24 February 2008 at
brown cafe New York NY
Artist
Julia Mandle is founder and director of Julia Mandle Performance, a Brooklyn-based, experimental arts organization that promotes performance art as a critical tool to reconnect us in the everyday and inspire our participation in the local environment. Mandle is the recent recipient of a NYFA Fellowship in Performance Art and numerous awards, including her earliest grant from Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, and later from The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, New York State Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In this Slow Dialogue, Mandle presented a range of her past projects. These are predominantly live, site-specific performances designed to interrupt people in their daily urban lives, "arresting the passerby" and inviting him/her to "tune in and consider what role they have in their environment." Mandle believes that information encountered unexpectedly through live bodies in space can cause the kind of interruptions that motivate people to more actively engage with that information. Mandle talked about how her work is inspired by acts of protest and conviction, where audiences are the performers and sites are underscored.
She presented three iterations of her "chalk shoe project," created between 1998 and 2008. One participant complimented Mandle on how the shoes have been used as a tool in different contexts to demarcate things that are unseen. In April 2008 she would present a project for the High Line, a highly publicized public park atop an abandoned industrial railway structure in Manhattan, where she had been working with a group of thirty 13 year olds from the Chelsea Lab School to don chalk shoes and scuff pathways to highlight the future entrances to the park. While Mandle acknowledged controversy about the High Line and issues of public/private ownerships, she defended her project as siding with the community: highlighting people and their space.
Finally, Mandle presented a description and early concept sketch of her newest project, 'Dirt Cookies' (later renamed 'Dirty Cookies'), a line of "arresting products" that address the issue of hunger. Inspired by a story she heard about a poor women in Haiti who feeds cookies made of dirt to her hungry child, Mandle decided to make her own batch of cookies and create a project for people in New York to investigate and creatively apply the dirt in their own local setting. One dialogue participant compared it to Amish Friendship Bread, a living yeast batter that is meant to be customized for one's own use and gifted on to others. Others brainstormed the distribution of the 'product' and the relevance of packaging concepts. Mandle also touched on the practice of people strapping stones to their stomachs to stave off hunger. She's interested in exploring that image in contrast with the obesity crisis in the United States.
This project will be the topic of a slowLab workshop in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in June 2008.
Moderated by: Cassis Trupiano
Participants: Giorgio Bottiami, Ella Ceppi, Bruno Contigiani, Emily Fischer, Rebecca Jones, Bethany Koby, Mohamed Kotb, Alessandra Pomarico, Anne-Katrin Spiess, Ellie Thornhill, Mike Trupiano
HUGE thanks to Alejandro Alcocer of
greenbrownorange for hosting our NYC dialogues!
