What keeps us separated from one another? After more than 2,000 years in existence, huge leaps in technology, the advancement of civil rights, and the feminist movement there is still something (or things) that keep us apart.
I wrote about this a few years ago for a Philippine broadsheet and years later I meet Olivia Robinson, an assistant professor for the Fiber/Material studies program at Syracuse University. She's wondering the exact thing--and her work is an outgrowth of it.
At a young woman living in Ba
ltimore, Olivia recalls creating a managing festival with friend Ben Lozada. "I wanted to be able to interact with people I felt segregated from," said Olivia. She says, there was a high degree of segregation in her Baltimore neighborhood. "The more I got into it, the more I felt the power structures that keep us separated from each other."
Today, she's still exploring the same theme of connection and, conversely, separation with work that spans from historical to modern-day whimsical.
Past Present
In Spectres of Liberty, Olivia and two collaborators, Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee, resurrect the Liberty Street Church in Troy, New York, an important stop in the Underground Railroad. With just $600 and 2 years of research, they created a 1:1 scale model out of construction grid and packing tape. Though the model itself is simple, Olivia says up to 10 people were needed to put it up. "It's like a sail basically. People had to wrangle it."
The inflatable building was a proxy for the real thing. At night, the inflatable church became an immersive screen projecting text from "An Address to the Slaves of United States of America" by Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, floating hauntingly around the walls. Instead of the sad parking lot that it is now, the community gained a chance to get inside a space and contemplate what happened there more than 100 years ago.
Sweating it out
Olivia also investigates the transformation of labor into product with her upcoming Salt Market project. Olivia creates a one-stop shop of a caravan that produces salt from human sweat and (if you wish to buy) sells "products" with salt. How would you like to buy popcorn with salt from this stand? Any takers? Olivia's concept is jarring, as it should be. How she'll execute it, we'll have to find out this September 2010 when she begins the caravan with a Syracuse stop. Details to follow.
Find out more about the Salt Market project on Olivia Robinson's site.
If you missed the Troy presentation, the collaborators will take the Spectres of Liberty project to yet another Underground Railroad stop, Syracuse this May 17 to June 4. Additional details here. Watch a documentation video here.
Connecting the Dots:
Photos courtesy of: Olivia Robinson and Spectres of Liberty
0 comments:
Post a Comment