Press Releases
The Enhanced Regional EU-ASEAN Dialogue Instrument (E-READI) is an EU-funded development cooperation programme that facilitates dialogue forums between the EU and ASEAN.
The overall objective of the E-READI is to support ASEAN integration aiming at poverty reduction through inclusive and sustainable growth, while the specific objective is to support the implementation of the ASEAN Community blue prints, drawing on European experience and know how through sectoral policy dialogues.
Please find notable press releases I have written for E-READI below:
Visit the archive for additional press releases: https://bit.ly/EREADI-tags
Red Cologne Bridges
Text for the artist-in-residence Zwoisy Mears-Clarke’s project at CAT (Community Art Team) Cologne.
(website) 2018
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Project Description
As a part of CAT Cologne’s "Blueprint – Love as a Strategy," Zwoisy Mears-Clarke will be presenting the work-in-progress “Red Cologne Bridges”, an interactive, performative, collective procession activating significant colonial sites throughout Cologne.
The piece offers engagement of present-day Cologne with the city’s historical connection to colonialism using storytelling, dance, and text. In the face of the current class-action lawsuit against Germany launched by the Ovaherero and Nama people, indigenous groups from Namibia who were the victims of genocide, forced expulsion, and concentration camp imprisonment while under German colonial rule, “Red Cologne Bridges” acknowledges this ongoing active struggle and the presence of history still alive today. In light of this struggle, we will engage each of our ability to give support, resist, and empower and ultimately celebrate that together.
Be a part of the journey and explore Cologne through footsteps of history. We will meet at CAT Cologne at 5pm and a map will be available online and at CAT for joining the procession on the way. The night ends back at CAT with an artist’s conversation, food, and drinks. Follow @catcologne on Twitter, @cat.cologne on Instagram, and catcologne on Facebook for updates and for an alternate plan in case of rain.
Dedicated to Ovaherero and Nama people and Otjiserandu (Red Flag Heroes Day).
Project Call to Action
CAT (Community Art Team) Cologne is looking for Cologne residents to share their stories in an exciting project!
CAT Cologne supports international emerging artists working in the field of social practice and community engaged work. During a working grant to spend 1-3 months in Cologne, artists are invited to realize a process-oriented project that picks up on issues that are specific to the context and engages with local communities.
Artist-in-residence Zwoisy Mears-Clarke is creating a brand new contemporary German folk dance and wants to hear your thoughts on your life in Germany as a first step in creating the final piece. Don’t miss your chance share to your knowledge and help build a piece of community-inspired artwork!
If you are a (legal or illegal) resident of Cologne, you are invited to join Zwoisy for tea at CAT Cologne any time in March for an hour-long interview about your own personal German history.
To participate, please call 0172 82 666 58 or send an email to info@catcologne.org with the subject “Me and My German History” with a proposed date and time in March for the interview. You will then receive a confirmation email with further details. Possible languages for the interview are English and German.
Save the date for the final performance of the folk dance on April 14, 2018. To find out more, visit catcologne.org
Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro's Atlas comes to life at the Queens Museum.
A blog post recapping an event for a multi-faceted artist project.
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"A city is a machine with innumerable parts made by the accumulation of human gestures, a colossal organism forever dying and being born, an ongoing conflict between memory and erasure, a center for capital and for attacks on capital, a rapture, a misery, a mystery, a conspiracy, a destination and point of origin, a labyrinth in which some are lost and some find what they’re looking for, an argument about how to live, and evidence that differences don’t always have to be resolved, though they may grace and grind against each other for centuries." —Rebecca Solnit
Excerpted above is the introduction to Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, the final in a trilogy of illustrated atlases by Rebecca Solnit (this one written with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro and editor-at-large Garnette Cadogan), which exemplifies the way Solnit’s fluid writing breathes life into the idea of cities, a theme that has mystified and inspired centuries of writers before her. The Queens Museum is celebrating her luminous definition and supporting it with artwork in a project entitled Nonstop Metropolis: The Remix which is comprised of murals by Duke Riley and Mariam Ghani, printed broadsides of selected maps, and related programming. One such program was the book launch here at the Museum on October 2, 2016 that brought together contributors to the Atlas—Solnit, Schapiro, and Cadogan—for readings from the book.
The day’s atmosphere was a reminder of the notion that the Queens Museum is a community museum: Fans of Solnit and the book were present along with general urbanists, curious museumgoers, families attending workshops, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles enthusiasts. The open plan of the museum gave way to a blending of the audiences as the sounds of birds chirping in Ukeles’ sound-piece of Freshkills Park gave a harmonious background sound to speakers reading aloud from the Atlas. Personal stories enraptured the audiences which emerged from readers including Mirissa Neff who grew up on Sesame Street (literally and figuratively) and Heather Smith, who wrote of Water and Power in Thirsts and Ghosts, and inspired Duke Riley’s bold mural That’s What She Said, on display in the Watershed Gallery.
As with all projects at the Museum, Nonstop Metropolis: The Remix falls into themes of our mission statement which partly reads: “The Queens Museum presents artistic and educational programs and exhibitions that directly relate to the contemporary urban life of its constituents, while maintaining the highest standards of professional, intellectual, and ethical responsibility.”
With the Panorama of the City of New York and the Watershed Model exhibited here, we are sometimes known as a cartography museum, and with an emphasis on ethical responsibility and contemporary urban life in our mission statement, what better place to exhibit the maps that illustrate the many stories that are told in and of New York City, and beautifully and creatively present information about our city that make us question grand themes of our history and present like immigration, feminism, religious freedom, and the environment.
Maps like The Mysterious Land of Shaolin with its Wu Tang Clan inspired locales dotting Staten Island; sacred and secular spaces in Harlem, “the capital of Black America” in Black Star Lines; the languages spoken in Queens, “the world’s language capital” in Mother Tongues and Queens (best paired with the large scale mural of endangered languages in Queens on the Panorama wall by Mariam Ghani); and many more geographical maps that delve deeper into the many non-geographic layers of the city in the form of histories and stories.
As Garnette Cadogan says “New York opens itself up to those willing to explore it” in his map City of Walkers. Those willing to explore New York were in the room at the book launch, are readers of the Atlas in every corner of the globe, and are those thousands of Queens Museum visitors who set their eyes on the maps, murals, and broadsides from Nonstop Metropolis: The Atlas.
Are you a New York explorer? Visit Nonstop Metropolis: The Remix, on view until January 2017 or follow along with the adventure via social media at @nonstopatlas and #NonstopMetropolis
Never Built New York
A video script and website text for a Kickstarter page that successfully reached its goal to augment a Queens Museum exhibition.
(website) 2018
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An exhibition exploring 200 years of never built structures is coming to the Queens Museum September 17, 2017-February 18, 2018.
We are so grateful for all of your support in helping us reach our $35,000 goal! With your help, the Never Built New York exhibition will be on view from September 17, 2017 to February 18, 2018. We cannot thank you enough!
$50K STRETCH GOAL
Now we are thrilled to announce a stretch goal of $50,000 to help us realize a few particularly ambitious aspects of our exhibition as envisioned by Studio Christian Wassmann. If we reach our stretch goal, we plan to build an inflatable bouncy castle modeled after the never built Westinghouse Pavilion for the '64 World's Fair designed by the legendary Eliot Noyes.
With the additional funding, we can also realize our incredible plan to build a glowing LED-powered "sun" that will illuminate the Panorama of the City of New York. And we will be able to give you the ultimate 3D experience of seeing Never Built New York through animations by Shimahara Illustration, one of the nation’s most accomplished architectural renderers.
Help Never Built New York fulfill its greatest potential! Make this ambitious exhibition a reality!
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The Queens Museum invites you to step into an alternate Gotham where the boldest, most daring, and most far-reaching urban designs are realized.
Curated by Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, and designed by Christian Wassmann, Never Built New York—opening September 2017—presents 200 years of visionary architectural and urban designs that never came to be, all brought to life for the first time with original drawings, renderings, newly commissioned models, and 3D visualizations.
We invite you to be part of this monumental exhibition by helping us reach our goal of $35,000. Funding will support the installation of a gallery dedicated to stunning, rarely seen models, sketches, drawings, and more than 70 models to be installed on the Museum’s renowned Panorama of the City of New York. These miniature models are currently being purpose-built by students in Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Select models will be sent to contributors who donate to our campaign. While these projects never came to be, you can own a model all to yourself!
Join us and together, let’s discover a New York that was never built...until now.
By showcasing visionary yet un-built architectural and urban planning projects, Never Built New York explores the backstory behind how and why New York City came to look the way it does, expanding our understanding of the city we know and love. The contents of this exhibition—culled from public and private archives—will also spotlight some of the most visionary concepts for New York City, giving visitors an unprecedented look at the design process, the rich depth of ingenious schemes, and the power of innovative ideas to propel the City forward into an uncharted future.
Exhibition models by Christian Wassmann
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
What lessons can we learn from forgotten or neglected ideas? Through Never Built New York, the Queens Museum will not only exhibit many daring designs that were never realized, but also encourage discourse around how some of the most pressing issues of our time—ecological sustainability, population displacement, and economic inequity—are inextricably linked to our built environment. With the support of the Kickstarter community, we will demonstrate how the architectural insights of the past can help us plan for a stronger future.
NEVER BUILT NEW YORK HIGHLIGHTS
Buckminster Fuller – Dome Over Manhattan (1961)It is hard to imagine a glass dome over midtown Manhattan, but R. Buckminster Fuller conceived just that: a two-mile-diameter dome over mid-Manhattan that spanned the width of the island and was three times the height of the Empire State Building. Why? The purpose of the temperature-controlled aluminum and glass dome was to provide Midtowners with a perfect climate year-round!
I.M. Pei – Hyperboloid (1954 )Robert Young, the newly elected chairman of the New York Central Railroad chose I.M. Pei for the redevelopment of Grand Central. I.M. Pei’s Hyperboloid was proposed to be a 1,497-foot-tall office tower and transit hub. The 108-story, $100 million edifice, spanning a nine-acre site, would have been the world’s tallest and most costly structure. But after Young’s passing, the project fizzled.
Rufus Gilbert – Pneumatic Railway (1880) Dr. Rufus Henry Gilbert proposed a railway powered by pneumatic air that would carry commuters in tubes 24 feet above the streets, a project that ground to a halt due to the 1873 financial crisis. The proposal's Gothic arches and Corinthian columns made for a stylish design to adorn New York City, however the Sixth Avenue Elevated Line eventually occupied the space on which they were meant to stand.
Wallace K. Harrison, Aymar Embury II, Louis Skidmore, W. Earl Andrews, and others – United Nations, Flushing Meadows (1952) Before Robert Moses foresaw a new Dodger Stadium or a World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, he imagined a much larger prize for his highway-laced park: the United Nations. The conceptual plan for the site included a domed assembly hall, three low-rise office buildings, and 51 sunken pylons representing the founding nations of the U.N. Around these buildings and symbols, there was also to be a long reflecting pool, a low-lying rectangular entrance court and terrace, and a central lagoon.
Frank Lloyd Wright – Key Project for Ellis Island (1959) “Causal, inspired living, minus the usual big-city clamor.” Frank Lloyd Wright’s Key Project for Ellis Island was imagined as a completely self-contained city of the future. This futuristic, car-free utopia would shelter 7,500 residents beneath air-conditioned domes housing theaters, hospitals, churches, schools, a library, and a sports arena, all linked by moving sidewalks. It would look like “a jewel suspended over the water and surrounded by it, free of congestion and noise.” Wright’s Key Project was rejected and Ellis Island was declared a national monument in 1965.
HOW DID THIS PROJECT COME ABOUT?
In 2013, co-curators Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell, installed Never Built Los Angeles, an exhibition at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles, and published a book with the same title. This hugely successful project caught the eye of the Queens Museum, an arts institution whose socially engaged and community-based programming includes urbanism, urban planning, and architecture.
WHY KICKSTARTER?
Never Built New York offers a look into an alternate reality for New York. With the City’s iconic skyline known all over the world, the possibility of New York being anything other than what it is today is endlessly fascinating. We are thrilled to use Kickstarter to engage with architecture buffs, lovers of New York City, and dreamers across the globe to bring this treasure trove of designs, plans, and schemes to life.
This project has been selected for inclusion on Art Basel's curated page on Kickstarter. Check out out their curated page to learn about other great cultural projects.
Risks and challenges
As with any project that involves creative collaboration, elements of "Never Built New York" may need to shift and evolve. The potential for this exhibition is as high as a skyscraper! If we don’t reach our goal, our highly skilled curatorial team will have to reassess the exhibition’s elaborate production and design. Having mounted critically-acclaimed exhibitions, including “Hey! Ho! Let's Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk”, “Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art”, and “13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World’s Fair”, the Queens Museum is well-equipped to face potential hurdles and will keep our community of supporters informed no matter what. There are many moving parts, but we are up for the challenge, and are confident that your help will make it happen!