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Corner of E 13th Street and 5th Avenue, New York City, May 8, 2012

Posted on May 8, 2012
I have been invited by Professor Nitin Sawhney from the New School to review student projects as part of a course on Civic Media and Tactical Design in Contested Spaces http://civicmediatacticaldesign.wordpress.com/. I am struck by the diverse ways according to which the students have chosen to address questions of participation, engagement and social justice. I raise questions about project design, methodology, taxonomy and intention. At one point, I hear myself say, “There is a distinction between creating an artistic work and curating it; the distinction is not purely semantic but it is also conceptual and it is that tension that underlies your entire project.” I sound just like an irritable – and irritating – law professor. I wonder whether I would have framed my remarks differently – perhaps even a little more kindly – had we reviewed the projects beyond a stone’s throw of the law school over the road, where I am based as a visiting scholar.

I have to leave by seven to make my way to the KGB Bar on E 4th Street where a mutual friend, Sadakat Kadri http://sadakatkadri.com/ is reading extracts from his latest book, “Heaven on Earth: a journey through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World”. He reads well; it is an intimate setting and everyone is listening. I do not recall anyone reaching for their mobile phones. Only a young man who came and stood by the table upon which some copies of the book lay to take a photograph so that he would remember the title. “Can I take a photograph?”, he says. I have just taken several, and so I acquiesce. There is a man asking a question as he edges this way and that in his seat, becoming more and more agitated. If he throws his beer or a punch, it could be a PR coup, as I look over to the bar man who is nodding at a man who is ordering something that involves a fist full of ice cubes. And as we leave for and after reading celebration at a Ukranian restaurant, the name of which great escapes me, I ask Sadakat whether he wrote about why he wrote the book. We never get to the bottom of that as people start to walk and talk at once, and the evening wears on just shy of midnight when R. and I share a cab ride home and she is asking me, “Where is home?” She is not the first to ask me that this evening. I reply and in the short time we have left, we manage to get beyond that question, thankfully. Because that is after all where life also lies; beyond home, belonging, possession and dispossession. Has to be, otherwise, I remain stuck in a game of snakes and ladders of who I am and who you think you are – and we never get to the good parts, that is to say, where that simply does not occur to either or any of us.

Read more from Miriam Aziz – The Artist is at Large http://miriamaziz.wordpress.com/

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