CITY ENCOUNTERS: NEW YORK
Students Travel Workshop
University of Fine Artes Umea, Sweden
September 1-10, 2005
A city, any large city, and New York is not alone in this regard, is too complex an object of study for it to be grasped in a single visit. It is best to think of it in terms of a series of encounters leading to a relationship. By accepting the inevitable partiality of this circumstance one can be free to experience the intensity of a highly selective while contingent encounter. It is thus that, at this point in time, one may find in New York a variety of temporally disparate experiences, conditioned as they are by a number of narratives that have consolidated the city's overlapping histories as well as shaped by everyday rewritings of such memories. I propose that we tackle New York diagonally, that is straight to its core cultural activities. At times, we shall cut through its layers as if to dissect its decayed body in order to understand its genealogies--the Dia Beacon's collection of minimalist work and the Whitney Museum's Robert Smithson's retrospective are good examples. At other times, we shall temporarily inhabit the city's living tissues in order to participate in the discourses that shape the contemporary moment--typically, conversations with Ayreen Anastas/Rene Gabri from the Beaver Group as well as visits with Hakan Topal from the xurban collective and Valerie Tevere/Angel Nevarez from neuroTransmitter.
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