LA Urban Rangers

L.A.-based geographers, environmental and art historians, artists, curators, architects, and others – who aim, with both wit and a healthy dose of sincerity, to facilitate creative, critical, head-on, oblique, and crisscrossed investigations into our sprawling metropolis and its various ecologies. Fashioned as a mobile and site-specific interpretive force, and appropriating the figure of the stereotypic park service ranger, we offer educational campfire programs and guided hikes throughout Los Angeles.



Emily Scott / Chief Ranger

Emily Scott is an art historian and park ranger/naturalist. In both academia and national parks, her work addresses visual culture and nature, with an emphasis on post-1945 art, media, and architecture that critically engages landscape and/or ecology. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in contemporary art and theory at UCLA, with plans to begin a dissertation this summer on land art and wasteland aesthetics.

Sara Daleiden / Senior Ranger

Sara Daleiden is an artist, curator and administrator who focuses on viewer experience through the creation of installations, exhibition systems and interventions within the city. Previous projects, stemming primarily from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, include Rust Spot, Wearable Sculpture Fashion Show and Travelling Wearables. She currently works as the Senior Programs Coordinator for the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles.

Therese Kelly / Senior Ranger

Therese Kelly is an architect, author, and editor. Her work explores the intersection of our natural and urban environments, conceptions of nature, and public space. She has edited numerous books and articles on architecture and design for ANY Magazine and Princeton Architectural Press, written for several design publications, and serves on the board of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Therese holds degrees in architecture from Princeton University and UCLA, and is currently practicing architecture in Los Angeles.

Jennifer Price / Senior Ranger

Jennifer Price, a freelance writer and environmental historian, is the author of Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (1999). She has published in the anthologies Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature and The Nature of Nature: New Essays from America's Finest Writers on Nature, and in the L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, American Scholar, and New York Times. She has a Ph.D. in history from Yale University, and is currently living on Venice Beach and writing a new book about nature in Los Angeles.



the GardenLAb experiment

"Thoreau Goes to Los Angeles"

How can we write about nature in L.A.? Why have nature writers shunned this megalopolis? Why should L.A. in fact be a mecca for nature writing? Why would an interest in cities save nature writing from being so terribly boring? Ranger Jenny Price explores these questions and more as she surveys a wide range of urban nature stories that this literary genre has entirely ignored. Join her as she describes our connections to nature in L.A. through such topics as mango body whips, murdered chihuahuas, the social geography of L.A.’s air, and the saga of the L.A. River – which is arguably the most important L.A. nature story of all.

"End Landscaping: Los Angeles Freeway Gardens"

Everyday, countless Angelenos whiz along the freeway at many miles per hour without noticing the landscaping at their side. Join Ranger Emily Scott to learn more about who manages these edgy green spaces, which plants cover the more than 8,000 acres of sinewy freeway “gardens” in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, why various flora are chosen for their ornamental value and/or abilities to endure drought, buffer sound, control erosion, resist weeds, and even counterbalance auto emissions. Discover, also, the wonderful world of “transportation art,” intended for maximum community pleasure and minimum driver distraction. Finally, consider how and why these areas – first pitched as ideal picnic stops for leisurely Sunday afternoon excursions – are now almost entirely access controlled, or off-limits to embodied exploration and occupation.

"Los Angeles and the Nature of Time"

How we experience time in Los Angeles is structured by everything from cell-phones, which seek to minimize it, to movies featuring natural disasters in town, which seek to maximize it. Both are examples, however, of living only in the present. Ranger Bill Fox will help us rediscover time across a longer spectrum in Los Angeles – from the La Brea Tar Pits to the Forest Lawn Memorial Parks to the Mt. Wilson Observatory. Along the way we’ll detour into the human neurophysiology of time, how to make lava for Hollywood, and why Los Angeles has the largest collection of faux classical Italian sculpture in its gardens.

"Hunting and Gathering in the Big City"

Often when we think of hunting and gathering, ancient or “traditional” cultures come to mind. In many of America’s greatest cities, however, the urban poor still forage for wild and domestic food simply to meet their daily caloric needs. These resources are not just limited to discarded trash, but include wild and feral urban animals such as birds, cats and dogs, fish, and rodents. In cities like Los Angeles, those without daily food security may also be forced to trespass onto private property in order to collect fruits, nuts, and other edible plants. Join Ranger Pete Alagona as he explores L.A.’s networks for finding, collecting, sharing, and preparing these urban foods. How do these foraging activities change traditional notions of human ecology, hunting and gathering, and ecological resources? And what do these practices – and our reactions to them – say about urban America today?

"Toxic Tourism in Los Angeles"

Ranger Donna Houston explores the toxic history of Los Angeles from the perspective of environmental justice. Participants will learn about the history and politics of environmental justice activism in Los Angeles as well as become acquainted with some important sites of environmental struggle via a virtual toxic tour of the city. Toxic touring is a way of reclaiming landscapes blighted by industrial pollutants and wastes as places of community and cultural memory. Toxic touring involves developing different strategies for ‘walking in the city’ in order to recover histories suppressed through the often violent reorderings of L.A.’s urban and industrial landscape.

Historical Reenactment

Allison Smith / The Muster



The Muster is a public art event in which artist Allison Smith invokes the aesthetic vernacular of the American Civil War battle reenactment as a stage set for a polyphonic marshalling of voices in her artistic and intellectual communities. The Muster takes form in a creative encampment on the Fort Jay marching grounds of Governors Island, in which fifty enlisted participants fashion uniforms, build campsites, and declare their causes publicly to an audience of spectators. Smith creates a literal platform, complete with banners and flags, to identify the creative minds in her midst and to celebrate what they are fighting for. Smith directs but does not script the event, so that its outcome is only revealed at the Muster itself.



Allison Smith, a Brooklyn-based artist, is interested in the notion of “authentic reproductions” – a common if oxymoronic phrase describing contemporary objects or tableaux that conjure historical aesthetics and episodes. In her sculptures and mixed-media installations, Smith investigates the ways in which a simple prop, bridging past and present, can come to signify more than its appearance suggests. She creates colonial handcrafts, Civil War memorabilia, and 19th-century weapons, often arranged to transform the exhibition space into that of a historic home or period room. For the past ten years, Smith has conducted an investigation of the cultural phenomenon of Civil War reenactment, or Living History, founded on the belief that historical events gain meaning and relevance when performed live in an open-air, interactive setting. Smith has appropriated the reenactor’s aesthetic palette to produce sculptural installations that examine the role craft plays in the construction of national identity. Over the summer of 2004, Smith organized a weekend encampment on the Catskills property of Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett in which artists came together to create their own unique historical event. Emerging from that experience, the Muster on Governors Island is the most complex project she has undertaken thus far, broadening the Civil War metaphor to reflect on current events, and involving potentially hundreds of participants. Smith was born in Manassas, Virginia in 1972. She received a BA in psychology from the New School for Social Research (1995), a BFA from Parsons School of Design (1995), and an MFA from Yale University School of Art (1999). She participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (1999-2000).

"Re-enacting Stonewall, Jackson that is" / Matt Wolf with Allison Smith


RFK in EKY



RFK in EKY, The Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project, is a series of public conversations and activities centered around the real-time, site-specific intermedia performance that recreated, on September 9th and 10th 2004, Robert Kennedy’s two-day, 200 mile “poverty tour” of southeastern Kentucky in 1968.

This webpage represents our attempt to capture both the essence and detail of the project – the material here reflects the four year development process, the performance itself, the ideas explored in a variety of formats, and the different directions the project is now heading . . . Like the reenactment itself, there are occasional points where the past and the present overlap, compete in some ways – we’ve learned to live with them by recognizing the ways they inform and challenge each other. As a point of reference, the performance is spoken of in the past tense, the project as a whole in the present – it is ongoing, and continues to find new ideas for evolving its exploration . . .

The project provides an opportunity to revisit the essential and still pertinent questions raised in Kennedy’s original visit (2004 being, like 1968, a pivotal election year): on the representation of marginalized populations in the national consciousness; the role of government in maintaining a quality-of-life safety net, and fostering sustainable economic development, educational and vocational advancement; ways to stem the out-migration of rural young people and the loss of natural resources; and the priorities of a government administration engaged in a protracted war. RFK in EKY, like Kennedy and those who created his tour, recognizes these questions are part of an important national dialogue for which Appalachia is only one of many possible settings.

Like the original tour, RFK in EKY focuses attention on the indigenous expertise and alternative visions of Appalachia. The performance re-enacted, with an all-local cast (of hundreds), the most significant events of Kennedy’s 1968 visit in order to hold an historical mirror to present day issues and ideas. The 48 hour performance recreated all aspects of Kennedy’s tour, including two official hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty (held at Vortex and Fleming-Neon), roadside visits with individual families, walking tours of small communities and strip mine sites, stops at one-room schoolhouses, and speeches at courthouses and colleges. A series of contextualizing activities took place preceding the recreation, and surrounded the two-day performance itself. They will continue, in new forms, as the project evolves. These events range from the analytical to the deeply personal and use art as the occasion for creating public meeting space in rural communities.



These pages present the events prior to and during the performance: speakers such as Peter Edelman and Loyal Jones address the history and strategies of the “war on poverty” as it played out in central Appalachia, and the legacy of the programs’ spirit and ideas. Head Start workers focus attention on the last intact remnant of the “war on poverty” idea of “maximum feasible participation of the poor” in determining the direction of programming meant to help them. Artists from the project, including Harrell Fletcher, present an exhibition of memorabilia and commemorative artifacts gathered during its four year development process, and artists within the project conduct a public discussion of the integrated arts approach and the many pitfalls that led to the performance.

Initiated and led by the artist John Malpede, RFK in EKY is a project of Appalshop, Inc. Malpede, now in-residence at Appalshop, began developing the notion of recreating Kennedy’s visit during the American Festival Project sponsored Artist and Community Gathering in 2000, and evolved it into its present form during extended visits over the subsequent three years.

John Malpede is a distinguished, genre-bending performance artist and theater director whose solo pieces “Inappropriate Laughing Responses” and “Get” have been performed throughout the US. Over the past three years Malpede has been featured in five video works in Bill Viola’s series, “The Passion,” including “Quintet of the Astonished,” in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. Currently, Malpede is performing a one-hour monologue as Antonin Artaud in director Peter Sellar’s “Artaud/Jordan.” The piece has toured six European cities and is now touring the US.

In 1985 Malpede formed the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), the first performance group in the nation comprised entirely of homeless and formerly homeless people. LAPD’s current touring project, “Agents and Assets,” originally produced in 2001, recreates a US House of Representatives hearing on the importation of drugs into the country by Nicaraguan Contras with CIA complicity.

The creative process of “Agents and Assets” merges experiential knowledge with contextual information, allowing both performers and audience a deeper understanding of the social and political forces that shape their lives. This model, mixing lived experience and context, is the basic groundwork for RFK in EKY. Local citizens, some of whom saw Kennedy as schoolchildren in 1968, will play national figures; children will play their parents; today’s political and community leaders will play their past counterparts. The construction of memory and commemoration is one context; environmental sacrifice and economic self-determination another; federal policy promises and failures yet another – the project exists to reveal both the imbalances inherent in our society and the extraordinary work and workers attempting to expose and rectify them.

RFK in EKY not only recreates an historic moment, it holds a mirror to it and asks people to join the conversations, exploring their hopes and analyzing what’s true in our relationships to government, community, and each other. Like RFK himself, the project hopes to give people the opportunity and the courage to listen, speak, and act as free citizens in a true democracy.

"RFK in EKY: Maximum Feasible Participation" / Jane Hirshberg


Jeremy Deller / The Battle of Orgreave /17 June 2001 / Orgreave, South Yorkshire



In 1984 the National Union of Mineworkers went on strike. The dispute lasted for over a year and was the most bitterly fought since the general strike of 1926 marking a turning point in the struggle between the government and the trade union movement.

On the 18 June 1984 there occurred at the Orgreave coking plant one of the strike's most violent confrontations, begun in a field near to the plant and culminating in a cavalry charge through the village of Orgreave.

Jeremy Deller's The Battle of Orgreave was a spectacular re-enactment of what happened on that day, orchestrated by Howard Giles, historical re-enactment expert and former director of English Heritage's event programme.

The Battle of Orgreave was filmed under the direction of Mike Figgis for Artangel Media and Channel 4, and was aired on Sunday 20th October 2002.

Dramatic photographic stills from the clashes in 1984 are intercut with footage of the clashes re-enacted in 2001, teasing out the truth behind this bitter struggle.

The English Civil War Part II


Rod Dickenson

The Milgram Reenactment is an authentic reconstruction of one part of Stanley Milgrams Obedience to Authority experiment conducted at Yale University in from 1960 for several years.



The Promised Land / Rod Dickenson’s re-enactment of Jim Jones’s miracle healing

Waco Psychological Warfare Re-enactment



Artist Rod Dickinson will reconstruct the FBI's secret psychological warfare assault on the infamous Branch Davidian religious community in Waco, Texas, at a secret, remote location close to London, on Thursday 16 September.

In 1993, the FBI laid siege to the religious community led by David Koresh for 51 days, intimidating them with a continuous barrage of white noise, rock music and an array of repetitive sounds played at 110 decibels.

Using first-hand testimony from interviews with survivors and academic researchers, Dickinson will recreate some of these original sounds, which included babies crying, circling helicopters, high pitched rabbit screams and dentist drills. The reconstructed audio will be broadcast at 100 decibels at a remote location surrounded by wire fencing and bright floodlights.

The reconstructed audio from the psychological warfare siege will also be streamed over the internet, in real time, for 24 hours a day for over a month.


Artur Żmijewski: Repetition



Artur Żmijewski's 39-minute film Repetition (2005) is a complex and riveting documentary of his reenactment of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. In place of college students, Żmijewski hired unemployed Polish men to enact the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison environment.

Filmed with hidden cameras, their behavior quickly progresses from play acting to acts of seemingly genuine frustration and anger. Confrontations between prisoners and guards escalate ominously, but just when it seems that Żmijewski's experiment will replicate the traumatic results of the original, things take an unexpected turn in a manner that raises questions about the differences between art and science, and whether either can offer convincing conclusions about human nature.


Greta Pratt

Greta Pratt is the author of two books of photographs, Using History, Steidl, 2005 and In Search of the Corn Queen, National Museum of American Art, 1994. Pratt's work is included in major public and private collections, including The National Museum of American Art; Smithsonian Institution, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and The Minneapolis Institute of Art. Pratt’s photographs have been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, American Art, and Photo District News. She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1987.

Nineteen Lincolns / Using History / In Search of the Corn Queen

Ahistoric Occasion / MassMOCA / Opens May 28, 2006

Historians, theorists, philosophers, and everyday folks have described the 1st decade of the 21st century as a period unaware of its own history; a period that has managed to step outside of time itself. Where are we now? How did we get here and where are we going? Have we reached the end of history as proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama or have we entered a new historic period that has changed the rules? In answer to this question, artists from around the world have taken up the charge and begun resituating and analyzing historic events. Whether it is the accuracy of the official story, the impossibility of historic memory today, the recreation of the past into the present, or the obstinate refusal to accept an ahistoric period as acceptable, these artists cull from the landmarks in the global timeline to position the present and give shape to the future.

Artists include: Paul Chan, Jeremy Deller, Peggy Diggs, Felix Gmelin, Kerry James Marshall, Greta Pratt, Dario Robleto, Doris Salcedo, Yinka Shonibare, Allison Smith, Eve Sussman


Jacqueline Donachie / A Walk for Greville Verney

"A Walk for Greville Verney" celebrated the life of the last of the well-known Warwickshire family to live at Compton Verney. The walk was led by a 20-strong Irish pipe band, actors from the Kineton Theatre group, and a team of horses and riders, each representing aspects of his life and passions.


Misc

An Arts-Based Exploration of Mao's Long March

La Commune / Paris, 1871 / Peter Watkins

Article: Patricia C. Phillips / Art Journal / Spring, 2003

Article: "Doing It Again" / Iain Aitch / Eyestorm

Ultra-red

In the world of modern electronic music and sound art, Ultra-red distinguish themselves for their intrepid blend of political commitment and innovative sound. Rejecting both self-satisfied formalism and convenient political posturing, Ultra-red have for over ten years pursued a precarious but dynamic exchange between art and political organizing. Collectively, the Los Angeles-based group has produced radio broadcasts, performances, recordings, installations and pubic space occupations (ps/o).

Working within a variety of urban ambiences, Ultra-red have investigated the spaces of needle exchange (Soundtrax, 1992 - 1996), public sex (Second Nature, 1995 - 1998), public housing (Structural Adjustments, 1997 - Present), resistance to global capital (Value System, 1998 - Present), labor (Social Factory, 1997 - 2002) and education (School of Echoes, 2001 - Present). Throughout each of these efforts, Ultra-red have pursued two aesthetic-political objectives: to explore acoustic space as enunciative of social relations and, secondly, to radicalize the conventions of electro-acoustic art.

Founded in 1994 by two AIDS activists, Ultra-red have expanded over the years to include activists and organizers from a variety of social movements both in Los Angeles and abroad. In 2004, on their tenth anniversary, the four members of the group launched a restructuring of Ultra-red into an aesthetic-political organization. The newly reorganized Ultra-red permits a greater diversity of projects and campaigns on a local and international level, with multiple groups and alliances taking up the Ultra-red moniker.

Ultra-red has established partnerships with community-based organizations like the Union de Vecinos in East Los Angeles and, internationally, with Ballymun Women's Resource Centre in Dublin, Ireland and the Germany-based migration and anti-racist network Kanak Attak. In addition to these groups, a number of artists have entered into tactical and provisional alliances with Ultra-red for purposes of specific and on-going cooperation. Some of these artists include Eddie Peel (of Sony Mao and Needle), Elliot Perkins (fka Phonem), Terre Thaemlitz, and others. To offer an outlet for the release of projects to come out of these alliances, in 2004 Ultra-red launched Public Record, a fair-use on-line archive for audio, text, image and video documents.

Since the late 1990s, Ultra-red have featured the following four artist-activists: Elizabeth Blaney (artist, organizer, Union de Vecinos), Pablo Garcia (musician, organizer, Valley Family Technology Project), Dont Rhine (artist, AIDS activist), and Leonardo Vilchis (artist, organizer, Union de Vecinos).



Public Space Occupations

Listening Material

Public Record

Public Record is the internet-based archive of the Ultra-red organization established for the distribution of work by Ultra-red members and allies. The Public Record archive serves as an interface between the organization and its publics. Born in 2004, Ultra-red's tenth year, Public Record expands on the group's mission statement: first, to facilitate cooperation between artists and social movements; second, to occupy the borders between art and organizing; and, third, to radicalize the conventions of electronic music and sound art.

Blok 70

Since the summer of 2003, Transit Migration has investigated the current profile of migration in the former Yugoslavia. The cultural portion of Transit Migration's Yugoslavia project features the audio activist group Ultra-red. Combining field research and cultural praxis, the members of the project team have focused on the various communities that come together in a particular shopping market in Novi Beograd's "Blok 70".

"Time for the Dead to have a Word with the Living: The AIDS Uncanny" / The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest: Issue 4

"Art and the Politics of Public Housing" / Planners Network

Spacing

Spacing is a magazine about Toronto's public spaces and urban landscape. We cover any and every issue that concerns life in the city's public realm.

Spacing was launched in December 2003. The magazine has quickly become an integral voice in debates and discussions about the joys, obstacles, and politics of Toronto's public spaces. In December 2004, Spacing was nominated Best New Title by Utne magazine's Independent Press Awards. In January 2005, the second issue of Spacing was awarded the Best Single Issue design by Applied Arts magazine. Spacing has also launched a collection of 1-inch buttons that replicate the visual landmarks and tile art of Toronto's subway stations. The success of the series has been called the “civic pride fashion statement of the year” by the National Post, and earned the magazine numerous television, radio, and print features.



The Spacing Wire is designed to act as a hub for news, articles, events, websites, projects, and ideas about public space issues in Toronto and from around the world. We believe that for any of us to fully understand whose space is public space, we must know the current events that help shape our cities, for better or for worse.



The Toronto Public Space Committee is a grassroots non-profit organisation run completely by volunteers.

Founded in 2001, we have quickly become one of the loudest voices representing Toronto's streets, sidewalks, parks and alleyways.

We are dedicated to protecting our shared common spaces from commercial influence and privatisation. While some see the streets as an untapped source of advertising revenue we see protected public spaces as a fundamental pillar of a healthy democracy. If only wealthy advertisers have access to our visual environment, then freedom of speech suffers in our city.

We are citizens first, and consumers second. Public space must reflect this distinction, and should be fully and equally accessible by all who walk through it. Public space is the guarantee of a space for citizens to engage in society and interact with each other without commercial influence.

Through our advocacy projects we affect municipal policy, help shape the debate and create a space for concerned citizens to get involved and participate. Through our community events we lead by example by beautifying the city without a big budget, without sponsors and without logos. Together, we are reclaiming our streets and creating community.

We invite you to join us!



[murmur] is an archival audio project that collects and curates stories set in specific Toronto locations, told by Torontonians themselves. At each of these locations, a [murmur] sign with a telephone number and location code marks where stories are available. By using a mobile phone, users are able to listen to the story of that place while engaging in the physical experience of being there. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze.

[murmur] believes interesting things don't just happen at the Rogers Centre and Nathan Phillips Square -- the city is full of stories, and some of them happen in parking lots and bungalows, diners and front lawns. The smallest, greyest or most nondescript building can be transformed by the stories that live in it. Once heard, these stories can change the way people think about that place and the city at large. These are the stories that make up Toronto's identity, but they're kept inside of the heads of the people who live here. [murmur] brings that important archive out onto the streets, for all to hear and experience, and is always looking for new stories to add to it's existing locations.



Geostash is a public art project that uses the city of Toronto as its inspiration and utilises Global Positioning Technology (GPS) and the web as a means to achieve its creative goals. Geostash takes its cues from the practice of Geocaching - a sort of high-tech treasure hunt that was originally conceived in 2000, and has spread worldwide through websites promoting this activity. Each artist will hide a "stash" somewhere in the city and post the GPS co-ordinates of where the stash is hidden on the Geostash website. The stash may contain a set of instructions requesting an in-situ performance, or could contain objects, materials and a manual to create temporary public art. Once the stashes have all been placed in the city, each participating artist will be randomly assigned another artists' stash to find using a GPS receiver. Once found, the artist will transform the contents of the stash into an ephemeral work of art.

Art & Geography

Fieldworks: Art-Geography 2005
Symposium at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, May 5-6, 2005

The 'field' is a shared and privileged space for both art and science. While geographical information gathered in the field is conventionally recorded and translated into graphic form, artists often engage landscape or the city for raw materials. New technologies and critical frameworks are currently transforming the nature and meaning of the field, the practices that take place there, and the ways both artists and geographers identify, secure and circulate field-founded knowledge. This symposium includes an evening of performance and a day of discussion to bring together practitioners from art, architecture, and geography to present original (field)works and address emerging relations between geographical science and artistic production.



"Geography and the politics of mobility"
Generali Foundation, Vienna, January - April, 2003

GEOGRAPHY AND THE POLITICS OF MOBILITY sets out from the transformative quality of geography in a time of increased mobility in which subjects are no longer tied to one specific location. These "transitory existences" constitute and transform the space that they cross or temporarily occupy due to migration or new working conditions. Human trajectories but also the traffic of signs, goods and visual information form particular cultural, social and virtual landscapes which inscribe themselves materially in the terrain.The resulting locations and non-locations re-articulate in their turn the relationship between social and territorial conditions.

In a directly geographical sense, the exhibition traces the logic of human economic circuitswithin a changed world order: the feminizedteleservice industry in India, illegal refugee boats crossing the Mediterranean, smuggling routes over the Spanish-Moroccan border. Different proposals of geographical practice are manifested both in the way the projects operate as a network, and in their esthetic strategy with regard to a "politics of space." By combining electronic and material landscapes, the art projects address systems both of representation and of navigation. The exhibition thus brings together connective and transgressive artistic practices: on the one hand it takes a critical look at an increasingly consolidating Europe and its borders, while on the other it presents emerging formations of artistic and activist geographies.

The exhibition includes five collective projects conceived by international artists, some of which will be presented here for the first time: Bureau d’études from France, Frontera Sur RRVT from Spain and Switzerland, Makrolab from Slovenia, multiplicity from Italy and Raqs Media Collective from India

Guest curator: Ursula Biemann



Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is working on a dissertation/book about the spatial aspects of military secrecy. His work involves deliberately blurring the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us.

His work has shown at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (2003), U.C. San Diego (2004), the California College of the Arts (2002), and numerous other arts venues, universities, conferences, and public spaces. He is a contributing editor to the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and develops tactical media projects with the prison-abolitionist group Critical Resistance. Paglen’s writing has been published in Blu Magazine, Art Journal, and will be included in the upcoming collection Spaces of Terror (Routledge, 2006).

Interview: "The Black World of the Military"

Article: "Hitching Stealth with Trevor Paglen"

Article: "Spying on the government: A UC Berkeley geographer maps the secret military bases of the American West – where billions of dollars disappear into creepy clandestine projects"



The Secret Bases

A series of projects that explore and document the "secret" military landscapes that are all around us: from clandestine installations in the remotest regions of the desert, to the massive military infrastructures that are hidden in plain sight.

This project involves limit-telephotography, expeditions, long-term military monitoring, amateur geospatial intelligence, and other strange techniques. The work itself is presented in written, installation, photographic, lecture, and participatory forms.

The Center for Urban Pedagogy

CUP makes educational projects about places and how they change.

Our projects bring together art and design professionals - artists, graphic designers, architects, urban planners - with community-based advocates and researchers - organizers, government officials, academics, service-providers and policymakers. These partners work with CUP staff to create projects ranging from high school curricula to educational exhibitions.

Our work grows from a belief that the power of imagination is central to the practice of democracy, and that the work of governing must engage the dreams and visions of citizens. CUP believes in the legibility of the world around us. What can we learn by investigation? By learning how to investigate, we train ourselves to change what we see.



In 1997, CUP launched its first project, a small booklet entitled "A How-To Guidebook for Urban Objects." At that time, CUP was an informal group of people with diverse backgrounds but a shared interest in making interpretive projects about the city. Since then, CUP has grown organically as a vehicle for collaboration. CUP received its 501(c)(3) designation in 2002 and hired its first fulltime staff members in 2005.

CUP has organized or participated in exhibitions at Storefront for Art and Architecture, Anthology Film Archives, Apex Art Curatorial Program, City University of New York Graduate Center, and PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York; Mess Hall and the Chicago Architecture Foundation in Chicago; and Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna.

CUP has worked with nonprofits such as Sustainable South Bronx, Place In History, the Municipal Arts Society, the Fifth Avenue Committee, REPOHistory, Temporary Services, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Global Kids, the Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), the Public Housing Residents of the Lower East Side (PHROLES), the Legal Aid Society, the Community Service Society of New York, the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, the Fiscal Policy Institute, the Met Council on Housing, the New York City Public Housing Residents Alliance.

CUP has worked with over 700 students since 2001, working in city-run Tier II shelters, City-As-School, the Academy of Urban Planning, Math and Science Upward Bound, the Heritage School, Monroe High School, Parsons the New School School of Design, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Wyckoff Houses, and PS 164.



Exhibition: "Lost futures of Governors Island"

A zany and sobering exploration of the Governors Island that could have been. Damon Rich, CUP’s Creative Director, will present a series of unrealized plans for the 172-acre island, which was used a military installation for over 200 years. The plans date from the turn of the 19th century to the turn of the 20th, and include a luxury housing complex, 2000-foot antenna, homeless shelter, casino, and airport. The lecture will examine the rise and fall of these schemes, and how they have left their mark on the Governors Island of today and tomorrow.

Interview: "Q&A: Civic Boosters: With lively exhibitions and a tongue-in-cheek walking tour, the Center for Urban Pedagogy urges individuals to actively shape their city."

Project: "Code City"

This Code City module examines some of the issues involved in the public administration of the built environment. It focuses on an extreme example of public administration - the 170,000 units of public housing administered by the New York City Housing Authority - and its relationship to racial segregation.

This website will provide a number of educational documents - interactive maps, databases, legal texts, and interpretive essays - to provoke you the viewer to engage issues of how a society should decide on the shape of its environment and the distribution of its amenities and citizens.

Article: "Deciphering the City’s Hidden Code"

Exhibition: "Shadow Cabinets in a Bright Country" curated by Ted Purves

Invites a selection of artist collaboratives to create projects that seek to fill holes left in the social sphere by the retreat of government interest and support.

September 5 - October 5, 2002

Collaboratives: Temporary Services, The Center for Urban Pedagogy, Marksearch, Nuts Society, and It Can Change



Presentation: MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies