The Spatial Reclamation Project: The Space Rec Project

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

The Space Rec Project

The Spatial Reclamation Project

EXTENDED MISSION:

Space Rec makes participatory art works, situations, and interventions in public spaces. We use art to raise a critical awareness of the global political economic forces that shape our “everyday” environment.

Often times these forces lead to a physical separation of people from different sub-cultures and socio-economic backgrounds and prevents them from interacting. We believe this separation deeply undermines communication, tolerance, and democracy.

The aim of The Space Rec Project is to restore communication, uphold and strengthen the ideals of a free and democratic society, and to raise an awareness of the cultural, political, ideological, economic, and physical development of public spaces through the artistic and symbolic reclamation of place.

Space Rec is an open forum, creation, and question for social alternatives. The realization of this project depends upon community origination, initiation and interaction.

Interested in The Spatial Reclamation Project?

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EXTENDED MISSION:

Space Rec makes participatory public artwork!

We believe that art is a powerful way to raise an awareness of the political and economic forces that shape our everyday experiences in public space. We also want to make the streets look and feel more personal.

What's the point?

Have you ever noticed the different neighborhoods, districts and suburbs in and around the city and wondered how they got there? What instigates this type of social organization?

There is a deliberate logic that goes into city planning and architectural design that is tailored to meet the objectives of a free-market economy. Cities, neighborhoods and transportation are all designed so that money can be made faster and more efficiently. But what happens to the landscape when the economy is prioritized over making communities stronger and more diverse?

Our identities are so intricately woven around the streets and highways, the specific routes, the parks, plazas, shops, and tree lined side walks that create the canvas for our lives. Its easy to take for granted the backdrop of our experience, but what would we see if we took a closer look? What and who would we not see? How does the built environment affect our identity as individuals, as neighborhoods, cities, states....a country? How does it affect who we interact with and who we miss?

Often it prevents people from different sub-cultures, socio-economic backgrounds and races from interacting and negatively impacts communication, tolerance and democracy. We believe. This. Is. Not. Okay.

The aim of The Space Rec Project is to create a public dialogue, uphold and strengthen the ideals of a free and democratic society, and to raise an awareness of the cultural, political, ideological, economic, and physical development of public spaces through the artistic and symbolic reclamation of place.

Space Rec is an open forum, creation, and question for social alternatives. The realization of this project depends upon community origination, initiation and interaction.

email: www.spatialreclamationproject@riseup.net

pub⋅lic [puhb-lik]

–adjective

1.	of, pertaining to, or affecting a population or a community as a whole.

2.	done, made, acting, etc., for the community as a whole.

3.	open to all persons.

4.	of, pertaining to, or being in the service of a community or nation.

5.	maintained at the public expense and under public control: a public library; a public road.

6.	generally known: The fact became public.

7.	familiar to the public; prominent: public figures.

8.	open to the view of all; existing or conducted in public: a public dispute.

9.	pertaining or devoted to the welfare or well-being of the community.

10.	of or pertaining to all humankind; universal.

–noun

11.	the people constituting a community, state, or nation.

Recommended Titles

City of Quartz -Mike Davis
Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of the Social Imagination after 1945 - Blake Stimson, Gregory Sholette
Conversation Pieces:Community and Communication in Modern Art -Grant H. Kester
Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism -Edited by Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford
Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism -Nato Thompson
Geographies of Exclusion -David Sibley
Golden Gulag -Ruth Wilson Gilmore
In Place Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression -Tim Cresswell
Mutations -Rem Koolhass Harvard Project on the City
One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity -Miwon Kwon
Participation: Documents on Contemporary Art -Claire Bishop
Relational Aesthetics -Nicolas Bourriaud
Securing the Spectacular City -Timothy A. Gibson
Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Instillation Art -Erika Suderberg
Spaces of Hope -David Harvey
Taking the Matter into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices -Johanna Billing
The Aleph and Other Stories -Jorge Luis Borges
The Everyday (Documents of Contempory Art) -Stephen Johnstone
The Politics of Public Space -Setha Low and Neil Smith
The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space -Don Mitchell
Third Space -Edward W. Soja
Verb: Crisis -Architecture Boogazine