THE DOOR: 2024
THE DOOR: 2024
A COLLABORATION WITH MEREDITH MAGNESS
The Door: A Tactile History of the Waterfront
The Door is a proposed mid-scale intervention against the gentrification of the industrial West Village waterfront. Along with the physical destruction of factories, public housing, and cultural landmarks of historic immigrant and working-class communities comes the ideological co-optation and commodification of people’s history and struggles. The Door replaces the sleek glass and aluminum doors of the Superior Ink Condominiums and adjacent townhouses with the wooden doors of the 1950s West Village, adorned with custom brass hardware depicting critical moments of struggle that occurred on the land, from the displacement of the Lenape people to the establishment of the Newgate Prison, the Stonewall riots, the Red and Lavender Scare, and the eventual destruction of the Superior Ink Factory to make way for the luxury apartments currently occupied by the ultra-rich.
Doors offer a unique medium to manipulate or co-opt for our own intentions. Visible to the outside world and passers-by, but also used daily by residents of a structure, the door had the potential to be used as a canvas for our political aims of revealing intentionally concealed histories and resisting willful ignorance.
To approach these histories thoroughly and with respect for the people impacted by the cyclical harm and displacement experienced in the neighborhood, we developed a ritual process to maintain our commitments to the residents and clarify our positionality in relation to the work.
We referenced the idols of Tell Brak, miniature sculptures carved by the ancient Mesopotamian people of modern-day Syria as representational offerings to an eye deity. We created our own eye idols to accompany us on our research tour of the West Village. Cast in brass from the oldest and last-remaining brass foundry in New York City, P.E. Guerin, they served to remind us of our responsibility to observe and listen, not overstep or overwrite.
With these brass Pocket Idols, we interviewed 22 long-term residents or small business owners in the West Village. With their experiences in mind, we created a set of three hinges, a door knocker, a door handle and backplate, and a peephole cover, all embossed with imagery and scenes from seven different instances of struggle and violence that shaped the West Village waterfront into what it is today. Intended to be installed (forcibly, maybe) in place of the current modern doors of the Superior Ink complex, the format of the project is also scalable to address the histories of other neighborhoods in Manhattan and beyond.
