The last time I visited New York, I spent most of my time in jail.
I was one of the 1,800 people arrested during the 2004 Republican National Convention, and Conflux 2006, taking place just over two years after that event, provides an ideal opportunity to obliquely reflect on and creatively respond to that experience by creating a psychogeography-inspired spatialization of New York City’s penal system.
“Super Block: Riker’s-Robeling” is a group event in which we mark the life-sized footprint of one of the prisons on Riker's Island directly on the sidewalks of Brooklyn with orange masking tape. Using the McCaig-Welles Gallery as a staging ground, I will distribute fragments of a map for participants to follow in laying their sections of the jails' "walls" on the ground. The tape lines, which will often run diagonally against the streets' grid and frequently be interrupted by buildings, dumpsters, lightposts, fences, and other elements of urban space, will provide a visual marker of the immense and unrelenting architecture of prisons as well as a more poetic gesture concerned with ideas of inside and outside, imprisonment and freedom. Reconvening at the gallery after the taping, we will assemble our map fragments and attempt to walk the perimeter of the prison on the streets of Brooklyn. I will invite a number of prison activists to attend this walk and engage in a free-form discussion with participants about the penal system in New York and elsewhere. Over the course of Conflux and beyond, the tape lines will decay and be removed, reabsorbing the prison’s footprint into the everyday life of the city.
If, as the Situationists defined it, psychogeography studies the “specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals,” then few geographies should be more relevant than those of prisons, which exert enormous power not only over the imaginations and actions of those incarcerated but also over those who have managed to avoid ever seeing the inside of a jail. Yet most artists and theorists have elaborated and employed psychogeographic techniques such as walking to explore ideas personal freedom and cultural/political autonomy, rather than their most extreme contrast: imprisonment. The project has particular topical relevance to Brooklyn, where 35 streets are so-called “million dollar blocks,” or places where so many residents are imprisoned that the total annual cost of their incarceration is more than $1 million. Inspired formally by recent projects such as Spurse’s “Sans Terre” archive, which overlaid North Adams, MA with Mexico City, and Francis Alys’s varied methods of marking his passages through urban space, “Super Block” builds upon the classic and contemporary methods and concerns of psychogeography to consider the literal and figurative footprint of the prison-industrial complex on the spaces of everyday life.
