Friday, February 3, 2012

Matthew Slaats, Participatory Installation of Zucotti Park


Project Name – Zuccotti (anywhere)

Proposal Brief

Zuccotti (anywhere) is a participatory installation project that recreates the various formal elements of Zuccotti Park as an archive for the collecting of mementos from the audience’s OWS experience.

Proposal Description

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been a catalyst for revisiting the meaning of public space. Through encampments erected around the world, those evolved have staked a claim for the importance of these sites as social and mental assets.  Yet the physical, organizational, and political ability to hold those spaces forces the movement to reconsider what occupation means.  For this project, I want to consider the historical importance and social impact of Zuccotti Park. 

The project will consist of recreating Zuccotti Park’s various formal elements in a vacant space in Catskill. This will consist of a precise construction of the benches, trees, and lighting that define the lower Manhattan space.   Once created, the audience will then be invited to make the space into an archive of the thoughts, images, and objects that have come to define their experience of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. These will be displayed on the walls of the spaces, allowing others to engage the meaning of OWS. Upon conclusion, the entire project will be documented via video, audio, and images to be uploaded to a website.  My hope is that this can then be translated to other sites throughout the United States.

This project is a part of a series of efforts that define Freespace, a project I have been developing for the past 2 years.   Freespace interests itself in the ways in which spaces have significance to all of us as individuals.  The objective is to document the experiences and memories we have with specific spaces, creating both a situated digital and physical commons of understanding that can be shared.  Presently, the project has been developed as a part of the Dia:Beacon Artist in Education program, the DC arts commission 5x5 exhibition, and the Kingston Teen Art Lab program.

Below are some portfolio examples.









Posted by at

9 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 5, 2012 at 4:50 PM

    YES: But needs more clarity, when audience enters this recreated Z Park they make art (bring objects?) and they put it on walls? Also the project would be built to scale of Z Park?

    ReplyDelete
  2. MarayaFebruary 8, 2012 at 4:34 PM

    No.

    ReplyDelete
  3. kateFebruary 9, 2012 at 10:07 AM

    compelling - don't feel like I have a clear sense of what this will be. how will audiences interact? is this to be a miniature set in a window or open space.

    ReplyDelete
  4. ArthurFebruary 9, 2012 at 2:21 PM

    clarity needed

    ReplyDelete
  5. Fawn PotashFebruary 9, 2012 at 7:10 PM

    Looking at his pictures, I am most interested in the projections that add historic layers to the existing street and architecture. Will email to ask for more details. I'm interested and it sounds compatible with Maria Byck and Antonio Serna's, Forum/Workshop abut the commons.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. UnknownFebruary 10, 2012 at 1:30 PM

      From the artiss: The proposal is actually more significant in scale than the reviewers are thinking. I see it as needing a portion of a room or an entire vacant space to be realized. I will create a piece of Zuccotti Park in full scale, constructing a platform onto which lighting, benches and trees will be placed that allows the audience to have a physical sense of the site in Manhattan. Attached is a schematic of how I see the installation developing.

      In terms of accessing an audience to submit materials, we would reach out to local Occupy groups and the general audience. I have contacts in the Poughkeepsie Occupy movement. I would also want to print a series of posters to draw attention to the project. We could also organize a talk or two about the impact of Occupy on the local level. These would all help to facilitate those types of interactions.

      Delete
  6. paulFebruary 9, 2012 at 7:56 PM

    wow. yes

    ReplyDelete
  7. SamFebruary 10, 2012 at 6:10 AM

    I like this a lot - and like notion of attention to the exact replication of Z Park - vs. an idea of it -f I am getting the drift. Not sure about how/where to put it - a logistical hurdle but one worth traversing.

    ReplyDelete
  8. imaniFebruary 10, 2012 at 11:02 AM

    maybe. i'm personally not so into the idea of recreating the past, but if it could become a living social forum rather than an archive, it could be viable. like the projections; like the idea of it being a space in which to have conversations on the commons

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)