Performing the space: Site-specific Practices | Steaming Cities Project

Steaming Cities | New York, April 1st to 30th 2015

Site-specific practices: Performing the space

A collaborative project by Fernanda Eugénio & Gustavo Ciríaco

In New York for one month, the Brazilian artists Fernanda Eugenio & Gustavo Ciríaco are in the city to install their CITY LAB, a temporary zone of attention for mapping-and-performing-procedures in critical urban areas, chosen by its attachment to a local contingent urge or persistent sociopolitical issue. Traveling through different cities in South America, Europe and Asia with the nomadic and time-based relational structure of the City Labs, the artists research the singular arrangements and the in situ performativeness of the materiality emergent from the co-operations between politics & architecture, habits & inhabitation, codes & deviations, coexistence & togetherness, ordinary & extraordinary, visibility & invisibility.  

Cities are as diverse as the layers that compose them. An ongoing alchemy sets on, producing sometimes conflicting, yet osmotic inhabitance patterns, sensorial experience and social togetherness. As well the result of many architectural and political dreams, evolving power structures and contingent local deviations, cities are simultaneously hardware concrete structures and ephemeral realms. In them, we live & die, we meet & depart, we hold together the daily fiction that glues the interstices of the bigger picture of the urban phenomena.

The CITY LAB-NYC takes place between April 1st and 30th 2015, hosted by Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics | NYU,  and inaugurates Steaming Cities, their new creative project, challenged by the impossible task of experiencing one city’s steams in another and completely different city. Using ethnographic tools and contextual based approaches, the duo aims to produce a set of sensorial operations which transport different urban ambiances and sensations to other contexts, building up an imaginary city through which one can navigate biased by multiple modes and time-space inter-crossings.

The New York edition of Site-Specific Practices: Performing the Space is supported by MINC - Ministério da Cultura Brasil (Brazilian Ministry of Culture) through its program Edital Conexão-Cultura Brasil Intercâmbios. 

The results of this ongoing project will be shared at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics | NYU, next April 22^nd.

If you wish to collaborate in our NYC groundwork research during this month, please write to:site.specific.practices@gmail.com

For +info, here is the project website.