Entanglement#3: VIOLENCE

Entanglement#3: VIOLENCE on October 1, 2019, in the framework of the project Jenny Brockmann: Dialogues on a Future Communication curated by Niama Sandy.

Entanglement#3: VIOLENCE seeks to actualize/operationalize the epistemologies of the location in which we have gathered by sifting through its place in the ecological, architectural, and cultural milieu of New York City, the United States and beyond. The happening seeks to learn how the histories of and assembled near this specific site are symptomatic of the conditions of racial and economic inequality, urban planning/development, and the modern Anthropocene.

Prior to the mid-19th century, the majority of Manhattan’s population was concentrated in Lower Manhattan. As the city grew more populous, the desire to expand northward took hold. In July 1827, exactly two hundred years since they were initially enslaved on this land, enslaved Black people in New York were granted their autonomy. In 1825, free Black New Yorkers began buying parcels of land that eventually became Seneca Village, which stretched from West 83rd to West 89th Streets along 8th Avenue. Seneca Village was one of several communities which was razed to the ground to make way for Central Park, but it was one of the very few havens at the time created by and for Black people in New York. 1014 Fifth Avenue, the site where Dialogues on a Future Communication will be held, is among the many homes constructed at the turn of the 20th Century along the eastern edge of Central Park by New York’s – and by extension America’s – elite. Particularly because of its spatial relationship to Central Park, this building is a symbol of contested histories of who is allowed to obtain and then become the architect of space, and of the ways in which race and class have always been at the center of that.

With art historian Danielle Wu, biologist Luciana Solano, historian Alexander Manewitz, writer and curator Niama Sandy, architect Mario Gooden.

Jenny Brockmann: ‘Dialogues of a Future Communication’ is commissioned by 1014 and funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe and by Willms Neuhaus Foundation, Berlin.