GreenBox ISLA Part I
May 1, 2024
GreenBox@WBX/ISLA Part 1
June 30, 2024
WhiteBox presents and invites you to participate in a most unique NYC Community-bound Summer '24 Environmental Workshops Series, as part of Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology, a new project curated by Blanca de La Torre. RSVP at info@whiteboxny.org.
In collaboration with ISLA@GreenBox, we unveil a symbolic space that addresses issues like food sovereignty, rewilding, ecofeminisms, hydrofeminisms and restorative aesthetics. With a post-anthropocentric attitude, it researches, experiments, and builds knowledge around the Democracy of the Air, Earth, and Water.
JUNE ’24 / SUMMER WORKSHOPS AND PERFORMANCES
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Juanli Carrion & Rodolfo Kusulas – ph NYC Workshop, Friday June 7, 4-7 pm
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Daniela Bertol SUNFARM Summer Solstice, Friday, June 21, All Evening
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Mary Mattingly Workshop/Performance, Saturday, June 22, 2-5 pm
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Jenny Marketou–Workshop: 'The Hatchery', Wednesday, June 26, 3-7 pm
Jenny Marketou Book Launch & Panel Discussion
Futuring Waters: A Speculative Manifesto for the Rights of Water, By Jenny Marketou, published by Eleusis Cultural Capital of Europe, 2023
Time : 6 pm to 9pm, Thursday, June 27, 2024
Guest speakers
Blanca de la Torre, Raul Zamudio, George Scheer, Ariana Kalliga, Mauricio Gonzalez, Jacqueline King and Jenny Marketou.
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"Stefano Cagol: Meet the artist at 4:30PM / Refreshments and Screening of Far Before and After Us at 9:15PM in WBX garden.
June 7, 3-6pm
JUANLI CARRION + RODOLFO KUSULAS
PhNYC, 2024
Flag and participatory workshop
Carrión and Kusulas transform stories, data, materials, actions or information into art and design strategies that serve as tools for sustainable community development. To this end, they develop participatory initiatives that combine public art, urban agriculture, product design and artworks that become tools education on water pollution education and jewelry that operate as therapeutic tools to confront the ecological crisis.
PhNYC consists of a hands-on workshop where participants will use textile dyes of food origin to create a flag that will visualize the current water pollution in the different water systems of New York City. To do so, locally cultivated red cabbage will be used to create pH-sensitive dyes that will impregnate cotton pieces, which will then be washed in the different waters of New York. Since the colorants used vary in color depending on the acidity of the water with which they are dyed or rinsed; the resulting textiles will reveal the different levels of water contamination in various colors ranging from red to yellow to blue.
Participants will work with the resulting fabric pieces, conceiving an idea that connects to their participatory experience. The pieces will be assembled as a 5 x 3-foot flag that will be displayed as an installation piece that brings visibility to New York's water contamination.
MENHIR (Iván Cebrián y Coco Moya)
13 Moons and a Blackhole, 2024
Ambient electronic walking music
This collective's music is created for immersive performances, site-specific installations, and interactive installations that explore the combination of analog synthesis with innovative digital instruments, using voice and sampling. For ISLA, they have developed a time-specific sound piece consisting of a geolocalized tour.
Through a free cell phone application* the work is configured as a walking music experience, a circular form to walk through the territory to be performed by the listener. The public recreates with movement the rituality of ancestral stone circles such as the megalithic monument of Stonehenge, real lunar calendars, megalithic cromlechs that signaled events and stellar objects and that are now embodied again in these virtual sound stones.
This piece is designed, as well, to be listened to in different locations. As part of the Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology project, the work will be located at le Petit Versailles Garden, L.U.N.G.S (6th & B), S.U.N.F.A.R.M and WhiteBox Garden (GreenBox). In addition, as part of the celebration of a special event on June 21st, during the summer solstice, the work will join the first common action of the spaces that make up the ISLA archipelago located in Costa Rica, Switzerland, Chile, Spain and New York.
*ECHOES, available for IOS and ANDROID
Daniela Bertol
SUNFARM Summer Solstice, Friday June 21, All Evening
Please rsvp at. info@whiteboxny.org
At S.U.N.F.A.R.M., which is part sculpture park and part digital experiment, Architect-Artist Bertol uses the land itself as her medium. The acronym S.U.N.F.A.R.M. stands for Spacetime Spiral System Survey of Universe Nature in a Future Art Revolution Movement. However, the name is also a fitting portmanteau—Bertol’s bio-art project tracks the sun's movements. Her work generates awareness of where we are in space and time according to celestial events, namely, sunrise and sunset.
Avelino Sala will propose an environmental piece for SUNFARM.
MARY MATTINGLY
Blockades, Boulders, Weights, 2014-2024 June 22, 2-5 PM
Mixed media performed installation
In this workshop, we'll creatively explore how our daily lives are shaped by the objects bought, used, and often then discarded through a series of prompts. Participants are asked to bring two objects each, that they can donate to help build a large sculpture: a bundle of our objects to be displayed at WhiteBox Art Space, which we'll document through research, drawing, and writing. By examining their origins, production, and use, we'll create an archive that tells the story of these items before they are added to the bundle.
Blockades, Boulders, and Weights are sculptures presented as amalgams of objects that appeal to rethink overconsumption. In 2013, Mattingly grouped almost everything she owned by creating seven large, packaged balls she could carry around with her rolling around, wearing the same clothes for years. Having grown up in ascetic conditions, the gesture reminded her of the unnecessariness of all the things she had come to depend on. In the manner of absurdist performances, she would walk the packages through the streets of New York to emphasize the symbolic weight of the objects: from that of extractive policies to that of the working conditions of manufacturers and distributors to the chemicals that pass into the air and water.
For the past seven years, Mattingly has dedicated herself to the investigation of the extractive supply chains of the objects she packaged to question her own role in systems of global worker oppression, the outsourcing of commodities to the Global South coupled with the abuse of child labor. For this exhibition, the artist made a site-specific work with belongings of New Yorkers and encourages GreenBox visitors to contribute their own objects and make a new monument to materialize overconsumption through a monument that speaks to the importance of acting and the possibility of a future based on degrowth.
JENNY MARKETOU
The Hatchery
Workshop in the GreenBox garden
Jenny Marketou
Wednesday, June 26, 2024 from 3pm to 7pm
WhiteBox, 9 Avenue B, New York
The workshop with Jenny Marketou and her assistant Isabella Haid is part of the exhibition Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology curated by Blanca de La Torre, GreenBox and ISLA and takes place from 3pm to 7pm on Wednesday, June 26 in the garden of WhiteBox, 9 Avenue B, New York.
The Hatchery explores the fragility of the waterways ecosystem and the destruction of the waterbody by human waste and biodiversity loss and its potential for regeneration. The workshop investigates the oyster as a central player in the economic and ecological entanglement between humans and nonhumans by examining its presence in diverse forms, such as oyster shells and limestone, tracing its life cycle, cultural significance, ecological impact, and colonial ties. During the workshop, we will work collectively in the production of a series of sculptures in the form of speculative habitats for non-human species made out of Eastern Oysters ( Grassostrea Virginia) shells reclaimed from New York’s restaurants by project contributor Billion Oyster Project headquarters on Governors island which will be displayed in the garden of GreenBox as part of the existing show.
BOOK LAUNCH EVENT
Futuring Waters, Jenny Marketou
Thursday, June 27, 2024, 6 pm to 9 pm
at WhiteBox - 9 Avenue B, New York
As part of the Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology exhibition curated by Blanca de La Torre, GreenBox and ISLA will host a book discussion on the occasion of the first presentation of the book Futuring Waters: A Speculative Manifesto for and from the Water by multidisciplinary artist Jenny Marketou. The discussion will address “water” from a variety of prerogatives calling for an interdisciplinary accounter between art and water culture, its ecological possibilities, politics, poetics and imaginaries with a group of guests some of which contributed to her book and include Blanca de la Torre, PhD art curator and writer, George Scheer art curator, artistic director at EFA, New York, Raul Zamudio curator, art critic and art historian, Ariana Kalliga, independent curator, CCS Bard Summer Curatorial Fellow, 2024, at the Vera List Center in New York, Mauricio Gonzalez, marine biologist, founder and director of the Marine Biology Research Program and the Civic Science team, New York Harbour SEALs, Jacqueline King, poet and Jenny Marketou interdisciplinary artist, educator and researcher based in New York founder and artistic director of Futuring Waters Project.
STEFANO CAGOL
Meet the artist at 4:30 PM / Refreshments and Screening of Far Before and After Us at 9:15 PM in WBX garden.
Far Before and After Us continues the research that began more than ten years ago in Norway, the Arctic, and the Barents Sea area. Stefano Cagol sought to delve into the evidence of the oldest geological eras. This rugged western coastal area off Bergen is one of the places that best evokes the orogenesis or mountain formation of northern Europe as we know it, that is, the traces of the continental collision event known as the Caledonian or Caledonian Orogeny during the Paleozoic.
The Golta Island crags shown in the video go back even further in time to the Precambrian, the oldest period on Earth. These are metamorphic rocks of magmatic origin, emerging from the Earth's crust from great depths.
Here, the artist, illuminated by the evening sun at the summer solstice, performs a ritual on fire, lighting the dark rocks with red light as if they were incandescent lava. He thus pays homage to the past of this territory, reflecting on the insignificance and transience of the human, focusing in appealing to the importance of shifting the anthropocentric look as an essential step to open a new era of ecological justice.
info@whiteboxny.org