"The Identity of Water"

May 17, 2015. 12:30pm 
CaLL WALK BROADWAY: 1000 Steps
VAN CORTLANDT PARK, BRONX, NY.
The walk starts at the south west entrance to the 1 train.

Artist Juanli Carrión and Sociologist Gianpaolo Baiocchi will lead a cultural journey through different flavors of water.  Participants will get a perspective of the different "identities" water can have and how susceptible these identities are to change, while learning about the past and the future of the neighborhood and its population.

Carrion creates site-specific interventions, gathering materials, people, actions, objects, information and geography to reconstruct "the landscape" and consequence of cultural conflicts.  For his most recent project, Outer Seed Shadow (OSS),  a series of public art interventions that evokes the connections between plant and human behaviors, by using different plant species to represent social groups or individuals. The main component of the Outer Seed Shadow is a community garden. The plants in the garden are selected through interviews, documented in video, in which plants are identified by community members. The garden then becomes a site for weekly workshops in partnership with local groups and institutions.

Baiocchi is a sociologist and an ethnographer at NYU. He is interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, and cities. He researches civic life and participatory democracy. His book, The Civic Imagination  (co-authored with Elizabeth Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Stephanie Savell, and Peter Klein) examines the contours and limits of the democratic conversation in the US today. Gianpaolo was one of the founders of the Participatory Budgeting Project and continues to work with groups improving urban democracy.

Mary Miss/City as Living Laboratory organizes artist-scientist led WALKs in urban settings, with the goal of engaging communities, artists and scientists in conversations about important environmental and social issues.  All WALKS are free and open to the public.