iLAND is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2011 iLAB collaborative residency:
PARK 2011 residency At Fresh Kills, New York
choreographer Kathy Westwater, poet Jennifer Scappettone, architect Seung Jae Lee, and trail-builder Leigh Draper
iLAB, now in its sixth year, is a residency program supporting collaborations between movement-based artists and scientists, environmentalists, urban designers/landscape architects, architects and others that integrate creative practice within different fields/disciplines. The goals of iLAB are 1) to invigorate and re-imagine relationships between the public and the urban environment through kinetic experience, 2) to engage artists and practitioners across the disciplines of dance, art, and the ecology of physical interrelationships such that we create and investigate innovative approaches to science, infrastructure, urbanisms, and architecture within a performative context, and 3) to support the development of process in engagement over product such that process is itself a product for artistic and public action.
Each year iLAB provides collaborator teams with support including a $5,000 stipend, resources to document the residency, mechanisms for disseminating their research in the science and art communities, and mentoring throughout the process. This year, in addition to participating in the residency activities, the iLAB recipients will be engaged in the development of the iLAND Process a dynamic structure of best practices that will foster in-depth and effective collaborative processes for the iLAB Residency program. Defining the iLAND Process will create a replicable model for interdisciplinary collaboration with a strong emphasis on the role that dance and somatic practices play in environmental and aesthetic understanding.
PARK 2011 Residency At Fresh Kills, New York
PARK is about what we destroy in order to create. Existing as both process and performance, it expresses forms of making and unmaking that engage wilderness, post-industrial spaces, and everyday landscapes. PARK locates the convergence of nature, industry, and individual experience of the wild and mundane daily life at large at Fresh Kills, New York.
Geographically situated away from the view of many of the city’s inhabitants, Fresh Kills, once the largest landfill in the world, is currently undergoing a 30-year conversion into a park.
Collaborators include choreographer Kathy Westwater, poet Jennifer Scappettone, architect Seung Jae Lee, and trail-builder Leigh Draper. Their research includes exploring the translation of wilderness practices to the urban landfill-to-park site.
PARK seeks to activate the landscape, articulating the site’s mutating topography, infrastructure, mass, and scale while evoking notions of proximity and distance between the public and the largely invisible contents of the landfill, collapsing our individual and collective remoteness from its obscured function in the life of the city.
As New York continues to create a new use-value for the Fresh Kills Landfill, the PARK residency project – which culminates in a public event in Fall 2011 –represents an unprecedented engagement for project collaborators and the public with a unique site that has been largely inaccessible until now, though it is crucial to both the history and future of the city. PARK invites individual participants to enter into awareness of their own connections to this place, a monument to cycles of consumption in which we are all complicit; it invites the public to enter a zone of visceral intimacy created within this expansive and alien, yet familiar landscape.
Culminating Public Event in Fall 2011
Leave a Reply