After a successful initial run in early August, Urban Exquis will return to First Street Green in early October with all new movies and a new, larger, and more dramatic installation format. More powerful projectors will illuminate more of the surfaces in the park, and we need your movies to fill the screens.
Urban Exquis is inspired both by the cadavre exquis method of poetry, in which a collection of writers blindly contribute isolated words that together compose a poem, and by Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1976 film City Slivers, in which the artist depicts New York City through a collection of masked views that fill only a portion of the film frame. Urban Exquis consists of several short video slivers hat depict various urban environments. Like the word fragments in a cadaver exquis, each video sliver is composed by a different moviemaker, artist, or architect. Like the images in City Slivers, each video sliver is a vertically-oriented fragment of a conventional video frame that defies the conventional widescreen format of cinema. In both method and form, the installation challenges many assumptions regarding the relevance of cinematic imagery to urban space. Urban Exquis suggests that the identity of the city resides in simultaneity and adjacency, not in spatial and temporal unity. Like the city itself, it cannot be understood as a singular vision. It is fragmentary, elusive, frustrating, and (ultimately) beautiful in a way that eludes intention.
Participation is open to a wide range of individuals, from professional moviemakers to amateur camera-phone operators. We will accommodate all contributions that are suitable for public viewing. Each contributor’s movie will occupy a sliver of the installation. No editing is necessary, as the organizers will manage the composition of the slivers into the installation. Contributors, however, are welcome to work with the organizers if they have preferences for how their movies are shown.
Complete specifications and application procedures are enclosed and available @ http://firststreetgreenpark.org/Competitions and open calls
To begin the process of contributing, please email a statement of interest to: [email protected]. You will receive more information in reply.
Ciotat Studio is an interdisciplinary design and research practice based in New York City. Its work includes examples of architectural and urban design, moviemaking, drawing, and writing. www.ciotatstudio.com
