swimming cities

oriana on 3 Oct ’11

neighborhood: gowanus (and the world!) | space type: art collective | active since: 2001 | links: website, blog, facebook, twitter

update, Nov 2011: Want to see some absolutely amazing photos from Swimming Cities’ incredible trip down the Ganges in India? Check ’em out on their blog here.

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With this post, I am thrilled to say that I’ve covered all the spaces that inspired me to start this project! Not that I intend to stop; I’m just really excited to have finally gotten to talk to everyone I’d initially set out to, and to celebrate all their crazy brilliance.

So let’s talk about the crazy brilliance of Swimming Cities. They’re a nebulous art collective of somewhere between ten and thirty people who build boats out of found materials and sail them all over the world. The boats themselves are essentially floating works of art, and the group does visual, musical, and dramatic performances atop them as they go. The first project, started by Orien and Callie (also known as Swoon), was the Miss Rockaway Armada (since splintered into its own collective), which went down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to New Orleans in 2001. The next project, Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea, went down the Hudson River, from Troy to Deitch Projects in Long Island City, in 2008. Then in 2009, Swimming Cities of Serenissima sailed down the Adriatic Sea, starting in Slovenia and winding up in Venice to crash the Biennale. And now, in September 2011, Swimming Cities Ocean of Blood is making their way down the Ganges in India, starting in Farrukhabad and ending in Varanasi for the Diwali festival.

photo by Tod Seelie, from Arrested Motion

They’re a well-connected group in the Brooklyn underground & art communities. Over Swimming Cities’ history, all manner of artists and collectives have taken part, including members of the Madagascar Institute, the Toyshop Collective, the Infernal Noise Brigade, GreenBusTour, Black Label Bike Club, Flux Factory, and dozens more. Much of the initial work on the Ocean of Blood boats was done at Serett Metalworks, and they throw crazy themed fundraising parties at the Gowanus Ballroom, Electric Warehouse, Chicken Hut, the warehouse on Ten Eyck, 285 Kent, and lots of others. The collective is also naturally involved in the Burning Man community and participates in Maker Faire, often winning awards for their ingenious floating creations. You can donate to their Kickstarter campaign to help them get home from India, but first check out my interview with Orien (third from left) and crewmember Angie (far right).

Ocean of Blood crew

brooklyn spaces: How did this all get started?

Miss Rockaway Armada boat

Orien: I had a boat and was living on the Gowanus Canal, and Callie lived a few blocks away. We met at Pratt, and she would hang out on my boat and we’d talk about building a floating performance art space. Then I left and spent some time in India, and she did Miss Rockaway Armada with several other artists. After that we did the Hudson River and Venice projects together, and then Callie was giving the project up, so I asked her if I could keep it going. India was the obvious choice for me; it’s my favorite place. But there was a lot of ambiguity about whether this would actually happen. I’m not a famous artist, I don’t have any money, I don’t have backing. But it gradually gained momentum, and now Swimming Cities has a presence beyond its association with Swoon and the other projects.

boats in Venice, photo by Tod Seelie, from Brooklyn Street Art

brooklyn spaces: Before we get too much into India, what was it like being in Venice for the Biennale? How was the reception?
Orien: Being in Venice with a boat is so much fun. I don’t recommend going there if you can’t get a boat, it’s just going to drive you crazy. And the reception was great, everybody loved it. Except when we went into the Arsenale, which is a military base, like a fortified marina, this big square with water and some sort of promenade around it. We went in there with Dark Dark Dark playing on the roof we and tied up the boats, and they came and cut our lines and told us to fuck off. But come on, we basically came uninvited in junk boats, so of course they did that.

brooklyn spaces: Okay, so now tell me about India. How many of you are going over, how many boats do you have, how did you set it all up?
Angie: There’s five boats, eight people are going, and we have a couple of Indian people there. We sent a scout a few of months ago, and he lined up places for us to stay and to store stuff, and people to help us, and institutions and permits and things like that.
Orien: They government wanted to know what we were doing. They don’t want to be like, “Oh, you’re doing a performance? Great!” and then you get there and quarter a cow or do something really offensive. But we got a letter of support from the Ministry of Culture that says something like, “Your project is not specifically offensive to us from a cultural perspective.”

sketch for part of the Diwali performance

brooklyn spaces: The highest praise. What are the performances going to be?
Orien: We’ll be pretty far out on the water, so it’s not practical or logistically possible to have sound or a plot. It’s going to be a gradual, five-day visual performance with a very vague narrative. It’s kind of like architectural puppetry.
Angie: We’ll have a big mechanical sculpture involving lights and movement, and at the end the boats come apart.
Orien: It sort of demonstrates the function of what makes the object interesting.

five boats in radial formation, photo by Ben Mortimer

brooklyn spaces: What do you guys do in between trips?
Angie: We have a lot of events. Most of them are fundraisers, but this summer we did the Battle for Mau Mau Island in Gerritsen Beach, where we got all our friends to form boat gangs. There was a race, a battle, and boat jousting.

West India Day fundraiser, photo from Laughing Squid

brooklyn spaces: What’s your motivation for doing this?
Orien: I’m really interested in boats as pieces of architecture, as objects. I come from an industrial design background, that’s what I went to school for. And all these people really enjoy being a family and having a common goal that isn’t about money or the banality of the homogenized world of bullshit. So I just keep doing it. It’s a reaction to the alternative. To exist in the actual world isn’t really an option for me; if I don’t do this, what the fuck am I going to do?

Bordertown party at Electric Warehouse

“Caddywhampuss,” which won Best in Show at the 2010 Maker Faire, photo from Makezine

brooklyn spaces: What’s next for you guys?
Orien: We’re probably going to go to Russia, down the Volga river to Moscow. I really want to go to Lake Baikal, which is one of the world’s largest lakes, it represents one-sixth of the world’s fresh water. It’s got seals and underwater caves, it’s insanely deep, and it’s in the middle of Siberia, there’s nothing near it. And surrounding Moscow is the Golden Ring area, the oldest part of Russia, so you have this really old architecture and culture.

welding pontoons with a martini, photo by Mayra Cimet

brooklyn spaces: Are you inspired as an artist by being in Gowanus, or in Brooklyn in general?
Angie: We were totally lucky to have Josh get that shop on the Gowanus.
Orien: Oh yeah. We built the first boat in this tiny place on Nostrand Avenue, and then Josh was like, “Guess what? I’m getting a new shop and it’s insanely massive and it’s on the Gowanus Canal.” It was just the most ridiculous luck we’ve ever had. This project wouldn’t have happened without Josh and Serett, it literally would not have. But other than that, I don’t find New York especially inspiring. It’s basically an impossible place to get anything done.

brooklyn spaces: But overall, has this been a rewarding experience?
Orien: Definitely. I have all the things I was looking for. We have the best friends anyone could have. We have something to do that isn’t awful, that doesn’t contribute to the greater horror, that doesn’t hurt people. No one has gained anything from what we’re doing, except maybe the beer distributors. Other than that, no one’s getting rich off us, which is nice. That’s about all you can ask for.

photo from Pipe Dream Museum

Like this? Read about more art collectives: Monster Island, Hive NYC, The Schoolhouse, Bushwick Project for the Arts, Flux Factory

rubulad

oriana on 18 Feb ’11

photo from the New York Times

neighborhood: bed-stuy | space type: parties & art space | active since: 1993 | links: none (sorry!)

update December 2011: Rubulad is moving! After  nine years in South Williamsburg and six in Bed-Stuy, this amazing space is hunting for a new home. And they’ve just completed a down-to-the-wire Kickstarter campaign, raising over $35k to help them on their way. It remains to be seen where they’ll go, but it’s clear this vital community will continue to grow and inspire creative culture for years to come.

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Rubulad—along with House of Yes, the 123 Community Center, and a handful of others—is what inspired me to start this project in the first place. For fifteen years, Rubulad has been an incubator of creative art and culture in New York; it’s one of the oldest, longest-running paeans to cultural experimentation, wild beauty, art for the sake of art. The influence of the space on Brooklyn’s creative class is impossible to overstate.

photo by E.A.R.

Rubulad is a huge, stunning, two-floor warehouse on the Bed-Stuy / Crown Heights border, and is both notorious and revered for the massive themed parties they’ve been hosting for over a decade. The events include installation art, eclectic performances, film screenings, and musicians, and attract a diverse crown, the majority of whom dress up in elaborate costumes to fit the themes.

photo by E.A.R.

Remnants of every one of the parties still adorn every inch of visible space—the walls, ceilings, rooftop, furniture, backyard, and garden are teeming with a dizzying array of decorations, from framed shellacked jellybeans to glitter-painted stuffed animals to a giant birdcage with a carousel horse inside.

photo by E.A.R.

In addition to the parties, Rubulad has also been home to many more intimate events, like kids’ days, smaller music performances, benefit parties, and art shows. Grub, the bi-monthly freegan community dinner bottom-lined by In Our Hearts, was held here for years. Want to hear how it all began? Read through for my interview with Sari, one of Rubulad’s founders.

Grub, photo by Julia Roberts

brooklyn spaces: When did you start doing this and why?
Sari: We’ve been going in different incarnations since ’93. It was started by four bands: Fly Ashtray, Uncle Wiggly, Smack Dab, and the Gamma Rays. Together we rented a huge place in South Williamsburg, back when things were cheap.

photo by E.A.R.

brooklyn spaces: Did you start right off throwing parties?
Sari: Well, we had this big space full of all these artists and musicians. And it felt a little flat to all the bands to just be playing in bars and not have any kind of control over the environment. We wanted to take a hand in that and say, “We’d like this band to play with these other performers, and then show these projections, and have a little play in between.” And we just invited the neighborhood in.

photo by me

brooklyn spaces: What were some of the obstacles you faced when you left Williamsburg for this new space?
Sari: One obstacle was the neighborhood. It took a while for people to want to come to Bed-Stuy. It’s hard to imagine that now, but even five years ago, people were like, “What? The G train?! You’re kidding!” But things moved quickly.

Grub, photo by Julia Roberts

brooklyn spaces: Let’s talk some more about the art and the artists.
Sari: I come at this as kind of a director of a show. My dream is to create a holistic piece of art, an experiential environment that many different people had a hand in. Our desire is to create work for people, and for people to get other work from having been here. The artists here have a chance to really evolve. We’re kind of family-oriented; lots of artists come back to do work here again and again, and so we get to see how they change and what happens to their art over several years. It’s really nice to give artists an opportunity for that growth, as opposed to just doing one show here, one show there.

photo by E.A.R.

brooklyn spaces: I read the interview you did with Nonsense NYC some years ago, where you talked about how for one party you needed sheets, and so you called all these hospitals to see if they would donate sheets.
Sari: We do have to hustle to get things, but you can have good adventures that way. That’s the part I like, the moment when you’re standing in a record store trying to find a square-dance caller or something else that you never thought you’d be doing.

photo from the Village Voice

brooklyn spaces: What have been some of your favorite party themes?
Sari: They always surprise you. You never really know when you pick a theme whether it’s gonna work. One of my favorite ones was Laundry Day. Who would have known that Laundry Day would turn out to be such a good theme? There’s a great picture floating around the internet of a girl playing music in roller curlers in front of the set of the laundry. And there was one party I really loved like ten years ago called Night of the Living Toys. That was really beautiful. If you look around the space, you can see remnants from them all.

photo from brokeassstuart.com

brooklyn spaces: How do you find the artists? Or do they find you?
Sari: Gosh, a lot of them find us. If they’re supposed to be here, they somehow hear about us, even in Australia or something. There’s really a lot of good stuff out there, almost endless good stuff. It’s amazing all the stuff that people know how to do.

photo by E.A.R.

brooklyn spaces: Clearly this is a creative space for making and appreciating art. But there are people who just see it as a party house. What do you think about that?
Sari: Well, those people are really missing the point, because if that’s what we wanted, we would just have a bar. People who are just looking for a place to drink beer, I encourage them to go to a bar, there are many. It’s not like we’re against that, but our parties are meant to be experiential. The whole point is for people to experience art that they wouldn’t see in the commercial world, or listen to music that they wouldn’t hear on commercial radio. Not that I mean to disparage beer, and I don’t want to underestimate the importance of celebration, because that’s really important to us. We definitely want to encourage more celebration and to help people make more holidays. People need them! Life is sad sometimes.

photo by E.A.R.

brooklyn spaces: How do you think being in Brooklyn has affected Rubulad? Do you feel like what you’re doing and have done is specific to Brooklyn?
Sari: That’s an interesting question. I’m a New Yorker and I went to high school in Brooklyn, so I’ve gotten to see Brooklyn really change. It used to be that everyone in Brooklyn just wanted to get to the city, and they thought of themselves as bridge-and-tunnel people. They’d think, if you make it, you go to Manhattan. That’s really changed, Brooklyn has really become its own city. Manhattan has become a place where the money lives more than where the people live. Here in Brooklyn there’s more space for independent stuff to happen, and there’s a lot of help from a great community. There are so many other spaces, other people who are doing amazing things. There’s a lot of cross-pollination between different groups, and we work with many groups who do things that are so different than we do. What was the last part of that question?

photo by Julia Roberts

brooklyn spaces: Do you feel like what you’re doing here is specific to Brooklyn?
Sari: Well, for years we thought that we were the only space like this in the world. We didn’t know that there were other Rubulads all over America and all over the world. I guess Burning Man was the first time we were like, “Holy shit, there are so many other people doing stuff!” The way we do things is specific to where we are, for sure, but we have connections to so many different kinds of spaces all over the place. I have a desire to live a life that doesn’t involve a certain kind of people, and I’ve been able to achieve that. I’m happy to never have to go to Midtown to work and live that sort of life. In New York that’s pretty hard to achieve, since it’s so expensive to live here. But there’s something about the grit of the struggle in Brooklyn that gives people a little added bite and energy. There’s so much going on right now, it’s a really good time around here, in Bushwick, Bed-Stuy. There are so many groups around that are really amazing, like the Groove Hoopers, or the Chicken Hut people. They’re like gutter-punk bike-jousters, and they throw a heck of a party. And we love Secret Project Robot. There’s so much going on in Brooklyn that we’re really excited about.

brooklyn spaces: Do you have any advice for creative people who are trying to figure out how to be involved in something like Rubulad?
Sari: There was a boy in here who once said in an interview, “Do art, be art, live art,” and that made me so happy. I want to encourage people to not be shy, to just make stuff and share it, because that’s what it’s for. I hope more people will make more spaces and do more weird theaters and galleries. If you decide to create your own thing and make it happen the way you want to, other people will enjoy it and join in.

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Like this? Read about other underground performance & party spaces: 12-turn-13, Monster Island, Flux Factory, Gemini & Scorpio loft, The Lab (Electric Warehouse), Red Lotus Room, Big Sky Works, Newsonic, Gowanus Ballroom