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Use Values: Re/Imagining Urban Waste

Led by Zena Bibler, Katarina Jerinic, and Juliette Spertus

Saturday May 2 1-4pm & Sunday May 10 1-5:30pm

Island between exit 30 off the eastbound BQE and Classon + Flushing Avenues in Brooklyn

This two-part workshop takes place on a leftover piece of land at Exit 30 off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a site maintained by volunteers through the Adopt-A-Highway program which, according to the program’s mission, is devoted to “beautification or other aesthetic-related activities.” During the workshop, we will use this location as a laboratory for exploring the role of waste, refuse, and acts of discarding in the formation of the urban landscape. We will play along the spectrum of owning, consuming, and throwing away, and follow the paths of objects beyond the moment at which they are initially discarded. In addition to studying the combination of systems that act on the landscape, we will take time to reorganize and reimagine the site through functional and aesthetic lenses. Finally, we will host an open house to share food and discussion with other workshop participants and visitors.

May 2 1-4pm: Collect & Analyze In this first session, we will examine the ways the site is shaped by the movements of animate and inanimate material in and around the island triangle. What are the discernible forces acting on the site? How does this site participate in broader urban ecosystems? We will document our findings in the form of movement scores and maps that will be shared with future visitors in a letterbox onsite.

May 10 1-4pm(Open House 4-5:30PM): Sort & Select In the second session, we will clean the site—collecting, re-organizing, and displaying discarded material. In addition to working with our observations of the site as we encounter it, we will also develop other possible uses for the site and its materials. We will conclude the session with an open house for visitors to experience the re-organized space and share food and discussion.

Please meet us directly at the site. Participants can take public transit to the site using either the G train to Classon Ave and walking to the site, or by taking the bus (B48, B69, or B44). Please wear clothing that covers your arms and legs and that you don’t mind getting a little dirty. We will be working with trash! Gloves will be provided. Bring any desired forms of documentation (camera, sketchpad, etc). We will provide all materials that are necessary, but participants are invited to contribute to documentation in their desired format.

Check out the Use Values Blog: http://usevalues.tumblr.com/ to see updates about the project.

Zena Bibler creates dance structures that use the moving body as a means of experiencing diverse environments, phenomena, and modes of being. Much of her recent activity is centered on collaborations with the Movement Party (co-founded in 2010 with Katie Schetlick). Her work has been presented at Movement Research, NADA Hudson, Gibney Dance Center, Dixon Place, Lublin International Dance Theatre Festival (Poland), Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (Egypt), Museum Perron Oost (Netherlands), and Sesc Vila Mariana (Brazil). Her dance films have been featured in Dance Magazine, Dance Films Association, and Moviehouse Brooklyn, and have screened nationally and internationally. As a teaching artist, she has developed workshops in the areas of sensory attunement, improvisation, choreographic viewing, and integrated techniques for Fleet Moves Dance Festival, New York University, Yale University, University of Virginia, the Floating Library, and Studio 303 (Canada), among others. She has had the pleasure of dancing in the work of Katie Schetlick, Brandin Steffensen, Athena Kokoronis, Anne Zuerner, Steve Paxton, Mariangela Lopez, and the Movement Party.

Juliette Spertus is an architect and co-founder of ClosedLoops, an infrastructure strategic planning and development firm. Her experience as a designer in Boston and New York inspired her to explore the integration of invisible support infrastructures, including the networks that bring goods and remove wastes, into urban design. In 2010, she created the exhibit Fast Trash: Roosevelt Island’s Pneumatic Tubes and the Future of Cities and the online resource fasttrash.org. Fast Trash led to two NY state-funded studies on the costs and benefits of pneumatic waste collection in New York City, which she led with researchers from CUNY’s University Transportation Research Center. She has presented her research on waste and urban design in conferences, design studios, papers, and articles in the US and Europe. She received a BA in Art History from Williams College and an architecture degree from l’Ecole d’Architecture des Villes et des Territoires in Marne-la-Vallée, France.

Katarina Jerinic’s photography, mixed-media projects, and public space-based installations respond to and intervene in built environments in order to draw attention to our interactions with surrounding spaces. Jerinic has been a resident at MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH (2008); the Center for Book Arts, New York, NY (2010); Tokamak at Helsinki International Artist Program, Helsinki, Finland (2013); and the Experimental Television Center, Owego, NY (2003); and participated in the Bronx Museum of the Arts Artist in the Marketplace program (2005). Her work has been included in exhibitions and programs at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY (2014); Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2006); Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY (2009, 2010); Proteus Gowanus, Brooklyn, NY (2013); NurtureArt, Brooklyn, NY (2009); BRIC, Brooklyn, NY (2008, 2011, 2013, 2015); the Peekskill Project, Peekskill, NY (2012); the Conflux Festival, New York, NY (2010); Temple Gallery at Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA (2011), as well as other spaces and places near and far. Jerinic’s collaborative, participatory project with Naomi Miller The Work Office (TWO), a re-interpretation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) for New York City artists, has been awarded grants from the Black Rock Arts Foundation (2009), the Brooklyn Arts Council (2010), Chashama (2009), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space (2010), and the Times Square Alliance (2011). She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts and BA from American University in history. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.