The title is drawn from the Arcades Project. Walter Benjamin wrote that he wanted to present the history of the collective as Proust had presented his personal one: not “life as it was,” nor even life remembered, but life as it has been “forgotten”. It is this attempt to re-animate fleeting moments of history from below that inspires this work which asks the question how can everyday art bring people together?
Currently a work in progress, the project includes drawings, artworks, and a film that takes place in New York's Lower East Side in the 1910s when it was a predominantly Jewish immigrant neighborhood, a hub of labor activism, and home to more storefront moving picture houses than any other place in the country. The nickelodeons (as they were known) served as de facto community gathering spaces. My project brings together the sewing machine and the showman and re-imagines the encounter between early cinema and radical young women labor activists.
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