

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.

Temporary Occupations, 6 min, silent, video, 2001 | 30 sec preview

The installation recreates the situation the video depicts. Two parallel fences divide the space of a rectangular room. Both fences stop before meeting one of their walls, allowing the viewer to pass through the relatively narrow space between the two fences. The video is projected onto one of the fences, on rear screen material. The other fence is covered with a translucent black netting material. The video can be seen from the tree sides of the fences. First mediated by the obstruction caused by the netting, then very clear but too close and finally at an optimum distance but flipped because projected from the back. This series of detours in the viewing of the piece allow the viewer to negotiate a balance between the intellectual and performative dimensions of the experience.

Fence, video still from video, 6 min, silent, 2001
Narrow Gap, video still from video, 6 min, silent, 2001
Angled Gap, video still from video, 6 min, silent, 2001

Featured
Diaz, Eva and Beth Stryker, Mind the gap (New York: Smack Melon, 2006)
Villar, Alex and Katya Sander. Temp Occupations and Other Double Binds (Luneburg: Revolver, 2003)
Villar, Alex. Other Ways and Temporary Occupations (Amherst: ReMarx, Vol. 14:3, Fall, 2002)
Johnson, Nato and Greg Sholette, eds. The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (North Adams: MIT, 2004)