FRANK H. OGAWA PLAZA, GOOGLE EARTH SCREEN SHOT, OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA


FIELD with Streetlight
2018 - ONGOING 

UPCOMING EXHIBIT:
24TH JUNE 2021, GOVERNOR’S ISLAND, NEW YORK
ACSA/EAAE Conference and Gala

Locations
- NEW YORK, USA - Governor’s Island

- OAKLAND, CA, USA - Frank H. Ogawa Plaza

- SÃO PAULO, SP, BRAZIL - TBA



NEW YORK - Governor’s Island

Partners:   ProArts Gallery and COMMONS, the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design Program at Pratt Institute, NY, & the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning at the University of Cincinnati, OH.


Team: Ane Gonzalez Lara - Assistant professor, School of Architecture, Pratt Institute.
Xenia Adjoubei - Visiting fellow, Inclusive Ecologies Lab, GAUD Pratt Institute.
Jil Berenblum - Industrial designer and materials researcher.
Jessica Fertonani Cooke - Socio/political researcher, artist and performance curator.
Supermrin - Assistant professor, School of Art, DAAP, University of Cincinatti, visiting artist, Inclusive Ecologies Lab, GAUD Pratt Institute




OAKLAND - Frank H. Ogawa Plaza

Partners:
ProArts Gallery and COMMONS, Oakland's Cultural Funding Program, the Public Art Program, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Department of Economic and Workforce Development for the City of Oakland.

Team: Natalia Mount - Executive director at Pro Arts Gallery and publication editor.
Jessica Fertonani Cooke - socio/political researcher,  publication co-director, artists and performance curator.  
Supermrin - Urban researcher, artist, publication co-director and project director



Field is cross-pollination between installation, performance art, institutional critic, bio-material research, de-colonial theory, architecture and urbanization.

It is both an art piece and an educational/research platform.



Field is a multi-site research, landscape, and systems engagement project that confronts the legacy of modernist urban design and place-making schemas in postcolonial global cities. The project engages the history of colonialism and its subsequent modern state and city-building project to interrogate the ways in which contemporary public spaces perpetuate forms of social order and control.

The project centers around each plaza’s manicured grass,  confronting the heavily re-design and place-making schemas urban grass lawns have over public space. Field is a call to tenderness, subjectivity, mutualism, and expanded ecology within public life. While working with the connecting institution responsible for the public lawn, we temporarily pause its routine mowing, caretaking and fertilizing. The resulting cycle of growth and decay in the living grass field will generate unexpected encounters amongst people, birds, animals, weeds, grasses, flowers, and bushes, creating a transitory zone of interaction between natural and constructed systems within each territory.

It is within the release of their urban density and institutional control where we can open subjective space and sense ‘what is truly there’? In a series of collective and shared inquiries into these ambiguous ecologies, we will subtly alter the perceptual field of the public space. Through its newly untamed form the project intends to create installations and performances of its historical/ biological/ urban cosmology as a form to re-signify the personal, poetic and shared experiences of public land. 



PROJECT SCHEDULE

Governors Island: From January to August 2021, Supermrin will be on residency at Governors Island in New York. In collaboration with Jil Berenblum from Genspace, the Inclusive Ecologies Architecture Lab, and invited artists Xenia Adjoubei and Alejandro ,  a temporary laboratory will be developed for material research on local grasses. The laboratory will host a number of public educational and collective craft events. A public exhibition with a curated installation and performance by artists Jessica Fertonani Cooke will be hosted June 2021 for the ACSA/EAAE Conference and Gala.  

Oakland: Design approvals have been obtained by the Public Arts Fund of the City of Oakland. No-mow lawn has been tested. Exhibition dates have been postponed in light of the pandemic, new dates are TBD. A publication on territorial and conceptual research of  Frank H. Ogawa Plaza is scheduled through Kalahati Press, Oakland for August 2021.

São Paulo: Initial conversations with key partners are underway for the Praça Azevedo Ramos in São Paulo, Brazil. The project will likely commence in 2023.