As part of the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, the Arts Research Center co-sponsored Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space on September 30, 2013. Participants have been asked to submit a blog post "on a keyword you see debated in the Bay Area arts, policy, and planning landscape." This posting is by Martha Herrera-Lasso, a first year PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.
Keyword: Bridges
Raquel Gutiérrez invites us to map the room around us: who is here
and how long did it take us all to get to 2150 Allston Way. For a
moment, we acknowledged the morning’s journey that brought us to this
place, and maybe even the bridges we had to cross to get here.
Throughout the day bridges came up again and again in the form of
projects, conversation, opportunities, performances and partnerships.
Deborah Cullinan invited us to think of alleys as bridges, as spaces of
circulation; she spoke of creating art bridges and using them to prepare
new generations for what is growing around them. She reminded us that
the word and is an important bridge, a word that
provides circulation in our conversation and our evolution. A concept
Brad McCrea returned to when touching upon the constant search for the
balance between Conservation and Development in his work.
Elvin Padilla spoke not only of the importance of bridging social
work to the reality of real estate, of collaboration with unlikely
allies and the complex negotiations that come from these partnerships,
but he invited us to deal with the anxieties that arise from the act of
crossing bridges. “Fear no art” and “Fear no tech” are indications that
we need trust in order to cross, that it is important not only for us to
build bridges, but to acknowledge the fears they provoke. Finally, he
asks us to look at the long-term design: will the bridge be able to take
the weight in the years to come?
Ava Roy and Lauren Dietrich Chávez offer a performance space in which
to experience bridge crossing hoping to recreate this experience in our
everyday lives. Through the element of surprise, We Players create
bridges within known spaces that take us into enchanted realms, where,
as one of their audience members expressed, “Alcatraz is now Denmark.”
But these interventions also aim to create bridges between the historic
and the current in the spaces we inhabit, bridging new time and place
within known spaces.
Finally, as Linda Rugg asked, what does it mean that a bridge is open
or closed? How does this force us to navigate in new ways? Susan
Schwartzenberg takes us to the imagined bridge – the mid-bridge that is
the pier, which stops you half way, immerses you in the bay, invites you
to listen, to be within it. Within it and not above or below it –
because this is the danger of the bridge: it can isolate us from what
lies below and what lies above it. It creates, as Brad McCrea expressed,
a static relationship with what we cross over. Bridges generate
movement and allow for new forms of circulation, but bridges also speak
of separation. So in this continuous building of bridges, let us keep in
mind how they connect and separate, where they began and how they carry
our weight into the future, how the acts of building and crossing
change us, and what views new bridges unintentionally obstruct while
they open our eyes and bodies to these new, enchanted realms.
No comments:
Post a Comment