BIK VAN DER POL’S PROJECT FOR LIVING AS A FORM (creative times). 2010​​

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-Scene: Over 40 years ago, New York City was granted an area bounded by Essex, Delancy, Grand and Willett Streets.  Currently known as SPURA, it is the largest area of the city that remains without urban development.  This particular place, full of hope, memories and meanings, is a critical part of the living history of the Lower East Side. 

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-Plot: Pablo Gomez Uribe (Colombia) and Reena Katz (Canada) will guide a silent performative tour through the proposed SPURA site, encouraging walkers to experience the place through the sounds of its current environment and the missing images of events that occurred in the past. Using a combination of sonic and visual cues gathered from the neighborhood, the walk will highlight the strange and highly political history of tenement fires that occurred in the Lower East Side in the years before SPURA’s birth.

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-Aftermath: Walkers will experience an ambiguous story of the proposed SPURA site, exchanging spoken scripts from their guides for silence and contrasting temporal images. This fractured space will evoke the missing voices needed to herald a just future for the site’s development. 

 

SILENCE IN THE POSTCARD CITY

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another

on the same site and under the same name, born and  dying without

knowing one another, with communication among themselves.

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Cities and Memory 5. The Invisible City. Italo Calvino.

 

INSTRUCTIONS

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1: And first of all; Welcome to the silent tour of the postcard city, our names are Reena and Pablo.

2: As you can see; Unfortunately. We are not allowed to speak or answer any questions.

3: All the questions that this procedure and tour creates have to be respond by your own.

4: Our goal is walk, hear, compare, contrast and try to evoke some consciousness about this particular place.

5: The duration of this tour is 60 minutes

6: Please fallow the mute guides

7: The mute guides will stop in 7 different spots of this area.

8: Using your postcard we would like that you frame some particular objects that you will find in the area. 

9: The mute guides are going to do a little demonstration of how you can frame.

10: Is your own way of frame and the thing that you are framing that counts for us.

11: Please enjoy the silent tour

12: Thank you so much

13: Reena and Pablo

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