Social Architecture
Seven Walks
Opening performances are grounding moments within the festival intended to set the tone prior to each showcase. These sessions are delivered by musicians and live performers who are originative in their art. Collective IE New Threads will respond to the prompts of our social architecture program in their performance, mixing free jazz and spoken word in an improvisational set where the artists act as infrastructural nodes.
Our NEW INC member cohort consists of 5 unique Tracks or focus areas guided by a Mentor-in-Residence: Art & Code, Cooperative Studies, Creative Science, Social Architecture, and XR (Extended Realities). At the core of DEMO, members share their individual projects during Track Talks which are followed by a group conversation moderated by the Track Mentor-in-Residence.
In partnership with the Jonathan D. Lewis and Mark C. Lewis Foundation, Social Architecture supports architects, designers, urban planners, and socially engaged artists who are exploring ways to make both social and public space more horizontal. Following presentations by Britt Ransom, Elsa Ponce, Karen Kubey, Melody Stein, and Philip Poon, the Trackâs Mentor-in-Residence Jessica Kwok will moderate a group discussion.
DEMO2024 Keynote Presentations serve as the meeting point between various disciplines, areas of inquiry, creative practices, generations, and career levels. Our invited speakers share their knowledge to bring further context to the ideas and projects incubated at NEW INC, as well as offer an additional perspective garnered from experience, passion, and illuminating creative work in their own fields.
Chloe and Mahfuz Sultan deliver their keynote conversation in alignment with the principles of our Social Architecture Track. The duo, known for their practice Clocks and their culture-shifting collaborations with Virgil Abloh, Solange, and more, will share projects ranging from spatial design to publications to live performances that underscore NEW INCâs investment in the impact of plurality and multidisciplinarity.
In her book Occasional Work and Seven Walks from The Office for Soft Architecture, poet and essayist Lisa Robertson writes:
âThe Office for Soft Architecture came into being as I watched the city of Vancouver dissolve in the fluid called money. Buildings disappeared into newness. I tried to recall spaces, and what I remembered was surfaces. Here and there money had tarried. The result seemed emotional. I wanted to document this process.â
Architecture has come to be closely bound to the urban landscapes of power and capital within which it operates. It is because of these entanglements that architecture is increasingly being asked to manifest its social dimensions and reflect political conditions. Drawing from Robertsonâs framing, this exhibition brings together the work of six interdisciplinary artists and invites us upon Seven Walks. Each artwork is a walk documenting their own excursion in sociality that attempts to crack away at the mosaic of forces that have produced our rapidly shifting built environment. The longest walk threads the six works together along a meandering path, urging us to consider social architecture beyond a qualifier and towards a mode of engagement concerning the intimate ways these artists make sense of place, cities, and infrastructures, in relation to their personal histories.
Fragments from the East Broadway Mall like a backwards neon fixture layered in front of traditional Chinatown signage echoes a collapsing of identities and the nuanced position of first-generation Americans in the face of complex racial discourse and gentrification. The layering of cultural fragments appears again in a ghostly model of three buildingsâ the Tawawa Chimney Corner House in Ohio, John Brownâs Fort in Harpers Ferry, and The Emma Ransom House for Women in Harlemâto reveal embodied memories around abolition and the civil rights movement. Also thinking through monuments of social progress, a sculpture depicting the neoclassical Temperance Fountain in Tompkins Square Park brings to life the four tenants of New York CityâHOPE, FAITH, CHARITY, and TEMPERANCE, through fantastical fictions that highlight the governance of water infrastructures undergirding much of the way people live.
A soundscape and textile work holds us in a space that also pays homage to water as it relates to African and diasporic principles of spirituality and community in the wake of climate catastrophe and ocean pollution. In another breath, air pollution is explored through a filter that cloaks the New York skyline in burnt amber, reminiscent of the aftermath of the 2023 Canadian wildfires, and a broadcast of oral testimonies from a Bronx environmental activist group through a truck radio. Nearby, a painting depicts the destructive act of fire but also its ability to be a symbol of resistance, hope, and transformation in the context of uprisings and protest.
Seven Walks gathers artists whose work poses provocations about the spatial conditions and upheavals of the systems that constitute our social fabric. It is the humble scale of walking that enables us to experience the poetics of architecture beyond its surfaces and uncover its inherent political gestures.
Curated by Jessica Kwok. Produced by Free Tripp, WORTHLESSSTUDIOS.
About the Track:
Our NEW INC member cohort consists of 5 unique Tracks or focus areas guided by a Mentor-in-Residence: Art & Code, Cooperative Studies, Creative Science, Social Architecture, and XR (Extended Realities). Annually, our members are invited to contribute to a group showcase demonstrating the Trackâs guiding questions. These exhibitions are curated and produced by invited guests.
Our Social Architecture track explores the medium of architecture beyond simple understandings of the built environment, rather its relation to how we see ourselves, relate to each other, and our hopes or dreams for a place. Artists, designers, and technologists in this cohort are interested in how practices rooted in design or architecture can bolster community, and ensure social or public space is representative of the people and ecological systems inhabiting them.