The CNN next list TV show and blog made a great video about our recent project Layered SPURA. The video talks about the history of the area and then visual urbanist approach taken by Buscada in creating dialogue between communities in the area.

Getting interviewed on a cold February morning by the CNN crew.

The Layered SPURA / City Studio project, headed by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, explores this complex site using a hybrid approach of pedagogy, art and research, and involves long-term collaborations between Lower East Side community organizations and students in Bendiner-Viani’s City Studio, a part of the New School’s Urban Programs. The Layered SPURA exhibition, a culmination of four years of student, faculty, and community collaboration which appeared at the New School’s Sheila Johnson Design Center in Winter 2012, does not suggest solutions for a place beleaguered by top-down planning, but rather hopes to spur new conversations amongst people with different points of view about SPURA’s past, present and future.
Find out more about this project : Layered SPURA

Get a preview of the exhibition

Please join us on October 7, 8 & 16th at our residency at Creative Time’s Living As Form, “a vast collection of documentation of 100 socially engaged projects from the last twenty years and from locations around the globe.”

Our residency features a new iteration of our ongoing work on the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA), in collaboration with Temporary Services’ MARKET.
More on the Buscada SPURA project
More on MARKET

You may know SPURA as the parking lots along Delancey Street. More than forty years ago, the area was razed for “slum clearance” and few renewal projects have been so contested. Very few of the originally-planned buildings were ever built, and many people were once displaced from the site, some now live on it, and many people live in the blocks around it. Many different communities claim SPURA, and imagine different futures for it.

Our work builds on Gabrielle’s City Studio class at the New School, and considers the past, present and future of this contested site, collaborating with community organizations, and using a visual urbanist approach to create a series of annual exhibitions to create space for dialogue.

On October 7th, 8th and 16th, in residence at MARKET, we continue to present and explore the multiple stories of SPURA. Please join us, and students from four years of City Studio us to tell your own SPURA stories, to talk with others at our booth, and to discuss the future of the neighborhood.

We will also be hosting a walking tour, on October 8th at 2pm, in collaboration with Dutch artists Bik Van der Pol, to explore the layered nature of SPURA, the hidden and intersecting voices behind the often perplexing physical, political and personal landscape of SPURA.
Sign up for our walking tour

We hope to see you at Living As Form on October 7th, 8th or 16th!

When:
Friday, October 7, Saturday October 8, Sunday October 16th, 12-8pm
Special guided tour on the complexities of SPURA : October 8, 2pm

Where :
the historic Essex Street Market, SE corner of Essex & Delancey Streets

This is a spur of the moment video (shot and edited on an iPod) we made on a recent visit to the PM Gallery & Pitzhanger Manor House in Ealing, west London. The exhibition shows the work of two distinct designers, Robin Day & Lucienne Day. The exhibition shows their individual work, and crucially shows how as a collaborative couple, they influenced each other to create new forms. It was an inspiration for us to see such an interesting dialogue between their work.

PM Gallery London

Join us this weekend at the Visible Evidence conference! We’ll be speaking on August 13, at the day-long workshop at Hunter College : The City and the Expanded Documentary.

It will be a great day, and we’re looking forward to our panel, “The Urban Documentary, New Forms for New Cities” in which we’ll be talking about the new ways that our recent project, The Triangle Fire Open Archive, explores new ways to know the city and its history – through unconventional archives, visual urbanist approaches, and creative forms of participation. In particular, we’ll be talking about some of the newest objects and stories about the 1982 Chinatown garment workers strike (one of these, above) – and the way gathering these objects in the context of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire tells a complex story about the city.

We’re looking forward to a compelling conversation with chair Martin Lucas and our co-participants, Lise Gantheret and Samara Smith.

9:30 AM – 11:00 AM, August 13
WORKSHOP: “The Urban Documentary, New Forms for New Cities”
Hunter College, Dept. of Integrated Media Arts / 544 Hunter North Bldg / E 68th & Lexington Ave.

The urban documentary has taken new life formally and socially as concepts move away from origins in ‘single channel’ form to a broad variety of new lives in locative media contexts, including GPS triggered audio and video, web-based media from issue-based blogs, to games, to social mapping. Sometimes these are projects initiated by filmmakers, at other times, they are framed by architects, urban planners and organizers. What do these new practices look like? What is their justification? What happens to documentary notions on these new platforms where the boundaries between subject, maker and location shift? This workshop is designed as an introduction to some of these practices in a form useful both to makers and theorists.

Get a preview of the exhibition

On March 25th, the 100th anniversary of the Triangle fire, we were honored to attend the centennial events on Washington Place – with the crowd filling the blocks from Washington Square Park all the way to Broadway. We were also excited to see objects from the Open Archive filling the jumbotron screen above the speakers on the platform. It was wild to see our good friend Amy Reddinger’s sign from the Madison, WI rallies (which she had contributed to the archive) beaming above the trees, while the inspiring Mary Bell from the Wisconsin Education Association Council was speaking. Finally, it was phenomenal to have stories and voices from the Open Archive featured on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show that morning.

Join us this Wednesday, March 16th, from 3-7pm, for a pop-up exhibition of the Triangle Fire Open Archive at the Brooklyn Historical Society!

The Triangle Fire Open Archive – a collaboration between Buscada and the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition – is an online, participatory archive of community contributed stories, images and documents. Each of these objects tell a piece of the history and impact of the infamous fire and its critical relevance for today’s pressing questions about labor rights and safety from New York City to Wisconsin to Bangladesh.

Join us for this rare opportunity to see some of the pictures, documents and objects from the Triangle Fire Open Archive in person!

The exhibition, honoring the Triangle fire’s centennial on March 25, will include items from BHS’ archival collections, rare documents from Our Lady of Pompei church (from the Center for Migration Studies), creations by performance artist LuLu LoLo, personal photographs, and much more.

We encourage you to bring in your own items to share - stories, photos, memorabilia, etc. about the Triangle Fire, or any kind of labor or women’s activism over the last 100 years. We will create digital photographs of your items and upload them to the Triangle Fire Open Archive, for the world to see. This event is open to the public and is free with museum admission.

The Triangle Fire Open Archive exhibition
Wednesday March 16, 3-7pm

The Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street at Clinton Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201

Trains :
2, 3, 4, 5 to Borough Hall, the A, C, F to Jay St/Borough Hall, or M, R to Court St.

The Meaning to Tasks model uses the idea of a “project meaning”.

It supports a practice for teams and individuals to create fundamentally new meanings for projects, products and services. By working in this way the meaning of everyday projects are changed, and projects created are differentiated from the rest of the market through innovatively integrated strategies, rather than solely through feature-level improvements.

To read this article in full, click here to download the PDF.

In late January, Buscada attended the first of a series of meetings hosted by MAPP International Productions to plan a new arts and community-engagement project about global interdependence, inspired by the interdependence movement championed by Benjamin Barber and others.

The meeting brought together a collection of artists, writers and performers to explore ideas of civic engagement and art practice.

We took this opportunity to ask the diverse group one deceptively simple question :

How do you get people to engage in dialogue?

This is the beginning of a new project in collaboration with MAPP International Productions to understand the processes and practices of engaging civic dialogue, art practice and pedagogy. This project is a continuation of our work begun with The America Project Teaching Method.

How do you answer this question for yourself? How do you encourage dialogue? We hope this is the start of a long and productive conversation.