OCCUPIED REAL ESTATE @EXIT ART

Not An Alternative is pleased to participate in Collective/Performative, the final exhibition of Exit Art’s influential 30 years as a non-profit gallery and cultural center. Please join us May 8th -12th for Occupied Real Estate, an installation and series of workshops.

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Occupied Real Estate
Tuesday May 8 - Saturday May 12
@ Exit Art
475 10th Avenue
New York, New York
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Installation: 10am-6pm daily

Tuesday, May 8 - Friday, May 11
Workshops: 2pm - 6pm daily.
Join other Occupied Real Estate agents in the production of props and tools for the Occupy movement. Materials will be used in support of Occupy Wall Street’s upcoming May 10-15 Week of Action.

Saturday, May 12
Presentations: 12 - 2pm
With artist John Hawke and Occupy Town Square collaborator Daniel Latorre.
Workshop: 2 - 6pm
Join other Occupied Real Estate agents in the production of props and tools for the movement. Materials will be used in support of Occupy Wall Street’s sidewalk sleeping occupations in front of Wall Street and banks across the city.

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OCCUPIED REAL ESTATE

The city of 2012 is contested: the boundaries of public and private are blurred; the interests of the 99% and 1% are in conflict. The battleground of contestation takes place in the streets, in the media and in public consciousness. As Occupiers capture imaginations and attention around the world, they enter the battleground in a forceful way, destabilizing ideas about ownership and use of space. This new class of ‘real estate agents’ comes equipped with the tools of their trade: those of media production and material construction. From foreclosed homes to public/private parks, to warehoused buildings and bank-owned lots, the movement reveals invisible spaces, exposing exclusions and power relations. Through anonymous acts, interventions and appropriations, they activate these spaces, building a new world in the shell of the old.

The Occupied Real Estate workshop is an architectural set that puts the production of this world on display. It is both a workshop and a studio set. Agents converge at assembly-line workstations to manufacture tools for the movement and document their practice along the way. In turning the lens on themselves, they perform the material function with an awareness of its immaterial implications.

The show is produced by Not An Alternative, a hybrid arts collective and non-profit organization with a mission to affect popular understandings of events, symbols, and history. The group curates and produces interventions on immaterial and material space, leveraging the tools of architecture, exhibit design, branding, and public relations. Not An Alternative's actions, installations, and presentations have been featured within art institutions such as the Guggenheim in New York City, Tate Modern in London, and Museo Del Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and in the public sphere, where they collaborate with community organizations and activist mobilizations. They host programs at a variety of venues, including their Brooklyn-based gallery No-Space (formerly known as The Change You Want to See Gallery).

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PRESENTATIONS

Using the principle of productive confusion developed through the collaborative platform Orange Work, for the past seven years John Hawke has made architecture and sign interventions into urban environments, as well as maintaining a studio practice in painting. He participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2006, and is currently a resident in the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts: Art and Law Residency Program.

In the U.S., public space, the commons, has been increasingly encapsulated by entities and ideas of privatization. At the same time, social movements have become highly networked and decentralized. How does an autonomous network of protest visually represent worthiness, unity, numbers, and its claims in public space? How does public space work as a platform to shape and ground the performance of new modes of association? What are the social and symbolic challenges in activist event management in public space? Since the eviction from Liberty Park, Occupy Town Square formed and began organizing an iterative series of pop-up events in public spaces with an aim to make its strategy and tactics replicable. Daniel Latorre, an Occupy Town Square collaborator and public space advocate, will talk about the process and experiences to date and suggest visions of where collaboration can go in this context.