LIQUIDITY, HISTORY, EPHEMERAL ART

Creating art in the public spaces of metropolitan centers raises peculiar challenges.  In the context of Harmattan Theater's Governor's Island project involving Hudson River water and the waterline of the island, the question of liquidity posed itself as a tool of history.  The text of the piece titled Henry Hudson's Forgotten Maps takes the 16th century maritime economies as the moment of departure.  Liquidity forged a new idea of the world in the sixteenth century.  Oceans opened up avenues of flows, geographies were no longer terrestrially bound- the imagination wandered beyond the open sea's curve.  Using this idea of liquidity as a historic linkage, the performance opened up the question of new york's water traces: the rivers, lakes, ponds, rivulets that have been buried over.  The beaches that were built over.  The question we asked was how do contemporary landscapes evoke older cartographies of knowing and world making.  The company chose to work with edible materials: milk, hudson river water, sugar mixed with water to add texture and glaze, egg whites mixed with water and milk to add viscosity- on the bitumen of the former military outpost.  The challenge of trying to inscribe on bitumen with biodegradable materials that are sucked into the harsh elements of the bitumen alone was mesmerizing.  The impact of human contact making lyrical and beautiful images on hard and unused landscapes, was one objective of the performance.  This tradition of inscribing on the public faces of transit is not new.  It is a venerable new york tradition made popular by the Graffiti artists of NYC.  What the performance achieves is a certain relationality between toxicity and biodegradable logics, between the permanence of military architectures and the fluidity of artistic improvisations that foreground otherwise dead sites of habitation.  Fulfilling the Governors Island debate about what to do with Governors Island, the Harmattan Theater project opened up the island's potential to make livable and stimulating what has for too long been viewed as largely a penitentiary and abandoned military outpost.  Through the performance of Henry Hudson's Forgotten Maps, the notion of a liquid history and the island's ephemerality is underscored.  The interdependency of this island city to the global economy, as well as its image as a tenuous place in its own imaginary is solidified.