BY ALICE FANG
MAKERGRAPH STUDIO LOT-EK: ADA TOLLA & GIUSEPPE LIGNANO
I would like to acknowledge the history of the material of my explorations. Rope reminds me of childhood - jumping rope and tug of war were my favorite. To me, it relates to friendship and nostalgia. However, the image of rope has different connotations from people to people. The use of ropes for pulling, fastening, attaching, carrying, lifting, and climbing dates back to prehistoric times as a tool for world inventions and civilizations’ advancements. Nevertheless, ropes can also be instruments of bondage, arrest, separation, repression, terror, and even… death. Through this lens, I wonder… How can rope, as a symbol of oppression, become hope in Morningside Park? It is impossible to ignore the Columbia Gymnasium’s insensitive and disruptive scale that, in addition, “turns its back” to the Harlem community. The liminal space between Morningside Heights and Harlem became the physical manifestation of this divide. My installation hopes to unveil this invisible history that is otherwise forgotten or unknown. It hopes to avoid history erasure by subverting oppression into positivity and togetherness. My material investigation consists of the “string and glue mummification” of the plastic cup, an object deemed invaluable, disposable, obsolete… When the cup is removed, the string and glue becomes structurally codependent and we are left with its memory.
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“THE NEIGHBORHOODS ADJACENT TO COLUMBIA WATCHED THE UNIVERSITY’S ENCROACHMENT INTO MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS AND HARLEM AND SAW THAT WITH EACH PURCHASE OF LAND OR BUILDINGS, THE SITUATION BECAME MORE HOPELESS. WHEN COLUMBIA ATTEMPTED TO TAKE EVEN MORE LAND IN A PARK THAT HARLEM RESIDENTS CONSIDERED THEIR OWN, THE COMMUNITY REACTED TO CHECK THESE “IMPERIALIST” AMBITIONS.”
Chapter “Why I Hate You,” Community Resentment of Columbia from Harlem vs. Columbia University Black Student: Power in the Late 1960s by Stefan M. Bradley
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Whose Park? Morningside Park in the Twenty-First Century by Sonia Steinmann, Sep. 17
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Memory is personal, emotional, subjective. With time, it creates new meanings or new deceptions. To allow the moment to be ingrained into our memory, we need a moment of pause to acknowledge the physical and psychological landscape. My material exploration seeks to memorialize the thread. The act of tying becomes the operation that creates an interpretation of the original object, never accurate nor exact, but abstract.
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“BALANCE IS MOST BEAUTIFUL JUST BEFORE ITS COLLAPSE” Photographic series “Equilibres” (1984 & 1987) Peter Fischli and David Weiss
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On-site, the artifact is inscribed in the projection of the Gymnasium’s swimming pool footprint, reflecting the proposal’s scale. It intersects with the existing path creating an obstacle. It is an uninhabitable dome that conceives a moment of pause, only allowing the view from the outside and forcing the body to move around the object.
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In the following iterations, I was interested in investigating the material’s capabilities in terms of height, creating a hollow core. Furthermore, as an exercise to scale up my object, I soaked rope in concrete, added wax in between, and used a box as my new cup. The relationship between the string-glue/rope-wax operates together to create something unnatural and uncanny as the rope wants to fall. However, the string is frozen still in the air with gravity seemingly working in reverse, rendering a feeling of unease – familiar but strange.
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It is impossible to ignore the gym’s insensitive and disruptive scale. The ghosted shafts delineate and expose the proposal’s imposing height, but instead of denying access to the Harlem community, the installation becomes a lighting infrastructure to the park. On the cliff, the ghosted shaft behaves like a periscope that enables visitors to look into the park’s foundation underwater.
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I was interested in investigating variations in the act of tying. The new process renders a memory further and further away from the original object, creating slopes, apertures, openings… The line also has a duality inherently embedded: It separates and connects. My material exploration advances by multiplying the cup, producing an interdependency between them that connects the cups through a single thread as a constellation with satellites that revolve the anchored piece.
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If one point remains as a point, two points become a line, and three points become a space, the trees on the site become opportunities to create rooms. Phantasmagoria – from Ancient Greek phán- tasma, “ghost,” agorá, “assembly, gathering,” or “to speak publicly” – signifies an exhibition of optical effects and illusions. In contrast to the previous installations, the phantasmagoria room is a habitable space roofed by the trees on-site where the community can gather to speak publicly in a room that is enclosed yet connected to the park.
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To scale up my object from the plastic cup at the first stages of my explorations, I kept the same material and operation but used a plastic chair instead. However, the string wrapping failed to be released from the chair. Initially conceived as an unsuccessful experiment, it became the catalyst for the fourth intervention, which explores concepts of stability and instability.
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The installation wraps tightly around the existing trees on the site and releases to create a habitable skirt and boat — the skirt of the armature dances with the breeze, while the boat oscillates with different body pressures. The installation attaches to the trees considering their specificity and height to produce engagement and play areas for the community.
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