CT4CT.com

Urban Nomads

From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times

Urban Nomads: Artistic Explorations of Homelessness and Migration

This page is a work in progress. Please visit the Discussion section for links to more projects.

Contents

Artistic Projects

Archisuit

Archisuit, 2008

Sarah Ross' Archisuit (2008) is a series of four jogging suits made to resist specific architectural structures in Los Angeles. The suits include the negative space of the structures and allow a wearer to fit into, or onto, structures designed to deny them.

According to Ross:

There are an upwards of 20 different styles of benches on the sidewalks of Los Angeles. They each serve a function, usually related to transportation and waiting; though they could serve many other functions such as aiding in socialization or resting. For this project I have tested the resistant behavior of each type of bench. To understand the resistant behavior of such benches is to first examine the behavior of human bodies and our surrounding environments.

See also:

Border Film Project

Border Film Project

Border Film Project is an art project involving undocumented Mexican immigrants and members of the activist group the Minutemen Project that examines issues of immigration from two opposing perspectives. Members of each group were given disposable cameras and asked to photo document their experiences.

According to Border Film Project:

Border Film Project is a collaborative art project giving disposable cameras to two groups on different sides of the border: undocumented migrants crossing the desert into the United States, and American Minutemen trying to stop them. To date, we have received 73 cameras — 38 from migrants and 35 from Minutemen — with nearly 2,000 pictures in total. The pictures show the human face of immigration, and they challenge us to question our stereotypes and to see through new and personal lenses.

See also:

Bushwaffle

Bushwaffle, 2008

REBAR's BushWaffle (2008) is modular inflatable furniture designed to facilitate relaxation and inhabitation of public outdoor spaces.

According to REBAR:

Bushwaffle is modular inflatable street furniture that functions as a personal space-softening device ("PSSD"). Usable as stand-alone art objects and street furniture pieces, Bushwaffle also tessellate into spontaneous aggregations, similar to the human swarms of emergent "urban playground" events. By infusing the physical landscape with brightly-colored inflatable padding, Bushwaffle temporarily softens the rigid psychogeographic contours of the urban situation and enables new forms of unscripted collaboration, improvisational architecture and cultural exchange. Designed to transform ordinary urban spaces into soft places for experimentation and play, Bushwaffle seeks to extend Rebar's examination of the "green" movement to include the concept of "social greening" in the built environment.

See also:

Casa Segura

Casa Segura, 2007

Robert Ransick's Casa Segura (2007) is a small solar-powered structure installed on private land in the Southern Arizona desert near the US/Mexico border. It includes a bilingual web space designed to facilitate intercultural communication and understanding. Visitors to the structure can find water, food and a touch screen computer which they are encouraged to use to share information about themselves and their journey.

According to Ransick:

Casa Segura (Safe House) is an artwork that combines a small public access structure on private land in the Sonoran desert in Southern Arizona with a dynamic bilingual web space that facilitates creative exchange, dialogue, and understanding. Located north of the Mexican border, Casa Segura engages three distinct groups: Mexican migrants crossing the border through this dangerous landscape, the property owners whose land they cross, and members of the general public interested in learning more about border issues and the intricate dynamics at play in this heavily trafficked region. It is a conceptual project that contrasts existing conditions with new choices that can positively transform how individuals on both sides of the divide engage with and perceive one another.

See also:

The Cocoon Project

Cocoon, 2007

Forays' Cocoon Project (2007) is a series of lightweight, portable and easy to build shelters. They were originally built to study tree canopies and how the geometry of leaves interacts with light.

According to Forays:

It is necessary that the cocoons are easy to assemble, cheap and comfortable. Its materials and operation are purposely low-tech. The constraints of the cocoons taught us the poetry and elegance of knots and folds and weight and we learned to source and hack spaces and infrastructures for their free and cheap materials.

See also:

Deportation Class

Deportation Class

Silke Wagner's Deportation Class examines the connections between Lufthansa Airlines and the deportation of refugees and immigrants living illegally in Germany. Wagner outfitted a VW van to resemble a Lufthansa bus and carried out a number of deportation performances around Germany.

According to the Lufthansa Deportation Class brochure:

We are constantly expanding and improving our Deportation Class service, which remains the most economical way to travel the globe. With Lufthansa Deportation Class you can now reach dozens of exciting destinations worldwide - Tunis, Damascus, Jakarta, Alma Ata, Harare, Lima, Quito... And the destinations are only half the attraction.

See also:

Endurance

Endurance, 2004

Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry’s Endurance (2004) was created in collaboration with those living and working on the street. A compelling video and photography installation, it documents a collective act of endurance undertaken by 26 homeless young people in Seattle over the period of one full day.

Each participant was asked to sequentially stand motionless on a Seattle public sidewalk for one hour while looking directly into a video camera. As one young person’s hour ends, a new participant arrives to quietly take her or his place. These performances were dedicated to the memory of friends who had died from life on the street—each participant was thus symbolically “standing in” for those who had fallen.

The resulting video, which has been artfully condensed using a time-lapse effect from 25 hours down to two, is accompanied by audio autobiographies from each young person which describe how they came to being on the street and how they feel about it. These “testimonies” include personal stories about leaving home, violence, drug addiction, the sex trade, and living on the street.

Powerful both as a work of art and as an example of urban visual anthropology, these performances also served as quiet acts of civil disobedience—Seattle “Civility Laws” make standing or sitting motionless for a period of time a crime.

See also:

Entering Buttermilk Bottom

Buttermilk Bottom, 1995

REPOhistory's Entering Buttermilk Bottom (1995) is a site-specific public art installation that honored the history and former residents of Atlanta using street signs and markings.

According to REPOhistory:

This project honors the passing of a community destroyed by Urban Renewal to make room for Modern Atlanta and the "New South." This site-specific public art installation consisted of signs, street markings, and a pavilion installation that illustrated the history of the community, as well as a reunion of former residents. The historical information was donated to the Martin Luther King Library and the reunion has become an annual event.

See also:

Gentrify!

Gentrify!, 2008

Geraldine Juarez's Gentrify! (2008) is a tool for de-gentrification. It consists of a printed roll of yellow tape (similar to caution tape) that is designed to "de-gentrify" real estate offices and mark the borders of "up and coming" neighborhoods. Geraldine Juarez is a designer from Mexico City based in Brooklyn. She is one half of the artistic collective Forays and a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam Atalier

See also:

Homeless Vehicle Project

Homeless Vehicle Project, 1988-89

Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle Project (1988-89) is among the most well known series of artworks produced around homelessness. Created two years after his Homeless Projection (1986) series in which he projected magnified images of the homeless onto public buildings, Homeless Vehicle was produced in consultation with homeless men and women around New York City.

Resembling something between a food vendor cart and a road warrior vehicle, Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle is simultaneously a utilitarian object and an artfully rendered political statement. It provides shelter, safety, and a means of income for users—the vehicle is designed for collecting and storing cans, bottles, and other materials—and this in turn provides a “legitimized status for its users in the community of the city."

Described variously as “illegal real estate,” “an architecture provoked by poverty,” a “high-precision, military-industrial instrument,” and a “missile,” Neil Smith (1993) explains that Krzysztof’s Homeless Vehicle “expresses the social absurdity and obscenity of widespread homelessness in the capitalist heartland” (p. 89).

The vehicle’s nose-cone, which resembles the head of a ballistic missile, inventively folds down to serve as a wash-basin—a design element not lost on Smith, who claims the nose-cone’s usefulness “contrasts abruptly with the pathological waste of a $300bn defense budget, as if to point out that there is more social use in a single wash-basin than in the entire national armoury of high-tech junk” (p. 89).

While Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle retains an impressive degree of functionality—though the vehicle primarily meets the needs of single homeless men and is less responsive to homeless women’s security or the needs of homeless families—it is not intended as a “solution” to homelessness. Instead, the true power of the Homeless Vehicle lies in its ability to strategically reclaim the political geography of the city by re-appropriating the urban environment for it’s marginalized invisible inhabitants, thus revealing homelessness as a serious and under-acknowledged tear in the social fabric.

See also:

Instant Housing

Instant Housing, 2006

Winfried Bauman's Instant Housing (2006) consists of a series of mobile housing units and living appliances tailored for urban nomads, including the homeless.

According to Baumann:

Instant residential housing are mobile devices based on the specific situation of the users. They are space-saving, mobile, and especially for one person to handle. The residential units should by no means be a permanent solution to the housing problems of the homeless. (translated from German)

See also:

It would be nice to do something political

It would be nice to do something political, 2002-2007

Toril Goksøyr and Camilla Martens' It would be nice to do something political (2002-2007) was originally produced in 2002 and was shown in various cities including Venice during the 2007 Biennale. Taking the form of a billboard advertisement behind a larger store front window, the piece features glossy portraits of the artists posing seductively. Less apparent is the ongoing presence of an African-immigrant worker continuously cleaning the glass. The work can be understood as a commentary on contemporary European life and immigration policies where former colonial subjects who are lucky enough to be granted residence in the old world are required to continue serving their European masters by doing the manual labor jobs that no else wants to do.

According to Goksøyr & Martens:

It would be nice to do something political is a performance presented in a window display. Goksøyr & Martens is exhibiting a single poster, which has the same dimensions as the window, and is mounted directly behind the plate glass. The poster shows a close-up on Toril Goksøyr and Camilla Martens. The artists are depicted in conversation, with the following dialogue printed on the photograph; Goksøyr: "It would be nice to do something important." Martens: "Something political?" Outside a window cleaner is located. This is a man originally from an African country. He is cleaning the window continuously each day throughout the duration of the exhibition.

See also:

Out From Under the King George Hotel

Out from Under the King George Hotel, 2000

REPOhistory's Out From Under the King George Hotel (2000) is a public art project that documents the history of an abandoned hotel in Houston, TX.

According to REPOhistory:

REPOhistory was invited to Houston, Texas, to create a public art project. We chose to document seven layers of history on the location of the King George Hotel. We chose this site because the abandoned Hotel was across the street from a homeless shelter and one block from the site of a new baseball stadium that was the cornerstone of the cityÕs plan to redevelop the downtown. We created a printed document that was distributed throughout the city. The document was also wheat pasted to the facade of the hotel with the permission of the Non-Profit Housing Corporation of Greater Houston, an organization that was renovating the structure as a halfway house for homeless. The Housing Corporation used the document for fundraising and will permanently hang a framed copy of the document in the lobby of the renovated structure.

See also:

paraSITE

paraSITE, 1997

Michael Rakowitz’s paraSITE homeless shelter (1997) is a direct response to the evolving needs of the urban homeless population. Inspired by the nomadic traditions of the Bedouins and the architecture of their tents, Rakowitz designed a series of tent-like plastic shelters to take advantage of the warm air exhaust emitted onto the street by the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems inside urban buildings. Thus like a parasite, the structure adapts to its host by utilizing its energy—the paraSITE shelter is inflated and warmed by HVAC exhaust that otherwise would evaporate into the air.

Beginning when he was a Masters student in Visual Studies at MIT (and a student of Krzysztof Wodiczko), Rakowitz worked with a group of homeless men in Boston to design a shelter that offered warmth and protection for sleeping out on the streets. Rakowitz’s first prototype incorporated opaque plastic in an effort to provide a degree of privacy and anonymity for its inhabitant.

As Bill, one of the homeless collaborators he worked with soon informed him, however, privacy is not a practical concern for people living on the street. Security, on the other hand, is paramount—making the tent transparent would thus allow users to see if someone intended to threaten or steal from them. As for anonymity, Bill assured Rakowitz they were already invisible enough in the world. Accordingly, Rakowitz ensured that subsequent iterations of the paraSITE shelter included translucent materials, windows and skylights.

See also:

(P)LOT

(P)LOT, 2004

Michael Rakowitz’s (P)LOT (2004) is a participatory public intervention that utilized portable tent-like frames and nylon car covers to create shelters that resemble (from the exterior) parked cars adorned with protective covers. Citizens in Vienna, Austria were invited in 2004 to loan these structures from the Museum of Modern Art (MUMOK) and to then re-assemble and inhabit them in municipal parking spots around the city. Rakowitz provided five different structures to choose from, ranging from a common Sedan to a luxury sports car or motorcycle. This work artfully questions taken-for-granted sanctioned uses of public urban space. As Rakowitz (2007) explains, rather than using municipal parking spots as storage spaces for vehicles, this project proposes “the rental of these parcels of land for alternative purposes.”

According to Rakowitz:

P(LOT) questions the occupation and dedication of public space and encourages reconsiderations of "legitimate" participation in city life. Contrary to the common procedure of using municipal parking spaces as storage surfaces for vehicles, P (LOT) proposes the rental of these parcels of land for alternative purposes. The acquisition of municipal permits and simple payment of parking meters could enable citizens to, for example, establish temporary encampments or use the leased ground for different kinds of activities.

See also:

Refuge Wear City Interventions

Refuge Wear City Interventions, 1993-1998

Lucy Orta’s Refuge Wear City Interventions (1993-1998) combine urban architecture and social activism with fashion design. Her wearable shelters can be described as “survival suits” that function poetically and politically to provoke dialogue and awareness about the connected issues of poverty, homelessness, war, and migration. Her first Refuge Wear prototype “Habitent” (1992-1993) is a tent-like shelter/garment, designed for displaced people who are forced to carry their belongings and shelter with them as they migrate between or within cities.

Through her research with the homeless, Orta learned that many of them were fearful of living in permanent housing or shelters as a result of “traumatic and alienating circumstances they had experienced living with other people." This inspired Orta to appropriate the street itself as an extension of the home by designing mini-environments that people can wear, relocate, and live in without relying on permanent and institutional shelters.

Over the course of five years, Orta produced a series of works she dubbed “Body Architecture,” that doubled as clothing and temporary shelters—often for multiple inhabitants. These works focused increasingly on diverse communities of people displaced by poverty, famine, and war. By fusing fashion with architecture, art, performance, philosophy, and politics, Orta’s work functions as a social provocation—a symbolic and political protest that artfully exposes public indifference and excess while also revealing the isolation and indignity endured by those trying to survive in our invisible culture.

See also:

To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond

To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, 1997

Zuang Huan's To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond (1997) was a performance work in which approximately 40 migrant laborers stood in a Beijing fishpond in order to raise the level of the water. This work symbolizes the flooding of Chinese cities with migrants from the countryside and is a critique of the assimilation of individuals in a society without basic democratic rights.

According to Zhang Huan:

I invited about forty participants, recent migrants to the city who had come to work in Beijing from other parts of China. They were construction workers, fishermen and labourers, all from the bottom of society. They stood around in the pond and then I walked in it. At first, they stood in a line in the middle to separate the pond into two parts. Then they all walked freely, until the point of the performance arrived, which was to raise the water level. Then they stood still. In the Chinese tradition, fish is the symbol of sex while water is the source of life. This work expresses, in fact, one kind of understanding and explanation of water. That the water in the pond was raised one metre higher is an action of no avail.

See also:

Urban Nomad Shelter

Urban Nomad Shelter, 2004

Electroland’s Urban Nomad Shelter (2004) is a portable structure that serves as both an urban sanctuary for the homeless and a provocation for the rest of us to confront the homeless’ invisibility and marginalization. Winner of International Design (ID) magazine’s 2005 Concepts category, these neon-colored tent-like inflatable cocoons provide inexpensive shelter while also removing the veil of invisibility surrounding homelessness.

According to Electroland’s Cameraon McNall and Dameon Seeley:

The Urban Nomad Shelter is designed to re-brand the homeless. We decided that our shelter had to be extremely cool, enough to attract significant attention and to make the cleanup crews hesitate before destroying them. “Homeless people: are invisible, but “Urban Nomads” are real people who can distinguish well-designed objects from trash. The shelter is designed to be inexpensive, portable, and transparent. Why transparent? In our research we found that invisibility is bad for Urban Nomands. When you are out of view of the police or other people, bad things happen to you.” (as cited in IDonline.com, 2005)

See also:

Voices of Renewal

Voices of Renewal, 2000

REPOhistory's Voices of Renewal (2000) is an extension of their Entering Buttermilk Bottom project.

According to REPOhistory:

Voices Of Renewal" is the second phase of REPOhistory's public art/public history work in Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward. Following on the heels of the 1995-96 "Entering Buttermilk Bottom" project, this Public Art Residency is a collaboration by REPO artist Tom Klem and residents of the Fourth Ward's Glen Iris neighborhood. Working directly with those who lived these histories, six artist-created public history markers were created and were installed permanently on the private property of those residents whose histories were unveiled and celebrated.

See also:

See Also

Critical Design

External Links

Retrieved from "http://www.ct4ct.com/Urban_Nomads"