spatial practices

Hello everyone,
As I know that many of you are interested in local histories--especially as they pertain to wilderness and civility--I thought this project by local filmmaker Sabrina Alonso may be of interest. She is looking for venues to screen this work, especially libraries or historical organizations. For more information or to arrange a screening, please see www.grizzlyroad.com or contact Sabrina directly at sabrinajos@hotmail.com.
Yours,
Cassie

In 1908, the last California Grizzly was reported shot and killed. One hundred years later, to commemorate the extinction of this amazing creature (and, ironically, our State symbol), I decided to make a documentary film tracing its demise. My film"Grizzly Road" will be released soon, and I wanted to send you the website (www.grizzlyroad.com) as well as a short clip that is linked. Take a look around the site if you like, and keep an eye out for the film, which will hopefully be screened around the city at guerrilla screenings, libraries and in small art houses in the coming months.

Also, if any of you have (or know of anyone who has) contacts with local regional librarians, I'm trying to set up potential screenings around the state at libraries, to raise awareness that the California grizzly bear was found in just about every coastal lowland area where heavy populations of people now live. It was as much a part of our landscape 150 years ago as Wallmarts are today.

Anyway, I hope to see you all soon and I hope you are well.

Love,
Sabrina

This event promises to extend some recent discussions:

PALESTINE: Interior / Exterior
Videos by James T. Hong and Kamal Aljafari (artists in person)
co-presented by kino21 and the Arab Film Festival

Wednesday, April 9, 2008. 8PM $8

Artists' Television Access

http://www.atasite.org/calendar/?x=2841

One of the great things I came away with at the SPD Open House this past Saturday is SITE CITE CITY, thanks to David Buuck, who handed me a copy of his self-published collection of recent project documents, printed on the occasion of the Artifact reading @ Oakland Art gallery last month, which I sadly missed. Among other things, the writing proposes “ 'writing' as feint to draw attention to the thinking-body in socialized & activated space.” David’s chaplet is enfolded in a xeroxed notebook page with the sentence “Fuck you [ someone's first name ] for not stopping the war” hand copied 30 times — like a self-enforced punishment that can only become a curse — each iteration appearing with another name inserted. The simple exercise page has a devastating effect. First, there’s the implied recognition of our collective failure: “We fucked up and failed to stop the war.” But as this collective “we” appears as a set of individual names, one experiences an even deeper identification with our failure, and whether your own first name appears on the list or not, you can’t help but hear “I fucked up, I failed...” reverberating, unless one reads in bad faith, and exempts oneself. And yet, the curse rests on the understanding that things ought to have been otherwise, and that the power to have made them so remains frozen in each of us, as individuals, and as a collective. The page works as a negative affirmation of our social agency, currently arrested, or in suspension, and the writing activates the real sense that this agency must still be there — somewhere — ready to break forth. “It’s the not-writing that strings me along […] It’s the knot-writing that ropes me in.” There's too much to say about David's work here, and I'll have to bracket that for now. In the mean time, I hope everyone has a copy of this little book, and if not, well, maybe Buuck can let us know how to get one.

My BARGE project BURIED TREASURE ISLAND opens this Saturday at YBCA as part of the Ground Scores exhibition, an off-site section of the Bay Area Now 5 show. 411 below. They'll be an online map and podcast, along with a downloadable guidebook as well - the site will be up and announced later this week. - DB

Buried Treasure Island - BARGE (the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics)
Given Treasure Island's long and complex history as an artificial staging ground for world's fairs, military bases, television shoots, and real estate speculation, as well as being an enormous landfill of dangerous and toxic substances, "Buried Treasure Island" attempts to unearth the secret histories of the site, and explore how the landscape is transformed not only by its usage, but also by what is elided from public view. Home to some of the most stunning views in the bay (but only if you turn your back on the island itself), Treasure Island remains a site full of hidden histories, presents, and possible futures. The work is presented in several overlapping iterations: installation, guidebook, self-guided tour, audio podcast, songs, performative bus tour, staged actions and photographs, and online. That some possible Treasure Island “itself” may be buried somewhere within the constellation of these versionings, between site and non-site, realities and representations, is a question that the work attempts to confront.

more info, with downloads, at:
http://www.davidbuuck.com/barge/bti/index.html

Opening Night party Sat July 19, 8pm-midnight
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission @ 3rd St
San Francisco
http://ban5.org/

Another primary source to consider in relation to the upcoming performance event in the Presidio. This document played an instrumental role in the site's conversion from military use to its present status as the U.S.'s first privately-managed national park.

This Thursday Nov 15 @ 6pm I'll be giving a talk on public art practices in
the Bay Area at the SF Public Library. I'll be showing slides & looking
at recent works & interventions performed by local artists, as well as interrogating
the parameters by which we tend to define "public" and "art"
in the context of an increasingly privatized & corporatized urban landscape.
I'm also aiming to look at some counter-practices, especially those everyday
life-world practices that don't always "read" as "art",
as well as exploring some speculative practices that might yet emerge out of our
collective tactics as engaged citizen-artists.

David Buuck
Thur Nov 15 6-730 pm
SF Public Library (downstairs)

http://sfpl5.sfpl.org/scripts/publish/webevent.pl?cmd=showevent&ncmd=sea...

photo by Stephen Vincent
David Buuck, urban poet explorer/pioneer image & thought maker was working his magic this evening in a basement lecture hall at the San Francisco Public Library. Took the gathered on a “49 mile detour” about the City via Powerpoint with a questioning voice layered over, under and inbetween past, present and futurist metropolitan visions. A work of counter-surveillance, metaphor and broken metaphor; a search for and revelation of sculptural and body manifestations of a body politic in erruption, individual and group injection and struggle with and against template architecture, corporate branding, ‘public art’, civic, military and police imposition. Wonderfully ironic and subversive - like Mr. Magus here - at work to invoke a gestural vocabulary in which momentum and power is restored to the citizen maker/player & actor en communicatus. It was an under the skin - individual and public - kind of night. Wish you had been there. Not to worry, David will variously reappear, no doubt playing on a real or magical keyboard, to manifest more visions and thoughts in the playland of the local real.

Cross-posted from stephenvincent.net/blog/.