Music and dance festivals are so last month. Next month New York will have what organizers are calling a “participatory walks” festival. Elastic City an organization that since 2010 has engaged artists in various disciplines to lead walks that are less about sightseeing than about finding fresh ways to think about a city’s history, architecture and traditions, is presenting its first Elastic City Walks Festival, from Sept. 26 to Oct. 7.
The festival includes eight walks (most offered two or three times) in Brooklyn and Manhattan that aspire to be art works on their own often quirky terms. In “Signature Walk,” for example, Todd Shalom, the founder of Elastic Walks and a poet, will have participants create their own art pieces along the way (the destination has not been specified), using found objects for visual pieces, and creating song lyrics from texts seen in shop windows, among other endeavors (Sept. 29-Oct. 1).
Anthony Goicolea, a photographer and painter, will lead a dusk and evening walk to take a group away from the city lights toward a woodland area in Brooklyn (it will be specified to those who sign up), where he will create a group photograph (Oct. 4). And Nisan Haymian, a visual artist and urbanist, will have participants visit Persian cultural landmarks in New York, and consider questions of immigration and identity, in “Twelve Grey Lemons” (Sept. 29 to Oct. 1).
Another walk will feature the performance artist Karen Finley’s “Mandala: Reimagining Columbus Circle,” in which she will look at the circle as a place where transportation, recreation and information intersect, as well as at layers of the circle’s history, including the destruction and reuse of Native American pathways (Sept. 26 and 27).
The festival also includes a day of panel discussions and talks at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn on Sept. 28. A full schedule in available at elastic-city.org/walks.
Source: The New York Times
August 7, 2014
By Allan Kozinn
