Im/permissible: A proposal for the Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship
The pedagogy:
Graffiti is sacred calligraphy of the lumpenproletariat. Graffitos mark property of the bourgeoisie like picket fencing, to protest existing class structures that stifle change in a community. It’s a construction that restricts the movement of bodies, and the exchange of symbolic language (graffiti) by delineating rectangular spaces of im/permissibility. I propose a fence that disrupts rectangular spaces which segregate im/permissible people and ideas. In his essay: *Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the dancer, André Lepecki, discusses the way in which polices and other institutions choreograph bodies by directing them to permissible spaces for political movement. He cites Sarah Michelson’s Devotion Study #1, a performance during which dancers “enact the freedom of political movement” by whirling repetitiously over a copy of the Whitney’s blue-print transferred on the floor. I want to rework the choreography of picket fences by considering two questions: 1) how can bodies redefine non-rectangular im/permissible spaces through a negotiation of both sides of the fence, not central authorities? and 2) how can the graffito/calligrapher “enact the freedom of political movement” by traversing over these same spaces?
