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6/10/2003

Nomads + Residents

Van Alen Institute, New York

A forum for visitors in the arts: making connections, supporting networks, setting up meetings

Nomads + Residents and Van Alen Institute invite you to:
"Body Architecture: Between Intervention and Survival"
a moderated discussion by artists Lucy Orta and Catarina Leitao

"Body Architecture: Between Intervention and Survival"
Large cities are broad architectural spaces serving millions of citizens, inhabitants, workers, traders, visitors, and passersby. The psychogeography of cities indicates that somewhere along the way they have lost their protective role, or perhaps never really offered protection, but only provided maze-like structures. Cities serve as structures for divisions between populations and for the distribution of space and of goods, becoming gradually less and less concerned with the human body contained within it, and instead indulging the economic and political practice of corporations and governments around the world. Once concerned with the built environment as capable of forming an interpretation of the meaning and significance of the lives that are lived among it - they are merely a stage for normative conclusions given by decision making entities, dependent on their fiduciary obligations and only rarely responding to "stakeholders" in a given community.

The individual body is protected by clothing, hidden in a room, or survives on the street, defined by an occupation or by the lack of one, defined in its physical identity, in its origins, or despite its origins, wondering among the shelters of different kind, both literal and metaphorical. What occupies the space between our skin and the walls of the buildings in the city? What messages are we supposed to read among the architectural and social structures and what questions do we want to recognize? What makes the spaces between our private well being and the politically and economically charged distribution and access to goods, laws, prohibitions, and consumerism driven rules among the city's communities?

Small-scale urban interventions, experimental fashion designs, and semi-domestic environments as means of social critique are linked by their immediacy to the human body. Artists Lucy Orta and Catarina Leitao create structures that practice this social critique through formal questioning of culturally acquired divisions and assumptions, using design, fashion and architectural form as means of critical commentary. Lucy Orta creates temporary environments that transcend fashion, architecture and traditional art practice, discussing social structures, cultural heritage and the construction of urban identity. Catarina Leitao creates sculptures that combine natural settings with articles of furniture made from fabric, carpeting and felt addressing the idea of nature in urban settings, as an artificial and consumable item.

About the speakers:
Lucy Orta's work has been exhibited in contemporary art museums around internationally. Her solo exhibition Lucy Orta: Nexus Architecture + Connector IV, currently touring the U.S., opens on October 4 at the Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, Washington. Orta is Rootstein Hopkins Chair, London College of Fashion at The London Institute and head of the new postgraduate program 'Man & Humanity' at the Design Academy Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The first concise monograph of her work, will be published this fall as part of Phaidon Press Contemporary Artists series.

A native of Portugal, Catarina Leitao is currently Artist in Residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as part of their Workspace Program. Leitao's has exhibited widely, including at the Andrea Rosen Gallery 2 in New York (2002), The Museum of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum of Modern Art in Lisbon (2002), and the Sintra Museum of Modern Art in Portugal (2001). Catarina has been the recipient of fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and FCG/FLAD (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and Fundação Luso-Americana).

About Nomads + Residents
Typically, big cities are in a continuous flux. Newcomers enter this flux and become part of the life of the city, making connections with others, both residents and non-residents. The city, as a space, contains these possibilities not by being a collection of buildings, nor by being an urban environment, but rather through the dynamic relationships between people, relationships, which provoke an active engagement. Thus, being "informers" we create and organize public events in a variety of places, using and temporarily moving into existing spaces in the city, and in this way making visible parts of our personal histories next to a new, common "history." We invite artists, curators, critics, activists, travelers and passersby, to present insights into their practice, ideas, histories, and what drives them. The organizing group of members and advisors consists of New York-based and temporarily residing artists and curators. Members: Liesbeth Bik, Katherine Carl, Heather Felty, Grady Gerbracht, Andrea Geyer, Peter Lasch, Kira Lynn Harris, Gordon Knox, John Menick, Cesare Pietroiusti, Jos van der Pol, Catherine Ruello, Shelly Silver, Valerie Tevere, Monika Weiss, and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss. Advisors: Moukhtar Kocache, Phil Niblock, and Wolfgang Staehle.

About Van Alen Institute: Projects in Public Architecture
Van Alen Institute is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving design in the public realm through a program of exhibitions, competitions, publications, lectures, and forums. Based in New York, the Institute initiates interdisciplinary collaborations between designers, students, educators, community leaders, and the public. This event forms part of the programs organized in conjunction with the Institute's current exhibition "OPEN: new designs for public space" on view through October 31. The exhibition of contemporary public spaces represents the most innovative architecture, landscape, and urban design from cities across the globe, by renowned design firms led by extraordinary designers and artists including Will Alsop, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Craig Dykers, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Walter Hood, Lucy Orta, and Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi in cities from Macon, Georgia to Melbourne, Australia, and Johannesberg, South Africa.

A program of OPEN: new designs for public space, on view at Van Alen Institute through October 31, featuring Lucy Orta's "70 x 7: The Meal."

Tuesday, October 7, 7pm
Van Alen Institute
Space is limited. RSVP recommended: 212-924-7000, x16
FREE

Image: a work by Lucy Orta

Van Alen Institute, 30 W 22 Street, New York, NY 10010 212 924-7000.

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