this is what you see to the right...
and this is what you see to the left...
bike and pedestrian paths cut through low-maintenance landscapes with apartment buildings...
Friday, December 11, 2009
photo gallery: Dessau
Images of Dessau: "wo Gebäude fallen...stehen Gärten"
this is what you see to the right...
and this is what you see to the left...
bike and pedestrian paths cut through low-maintenance landscapes with apartment buildings...
this is what you see to the right...
and this is what you see to the left...bike and pedestrian paths cut through low-maintenance landscapes with apartment buildings...
photo gallery: Glaucha
Glaucha imagesHere is a series of images of Glaucha streets and housing. It was hard to choose images and ideally I would be more selective. However, I find that skimming through the larger group rather than focusing on a limited number gives more of an overall impression and a better sense of the neighborhood look and feel and the contrasts within. Glaucha is primarily residential, but does have a commercial street or two, plus some ground floor shops in otherwise residential streets. This gallery is focused on images of housing.
street views...
building mix...
boarded up ground floors...
two doors...
three empty buildings...
facade details...
more facade views...
street views...
Last shot: streetscape with turquoise Trabant...
impressions of Glaucha and Dessau
on impressions and the photography experience in Glaucha and Dessau...
Earlier in the month, I spent some time in Glaucha, a neighborhood in Halle, taking photographs. It’s interesting to see how the photos transform the way I view the place. On the search for an essence of Glaucha, to capture the typical building and street, I took certain photos (see the post on curating the city). Afterward, I looked back and saw what I thought was worthy of shooting. I think back to why I took each photo, what I notice and don’t notice, and how the photo documentation compares to my memory and impressions of the place. In Glaucha, for example, I tried to document the variety of types of housing and streets – but still focusing on what is typical or characteristic, not on the exceptions. In my mind, my impression is that Glaucha has a real mix of newly renovated housing and of vacant housing that is boarded up and in disrepair. Sometimes they are right next to each other, and sometimes there is a block of predominantly renovated or predominantly disheveled facades. But the photos appear bleaker than the images in my head. Although I documented both conditions (including attached facades, showing a clear juxtaposition), the black spaces behind the broken glass in the windows of a vacant top floor apartment that is covered in graffiti are so striking that they just make a strong impression that sticks longer than the cleaned up buildings, many of which are lovely, but also more “quiet”.
I had an opposite experience in photographing Dessau. At first impression in October, I was under-whelmed by the scruffy landscapes where buildings had been torn down and replaced with low-maintenance parks and garden lands. But when I looked at the photographs I took in October, these spaces looked much better than I remembered, and when I went back again, on a particularly cold gray day in December, they again looked the way I remembered – pretty bleak – but again, the photographs captured something attractive about them that wasn’t registering in my impressions formed on the sites. These projects in Dessau are also intriguing to me because I heard them explained before I saw them, and the idea sounded really good – the plan to gradually let easy-to-maintain green spaces (cut through with bike and pedestrian paths) take over as buildings are taken down is appealing (See IBA website: Dessau) The fact that this solution was arrived at through a community process and was unexpected by the planners facilitating it also appeals to me – and may be the key to its success – because people want it, no matter if it’s aesthetically perfect, and they’re satisfied with the long term transformation being not-always-pretty, because the idea came from the community. Another thing that I found interesting about seeing these spaces was that my impressions were relative – although the new landscaped spaces were very plain, in comparison with a “before” picture, they are a clear improvement.
Earlier in the month, I spent some time in Glaucha, a neighborhood in Halle, taking photographs. It’s interesting to see how the photos transform the way I view the place. On the search for an essence of Glaucha, to capture the typical building and street, I took certain photos (see the post on curating the city). Afterward, I looked back and saw what I thought was worthy of shooting. I think back to why I took each photo, what I notice and don’t notice, and how the photo documentation compares to my memory and impressions of the place. In Glaucha, for example, I tried to document the variety of types of housing and streets – but still focusing on what is typical or characteristic, not on the exceptions. In my mind, my impression is that Glaucha has a real mix of newly renovated housing and of vacant housing that is boarded up and in disrepair. Sometimes they are right next to each other, and sometimes there is a block of predominantly renovated or predominantly disheveled facades. But the photos appear bleaker than the images in my head. Although I documented both conditions (including attached facades, showing a clear juxtaposition), the black spaces behind the broken glass in the windows of a vacant top floor apartment that is covered in graffiti are so striking that they just make a strong impression that sticks longer than the cleaned up buildings, many of which are lovely, but also more “quiet”.
I had an opposite experience in photographing Dessau. At first impression in October, I was under-whelmed by the scruffy landscapes where buildings had been torn down and replaced with low-maintenance parks and garden lands. But when I looked at the photographs I took in October, these spaces looked much better than I remembered, and when I went back again, on a particularly cold gray day in December, they again looked the way I remembered – pretty bleak – but again, the photographs captured something attractive about them that wasn’t registering in my impressions formed on the sites. These projects in Dessau are also intriguing to me because I heard them explained before I saw them, and the idea sounded really good – the plan to gradually let easy-to-maintain green spaces (cut through with bike and pedestrian paths) take over as buildings are taken down is appealing (See IBA website: Dessau) The fact that this solution was arrived at through a community process and was unexpected by the planners facilitating it also appeals to me – and may be the key to its success – because people want it, no matter if it’s aesthetically perfect, and they’re satisfied with the long term transformation being not-always-pretty, because the idea came from the community. Another thing that I found interesting about seeing these spaces was that my impressions were relative – although the new landscaped spaces were very plain, in comparison with a “before” picture, they are a clear improvement.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
curating and personal mapping: examples and links
some inspiring examples...
I have been thinking about how this concept of curating and personal mapping can be used in community art projects and found some inspiring examples...
I Am a Curator (support structure phase 1: art)
Audiences at the Chisenhale Gallery in London could curate their own exhibition for one day from a collection of “sculpture, video, sound works, painting, performance proposals, drawing, social intervention and action descriptions. The result was 30 shows, each documented and presented on the Chisenhale website archive”
walking & talking (support structure phase 5: education)A series of walks (think of landscape artist Richard Long)
“A public call was made and over a 6 month residency, Condorelli and Wade were taken on walks and talks around Wivenhoe park, researching and recording the diversity of the University in the same way that it was originally conceived. The walks and talks act as a register of collective memory and experience of the site from its creation to now. The conversations led to the production of a set of temporary signs located around the site to encourage conversation and an awareness of social acts.”
Safe Harbor (Red Hook, Brooklyn) Choreographer Martha Bowers’ “multi-media outdoor performance piece that walked audience members through the community to visit staged vignettes that told some of the community’s stories, in some cases, from the residents themselves.”
anywhere-somewhere-everywhere (Nottingham)
A public event at the site of a planned renewal project featured a self-guided walk using a handheld video player with curated content including maps, recordings, and images “as an approach to curating architecture in situ”(51), created by artist/choreographer Cie Willi Dorner
An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube by Michael Wesch and the Digital Ethnography Working Group at Kansas State University. See also Michael Wesch's website Mediated Cultures.
This isn’t an art project, but it is an entertaining and thought-provoking lecture about digital media as a community-building tool. It addresses a broad scope of activities that are not exactly relevant to the kind of community building I am thinking about, but it opened up my mind to possibilities for communicating and curating information about a specific place by using the web and the “vlogosphere” to share through amateur video, photography, and sound, individual perspectives on a place. The lecture/video is 55 minutes long but I found it flew by.
I have been thinking about how this concept of curating and personal mapping can be used in community art projects and found some inspiring examples...
I Am a Curator (support structure phase 1: art)
Audiences at the Chisenhale Gallery in London could curate their own exhibition for one day from a collection of “sculpture, video, sound works, painting, performance proposals, drawing, social intervention and action descriptions. The result was 30 shows, each documented and presented on the Chisenhale website archive”
walking & talking (support structure phase 5: education)A series of walks (think of landscape artist Richard Long)
“A public call was made and over a 6 month residency, Condorelli and Wade were taken on walks and talks around Wivenhoe park, researching and recording the diversity of the University in the same way that it was originally conceived. The walks and talks act as a register of collective memory and experience of the site from its creation to now. The conversations led to the production of a set of temporary signs located around the site to encourage conversation and an awareness of social acts.”
Safe Harbor (Red Hook, Brooklyn) Choreographer Martha Bowers’ “multi-media outdoor performance piece that walked audience members through the community to visit staged vignettes that told some of the community’s stories, in some cases, from the residents themselves.”
anywhere-somewhere-everywhere (Nottingham)
A public event at the site of a planned renewal project featured a self-guided walk using a handheld video player with curated content including maps, recordings, and images “as an approach to curating architecture in situ”(51), created by artist/choreographer Cie Willi Dorner
An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube by Michael Wesch and the Digital Ethnography Working Group at Kansas State University. See also Michael Wesch's website Mediated Cultures.
This isn’t an art project, but it is an entertaining and thought-provoking lecture about digital media as a community-building tool. It addresses a broad scope of activities that are not exactly relevant to the kind of community building I am thinking about, but it opened up my mind to possibilities for communicating and curating information about a specific place by using the web and the “vlogosphere” to share through amateur video, photography, and sound, individual perspectives on a place. The lecture/video is 55 minutes long but I found it flew by.
curating and mapping
curating and mapping...
Recently, I’ve been reading and thinking about the themes of curating and mapping. It all started with an attempt to understand the research approaches of visual anthropologists and ethnographists. The researcher as participant-observer is a core concept in these fields, and I reflected on my own position – what am I participating in? What does it mean to be an outsider and a non-native speaker from the US? At this stage, I am simply a participant-observer in navigating the city’s neighborhoods. Eventually, I will get more involved in some neighborhood activities, but for now, I’m really just another person walking around. As an outsider, I don’t see things habitually yet, but what stands out to me is different from what others would notice. This is where the concept of curating comes in. Here is a quote that describes how navigating a city is a curating process...
Chapman and Ostwald distinguish curating from cartography, defining curating as a “selective presentation of elements...to infer the existence of a totality.” and cartography as a scientific effort to “construct a whole and identify its constituent parts”. Curating is interpretive whereas cartography attempts to be objective. However, I think of “mapping” as a term that can encompass both of these ideas and is also a common tool for visual anthropologists. I saw an example of this in an exhibit called “Placemaking” at the Schering Stiftung in Berlin. One element of the exhibit used maps made by people who had immigrated to Berlin from other countries. The maps included information about each individual’s routine destinations and paths as well as areas, such as “no-go zones”, that they interpreted as either irrelevant to their life or worth avoiding.
some inspiring examples...
I have been thinking about how this concept of curating and personal mapping can be used in community art projects and found some inspiring examples, which I discuss in this entry...
Recently, I’ve been reading and thinking about the themes of curating and mapping. It all started with an attempt to understand the research approaches of visual anthropologists and ethnographists. The researcher as participant-observer is a core concept in these fields, and I reflected on my own position – what am I participating in? What does it mean to be an outsider and a non-native speaker from the US? At this stage, I am simply a participant-observer in navigating the city’s neighborhoods. Eventually, I will get more involved in some neighborhood activities, but for now, I’m really just another person walking around. As an outsider, I don’t see things habitually yet, but what stands out to me is different from what others would notice. This is where the concept of curating comes in. Here is a quote that describes how navigating a city is a curating process...
“Our individual experience of the city is innately fragmented, episodic and partial. In order to navigate the city a path must be traced. This path may consist of a sequence of known streets or a series of views to distant landmarks, but it could equally be framed by the determination to find something less tangible; warmth, fresh air, adventure or solace. Along this path individual moments are later singled out as significant milestones or as distinct, and sometimes treasured, memories. In between these moments, the rest is blurred or lost. This is why an individual’s experience of the city is fragmentary. The mind makes sense of these moments by placing them in a historical sequence or by sorting them into a range of possible groupings and then by representing or reframing them, in diaries, conversations and reminiscences. In this way, we each curate our experience of the city.”
SOURCE: Chapman, Michael and Michael Ostwald. 2009. “Curated desires: film photography and the visual transformation of urban space in surrealism” in Chaplin, Sarah and Alexandra Stara. 2009. Curating Architecture and the City. London/New York: Routledge. p.39.
Chapman and Ostwald distinguish curating from cartography, defining curating as a “selective presentation of elements...to infer the existence of a totality.” and cartography as a scientific effort to “construct a whole and identify its constituent parts”. Curating is interpretive whereas cartography attempts to be objective. However, I think of “mapping” as a term that can encompass both of these ideas and is also a common tool for visual anthropologists. I saw an example of this in an exhibit called “Placemaking” at the Schering Stiftung in Berlin. One element of the exhibit used maps made by people who had immigrated to Berlin from other countries. The maps included information about each individual’s routine destinations and paths as well as areas, such as “no-go zones”, that they interpreted as either irrelevant to their life or worth avoiding.
some inspiring examples...
I have been thinking about how this concept of curating and personal mapping can be used in community art projects and found some inspiring examples, which I discuss in this entry...
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