Invisible City Walk with Oksana Veselkova
Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space: MoRUS
Sunday August 3, 2023 @ 4pm
155 Avenue C, New York, NY 10009
Reserve free tickets here. (Donations to MoRUS are welcome!)
“Invisible citywalk” is a photowalk and mapping exercise where we explore the secret gems of the Lower East Side and touch its activism history. Bring your cameras, water bottles, and creativity — we will spend about 1-2 hours walking, learning, and placemaking.
As we walk, we’ll take photos and make marks on the maps to identify what caught our attention. LES is home to a cluster of art and activism that revitalized abandoned lots and buildings starting from the 1970s. We’ll pass by squats, community gardens, and other artifacts of this reclaimed space movement, shaping a new “psychogeographical contours” of the East Village. This long field study is a variation on Guy Debord’s “Derive,” an artistic method of a exploring a city through unexpected situations beyond an everyday course.
Digging past the 20th century, we’ll also return to the mid-19th century, when an influx of German immigrants — among other Europeans — settled in what’s now known as the LES. They came from many cities suffering from industrial era overcrowding, including Berlin. Little Germany is hidden between the East River shore, 14th Street, and 3rd Ave — Alphabet City, Kleindeutschland, the East Side twin of Greenwich village. We will explore the area with the map of the German borough Friedrichshain Kreuzberg, which was densely populated with working-class people. And we will try to imagine reflections of that place and time in the present cityscape of the East Village.
