On Saturday, September 30, 1967, Robert Smithson, equipped with his Kodak Instamatic, a science fiction book in hand, takes a bus to New York and gets off at Passaic, New Jersey. It will emerge from this stroll a founding text for all walking artists and beyond, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic”, a veritable manifesto of an a esthetic re-evaluation of the landscape, published in the magazine Artforum with photographs captioned and a map. Exactly 50 years apart, Saturday, September 30, 2017, artists, authors, architects, admirers of Smithson, whoever they are, in diverse urban interstices throughout the world, play a reactivation of Robert Smithson’s journey.
During your wandering, you will pay attention to the alterations of space and time, you will strive to open your perception of the time through the place, you will measure with modesty, sadness or nostalgia perhaps, but without terror the irreversibility of the human occupation of the soil. You will simply wonder how you can live in the ruins of your time and what the monuments contemplated on that day, Saturday September 30, 2017, teach you in this matter.
This is a tribute, simple and modest, without outrageous form of publicity. It is an almost solitary act but connected to a community of experience. It is an opportunity for everyone who participates in this reactivation to experience with a singular intensity the ruins of our modern world, to cross the entropic landscape and to make an appointment with our future which, as Smithson writes, “is lost somewhere in the dumps of the nonhistorical past”.
Artists will produce narratives of their Visit to the Monuments, including photographs (or drawings) and their captions.
For the publication of the book Tribute to Passaic (bilingual English / French), the artistic collective Urbain, trop urbain associates with the Autrechose publisher, directed by the artist Quentin Jouret.
Please let us know by email if you would be interested by a copy of the book!
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Reenactments done Saturday, September 30, 2017
Amsterdam, Netherlands
David Habets
Location of the monuments: 52.389690, 4.892799
Barcelona, Spain
dpr-barcelona (Ethel Baraona Pohl & César Reyes Nájera)
Location of the monuments: unknown
Berlin, Germany
Elise Hunchuck
Location of the monuments: 52.484175, 13.371688
Edinburgh, Scotland
Mark Dorrian
Location of the monuments: unknown
Genova, Italy
Emanuele Piccardo
Location of the monuments: 44.350753, 9.231335
Graz, Austria
Christoph Walter Pirker
Location of the monuments: 47.541439, 14.888427
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Christopher DeWolf
Location of the monuments: 22.339336, 114.204221
Incheon, South Korea
Trojan Tactics (Gemini Kim & Sébastien Mazauric)
Location of the monuments: unknown
Istanbul, Turkey
Nazlı Tümerdem
Location of the monuments: 41.212959, 29.109934
Igor Medarić is an archaeologist and a musician from Slovenia. He is finishing his PhD at the University of Ljubljana.
La Paz, Bolivia
Jessica Biermann-Grunstein
Location of the monuments: -16.489847, -68.209090
Lausanne, Switzerland
Leo Fabrizio
Location of the monuments: 46.526104, 6.679939
London, England
Corinna Dean
Location of the monuments: 51.691664, 0.009667
Marseille, France
Hendrik Sturm
Location of the monuments: 43.308513, 5.375556
Melbourne, Australia
Charity Edwards
Location of the monuments: -37.8144444, 144.90944439999998
Montréal, Canada
Nicolas Nova
Location of the monuments: 45.557078, -73.551077
Nantes, France
Anthony Poiraudeau
Location of the monuments: 47.207273, -1.549177
Napoli, Italy
Claire Dutrait
Location of the monuments: 40.871190, 14.127542
New Orleans, USA
Miriam Arkin
Location of the monuments: 29.349323, -89.537260
New Orleans, USA
Jan Gilbert & Kevin McCaffrey
Location of the monuments: 30.026667, -90.082974
Kevin McCaffrey is an award winning filmmaker, writer, editor, and oral historian. His interests primarily focus on culture, history, arts, culinary history, Louisiana cultures and the environment. He has created documentaries for broadcast television, clients, exhibits, and online and which have also been screened in several film festivals. His articles and columns have appeared in local and national magazines and newspapers and he produced a book on the history of the New Orleans Jazz Fest. He is a member of the Louisiana Folklife Commission and has been awarded grants and fellowships including a Monroe Fellowship at Tulane University studying Jazz history, Visiting Scholar at Newcomb College, and is a Fellow of the Loyola University Institute for Environmental Communication. His food culture documentaries, We Live To Eat (New Orleans culinary history), was a finalist for a national James Beard Award and No One Ever Went Hungry (Cajun Food Culture) was Louisiana Humanities Documentary of The Year. His current projects are not only the Traditional Jazz content for “A Closer Walk,” a music tour app for radio station WWOZ; documentation work for the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation as well as the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Archive. He is also pursuing fund raising for a documentary recounting the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans as well as culinary culture and history projects.
Oslo, Norway
Stine Alling Jacobsen
Location of the monuments: 59.547640, 10.567762.
Paris, France
Eric Tabuchi & Nelly Monnier
Location of the monuments: 48.730961, 2.240389
Après une enfance rurale, des études de cinéma à Bourg-en-Bresse et des voyages en Europe de l’Est, Nelly Monnier obtient un DNSEP à l’ENSBA-Lyon en 2012. Elle présente ensuite son travail, où peinture, dessin et récit abordent les rapports entre architecture, loisirs et paysage, à la Galleria Moitre (Turin), au Creux de l’enfer (Thiers), au musée Fabre de Montpellier suite à l’obtention du prix Félix Sabatier, à l’Institut d’Art Contemporain de Lyon/ Villeurbanne en 2013, puis à Singapour et Allevard-les-bains en 2015 et en galerie à Paris et Toulouse dernièrement. En 2014, elle entame des collaborations : avec Eric tabuchi dans le cadre d’Utopark, Distopark puis pour l’Atlas des Régions Naturelles ; avec Gaëlle Delort dans un inventaire photographique intitulé Secteur Lambda ; avec Hélène Paris sous forme de correspondances dessinées présentées à Reims et à Paris. www.nellymonnier.com & www.arn-journal.tumblr.com
Potsdam, Germany
Viktor Vejvoda (Trojan Tactics)
Location of the monuments: 52.413513, 13.090159
Plouézoc’h, France
Catherine Rannou
Location of the monuments: unknown
Roma, Italy
Stalker
Location of the monuments: unknown
San Francisco, USA
Richard Hindle
Location of the monuments: 37.807549, -122.335694
Shanghai, China
Xiaoling Fang
Location of the monuments: 31.121219, 121.432398
Toronto, Canada
Jill Price
Location of the monuments: 48.84525180081516, -66.02443879999994
Yagisawa, Japan
Yoann Moreau
Location of the monuments: 34.979439, 138.951001