Light installation
Commissioned by: NTHCC, Brooklyn, NY
Location: Engine 212, Brooklyn, NY
Year: 2010
In collaboration with Nandini Bagchee
The interior of the firehouse, despite its run-down appearance is a charged space. It is one that instigated a community to come together and generate enough momentum to create a public owned community center in a defunct Fire Station in Brooklyn. Our installation was part of a summer program series where artists are invited to perform and install their works inside the fire-station while an audience watches from the sidewalk.
In this piece, we speculated on the context, the surroundings, the history of the fire station, Engine 212, and alluded to the future of this building as a community run cultural center. The project is a reflection of the interior as a repository of a shared past, when the large double storey space housed a fire engine. Using the ephemeral medium of light, we explored the latent possibilities of this vacant interior and occupied the vacant firehouse temporarily with our photomontages and light drawings. Once the source of the projection was turned off, these spaces ceased to exist. The intermediary of light made an intervention possible in a fragile building that has lain vacant for many years.
Two music bands Crispus Attucks Ensemble and Alper Yilmaz Electroacoustic Trio performed and engaged the audience by inviting them to read selected texts from community and activist related literature.