Seeding the City, another in an impressive line of Eve Mosher‘s large-scale, socially-concerned public projects, functions as a sort of modular green roof installation. Small garden plots, sized 4′x4′ and marked by green flags, spread over the urban environment, joining NYC rooftops in a remedial network.
Seeding the City sites across New York City can be seen here.
The advantage of this decentralized approach, according to Mosher, is awareness-raising. One green roof installed on a private building is of little concern to passers-by, whereas a system of visible interventions, however small, raise questions and highlights the potential for collaborative work to make a difference. What’s more, green roofs frequently require architectural considerations that are prohibitively costly and time-consuming. Mosher’s project offers an immediate option.
Seeding the City relies on kinship networks to spread new nodes around the city. Each primary participant identifies two to three others they’re familiar with, who would be interested in joining. The sites are then mapped, as in the above image.
Interested in joining? Find out more here.
C Words: Carbon, Climate, Capital, Culture – a two-month exhibition by artist-activist group PLATFORM and their collaborators is currently ongoing at Arnolfini.
The show boasts seven new commissions, including The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination‘s installation is open this week, in preparation for their upcoming workshops.
What’s more, the Lab is treating the commission as a space to prepare for a tactical deployment of their work at the much-discussed COP15. Mobilizations at the UN summit, coordinated in part with Climate Camp and other Climate Justice Action network members, are set to include the Bike Block, and will
be unleashed on the RECLAIM POWER day of action on 16th December. Made from hundreds of recycled bikes, The Bike Bloc will merge device of mass transportation and pedal powered resistance machine, postcapitalist bike gang and art bike carnival.
The video below asks you to put the fun between your legs, and join the Bike Bloc.
Our friends at the Design Center for Social Intervention (DS4SI) have released a paper for social justice activists, enumerating ten distinct points where cultural activism can supplement policy-oriented organizing efforts. Working with the idea of cultural geography, the Studio recommends that practitioners work with “a wide variety of constituencies” to determine “a description of the place you are thinking about/working in.” This working definition can elucidate tensions within the problem at hand – the metaphorical and literal lay of the land can both pose challenges and offer up the means by which we can address social ills.
Perhaps the most direct way we can recognize this “double-edged sword,” as DS4SI refers to it, is in public space. The paper delineates a boundary we experience everyday, between “appropriate” and “inappropriate” uses of space. Drunken baseball fans can stumble through Boston’s Copley Square, but the queer youth that gather around the fountain there on a weekday afternoon aren’t permitted to loiter. In another example less state authority oriented, the very walkable streets of St. Louis and Atlanta make a visitor wonder why the cultural norm of that city is to drive everywhere.
DS4SI asks us to look for the social joints where interventions might be most successful. A commitment to understanding the particulars of any place, to working with varied groups of constituents and constituencies, and to constantly revisiting that understanding, is integral to this type of strategy.
Download Cultural Geography and Place Based Problem-Solving here.
Disclosure: Groundswell and DS4SI are tight.
The Groundswell Collective would like to announce its intention to create a print journal. For the past three years we have been covering critical cultural production at the crossroads of arts and activism. As our work has progressed it has become it apparent that it is time for our organization as a whole to progress, and, so, to the presses!
With the inception of this magazine it is our hope to build awareness of social justice issues and the role played by artists in effecting change in such areas. It is our goal to create a larger, broader and more connected community of actors and participants. (more…)
In commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Toward Women and Girls, five SF Bay Area artist/activist groups are staging a public multi-arts performance, including appearances by Judy Grahn, MamaCoAtl, SF Mayor Mayor Gavin Newsom, and Nina Serrano, among others.
They Are All Our Daughters! / Todas Son Nuestras Hijas! is one of a planned 16 Days of Artivism for the Healing of Violence.
From November 25th to december 10th, 2009, community organizations, artists, curators, educators, healers and all those who care, are asked to organize, to hold space for the most important work of our generation; healing the violence.
Thanks, Anna!
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