Another Seedbed. From Domesticity to Hospitality.
Another Seedbed is a new node in the cultural fabric of New York City. Resulting from the renovation of a space in a former hat factory located in a late 19th Century cast iron building in Brooklyn, the project keeps the impetus of earlier occupations of industrial spaces in the city by facilitating different forms of hospitality through artistic performances and other public events that the owner organizes–countering the tendency towards normative domesticities that characterize current trends in the renovation of former industrial spaces in large metropolises.
Performance artists operating within and along the occupation of lofts in New York City and other post- industrial cities from the 1960s to the 1980s systematically disturbed the construction of intimacy and challenged the notions of property and ownership. Such challenges were also decisive to the habitation of lofts, which questioned the conventional valuation of spaces and the ideologies of domesticity.
The owner and activator of this space had been living in an old industrial space in Bushwick rented from a colleague, where he started to organize parties, performances, and other events. These happenings not only probed the boundaries between intimate spaces and public occupations but additionally provided the ground for the formation of social and cultural networks. With such impetus, he imagined a space in which he could live, work, and host other artist friends to develop their work. Neither just a private studio nor an art gallery, the space is equipped to welcome gatherings that operate between a dinner party and a public performance. Artists appropriate the space and become hosts themselves, expanding the communities which the project brings together.
The space will not advertise its performances. Some neighbors might not know of its existence. Others will hear about an event through friends. Some might find themselves there often and will develop networks of neighborliness within it.
A number of volumes in red-stained pine plywood, hand-troweled earthen clay plaster, colored MDF, and back-lit smoked polycarbonate with colored wood frames and a host of moving furniture articulate these encounters and choreograph the boundaries that the project negotiates.
