The Other City

The Other City 

May 4th |  7-11PM
2844 W. Dickens Ave.

Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an
appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s,
and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.
- Henri Lefebrvre

Space is a fundamental dimension of human society, and cannot exist without
addressing the socio-historical equities embedded within.

This exhibition seeks to repopulate our cities with poetic eccentricities, whimsical
inquisitors, and citizens that know no shibboleth. We are mapping The Other City; the
invisible specters that haunt the edge of town. A place where towers blossom with
color in the spring while the great halls of our libraries collapse into harmonizing codes
and commands. Capitalism has done way with the mythic imaginary in favor for the
rational, slipping dangerously close between the thresholds of imagined and real space.
Can we allow the poetics of the land to be shaped by a new mythic imaginary? This is
the question we propose. The Other City is not a sovereign nation, but instead a new
imagination from which a new space can be carved in order to develop new systems of
social relations, equity and justice. It is our collective imagination, our poetics, and our
new founded city.

We have always understood ourselves as temporal beings, irreversibly contemporary,
unavoidably temporary, and always fettered to the given moment. It is now, through
the advent of the modern city, that human society is being re-interpreted in terms of a
collaborative relay. A mapping between space and time. Lines have been drawn across
the land, dissecting it, organizing it, and distributing it in unequal proportion. The body
has not been spared. Communities dislocated, brutalized, and marginalized. Society at
large is haunted by the spatial injustice cast in the shadows of the modern metro-pole.
The equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right, and
in this way the space we occupy, our cities, nations… they have failed us.

The Other City is a critical observance of the function of space within our societies, but
even more, an unabashed imaginary of how that space could function, abandoned from
the inequities that haunt it now.

Featuring works from:

George Carr
Stephanie Cristello
Blake Daniels
Jackie Furtado
Nadine Hutton
Dhehee Lee 
Courtney Mackedanz
Joe Mault
Lesley Perkes
Silvia Vasilescu