risd | public engagement

This weekend, I spent a warm wet Sunday afternoon on New York’s Governors Island, exploring the video and building installations in the Creative Time This World & Nearer Ones exhibition.  Governors Island is imminently urban, located only 800 yards from the lower tip of Manhattan, yet exudes a sense of quiet that is surreal and unsettling given its urban proximity. It  is a place where ghosts and tourists (on this particular weekend, art tourists) intertwine native, colonial, military, and capitalist histories  as they walk side by side down tree-lined paths.

Tue Greenfort's The Project for the New American Century installation at the Brick Village

Many of the exhibition’s installations occur inside the vacated homes of military personnel, reactivating these dormant spaces with infrasound, seances, and in one case carefully negotiated vandalism.  They reflect varying degrees of decay and rot;  chipping paint, crumbling walls, musty halls and sticky floors add subtle gestures to the narratives being told by the artworks. Having spent a lot of time thinking of how to creatively repurpose underutilized spaces, I appreciated the ways that the artists, and Creative Time curators, approached these sites, finding ways to challenge their spatial limitations while paying respect to their histories that extend far beyond the life of this exhibition.

At the same time, the future of these buildings is very much under negotiation between the city of New York, the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC). While many of the structures are protected under the national registry for historic buildings, others are slotted for demolition to make room for redevelopment and landscaping of the park. Tue Greenfort’s piece, The Project for the New American Century (which unfortunately was closed after one of the letters, built from salvaged materials from the interior spaces of soon-to-be demolished homes, fell off the side of the wall!,) creates a pointed commentary around the privileging of certain kinds of history over others.

This sends me thinking too about why we document – what compels us to record our experiences of particular moments in time? (on a tangential note, I’ve been excited by the obsessive documentation of what is being called “feral houses” in Detroit and our own experience of urban decay in Forgotten Providence.)

Feral Home in Detroit

An intervention like This World & Nearer Ones, though sanctioned by the same groups that are leading the redevelopment of our urban spaces,  create the opportunity to reflect upon and capture these particular moments in time, before the rewriting of spaces and histories has been complete.  Through documentation these efforts will extend their lifespans both formally through publications and press, but also informally through the photos and recountings by visitors to exhibitions, neighborhoods, cities. We document to remember but also to share with others so that these histories are not lost and that new futures can be imagined.