Essex street at Retail Market, hosted by Cuchifritos Gallery
"FEED"
An itinerant experiment in and about public markets. In this installment, Fragmental Museum nests within the Essex Street Market to explore its complexly stratified fragments of time, space and culture.
As an analytic and a process, FEED seeks to be inspired to know better the public realm.
with Artists curated by Gabriela Galati, The Fragmental Museum
Constance Armellino
Paolo Bertocchi
Luca Bolognesi
Vanessa Chimera
Baptiste Debombourg
Marc Fornes The Very Many
Mores McWreath
Manal Rachdi OFF Architecture
Konstantinos Stamatiou
Skylar Tibbits The Very Many
Tanguy Vermet OFF Architecture
Public markets have always been a primary site of commodity exchange, yet once were known also as vital cultural centers for social exchange within the urban setting. FEED, a migratory exhibition presented by Fragmental Museum, seeks to renourish these public spaces with the installation of visual arts and cultural projects; not to create new connections, but to highlight and present relationships that already exist. The interactions, between merchant and shopper, product and consumer, artist and audience, and community members alike, are fluid. FEED seeks to encourage these existing open connections to foster a dynamic conversation with the desire to better understand the myriad ways we relate to ourselves, each other, and our environment as a whole.
This upcoming installment initiates FEED, as a series of cultural recycling investigations. A collaboration between Konstantinos Stamatiou and The Very Many forms the facade of the host space, Cuchifritos Gallery, and embodies the theme of the exhibit, a synthesis of their related approaches to topology, to create a sculptural cartography of the Essex Street market. Inside, there will be a site-specific stadium by Constance Armellino & OFF Architecture, built of recycled materials and engraved with benefactors name to memorialize their (your?) endowment to FEED.
The video screening program is curated by Gabriela Galati featuring "Baby bottle sequence" by Baptiste Debombourg, "Pinocchio" by Luca Bolognesi and "The Bud, The Seed, The Egg" by Mores McWreath.
"Famine," a collective action coordinated by Vanessa Chimera & Paolo Bertocchi, will engage the public market visitors and local merchants in a social interaction throughout the entire market, using research into historical edibles of the Lower East Side, with the help of the Tenement Museum archives.
Anthropologists Chelsea Estep-Armstrong and Rachel Signer are collaborating with various activists, artists, and academics to design interactive walking tours which will employ various methods of critical inquiry in order to generate new ways of thinking about food in the contexts of space and place. Additionally they are planning lunchtime discussion panels with activists, artists, and academics who will discuss the meanings of food, creativity, collaboration, and urban space.
Friday September 18th
Baptiste Debombourg & Antoine Melchior "Baby bottle sequence" 2009; HDV color/audio; 00:06:35
Baptiste Debombourg’s works look into the relationship between common objects, everyday life events and art. He works generally with sculptures and installations, but he also uses other media, such as video, photography, drawing or performance. When working with video, Debombourg examines people's hobbies, like in “Baby bottle sequence”, where weekend racers use cars cut in a half. In this way, ordinary events and discrete people interests are raised to kind of an ironical heroic category.
Feed is an exhibition about cultural exchange, and thus of reciprocal symbolic feeding. Each of the works presented explore the possibilities and impossibilities of this exchange.
the fragmental Museum mission to provide public access to cultural projects by creating interactions between fragments of time, space&culture. Continuous critical research of cultural art practices is the ground for the development of its site-specific projects. Its long term development is achieved through its online archive and its network host members.
Friday, September 18, 2009 - Saturday, September 26, 2009, Hours of Operation: Monday - Saturday 8am to 7pm, Closed Sunday
Location: 120 Essex Street (at Delancey Street) NEW YORK , NY 10002
Courtesy Galerie Patricia Dorfmann Paris
