Preparing for the Encampment

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The New York Sun

The Encampment, a large-scale collaborative art installation, is scheduled to go up this Friday on the south tip of Roosevelt Island. Last week, plans were still in a rather fluid state. This is often, of course, the most pleasurable point in the creative process, before any concessions must be made to the realities of expense, logistics, and talent. Indeed, on a recent evening, the handful of volunteers sitting in a circle in the island’s indoor sports complex seemed to be savoring the as-yet unlimited possibilities. It was the difficult task of the project’s director, Thom Sokoloski, to focus them on their ultimate goal: designing installations that would tell visitors about the island’s complicated, and often grim, history.

The idea of the Encampment is that volunteers will create installations for each of 100 identical tents. Each installation is inspired by an individual who was confined on the island at some point — in the penitentiary, the workhouse, the charity hospital, the lunatic asylum, or the smallpox hospital, all of which operated there for varying lengths of time during the 19th and into the 20th century.

The tents will go up Friday morning; the Encampment will open at 7 p.m. and remain open for three nights. Darkness is crucial to the visual effect: The tents will be lit from the inside by LEDs, making them visible across the river to drivers on the FDR.

Mr. Sokoloski’s first task on Tuesday was to rein in a young volunteer named David, whose idea for his installation was a rather abstract one: a 1910 battle between a doctor and a city official over control of a pathology institute. Because the discussion was waged largely on the letters page of the New York Times, it was slightly unclear how this would translate into a visual installation.

“So, with all the information you have, how are you going to corral that?” Mr. Sokoloski asked. “Have you had any thoughts about externalizing?”

David said he was considering setting up tape players at different ends of the tent, playing recordings of each of the men’s letters.

A woman named Amanda was further along in conceiving her installation, about a doctor at the lunatic asylum, who was, according to an article in Harper’s, the object of affection of two of his female patients. The patients, known as Fanny and Moonshine, expressed their love by leaving the doctor bouquets made of grasses, strips of paper, or rags. Amanda was planning to hang these around the tent, possibly with cards in them telling the women’s stories. Mr. Sokoloski nodded. “I like the idea of what those bouquets signify, because it’s very primitive and primal, communicating through objects,” he said.

Mr. Sokoloski, who produced a similar work for last year’s Nuit Blanche festival in Toronto, received no funding for the Encampment. He is hoping to offset his expenses (which, including travel, come to almost $100,000) by selling “Encampment curios” — that is, boxes containing pieces of the installation — for $250 each.

Besides the tents, the Encampment will include elements of movement and music. John McDowell, who wrote the score for the Academy Award-winning documentary “Born into Brothels,” is creating the music element, while the movement will be designed by Jenny-Anne McCowan, who worked with Mr. Sokoloski on the project in Toronto.

Rather than formal dance movements, “What we’re looking at creating is more an environment,” Ms. McCowan said, where people will appear or disappear, “more like a dream.” Similarly, Mr. McDowell imagines strains of music seeming to emerge from the ground, like memories being unearthed. For the opening ceremony next Friday evening, children from the nearby Youth Center will sing songs Mr. McDowell has discovered that relate to Roosevelt Island’s history. One, “Out from the Poorhouse,” is about a man who is glad to die because it means being released from the poorhouse. Another is a work song that would have been sung by prisoners in the penitentiary.

For some of the participants in the project, the island’s history as a destination for the city’s outcast and forgotten probably doesn’t seem so far away. A group of patients from Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital & Nursing Facility — which offers long-term care for people with spinal cord injuries or HIV/AIDS, as well as medical care for undocumented immigrants or homeless people — are designing 20 tents.

One patient chose a story about a young man with tuberculosis who jumped to his death off the south point of the island, Ms. McCowan said. When she asked him why he chose that story, he said it reminded him of his own friends who had committed suicide. Another young man with a spinal cord injury decided to use his installation to tell his own story. “He said, ‘I’m still here,'” Mr. Sokoloski recalled.

It remains to be seen how the project will come off — whether it will be a success on aesthetic terms, or as a statement of social conscience, or both, or neither. Toward the end of the meeting last week, Mr. Sokoloski encouraged the group to get their friends involved, noting that around 30 tents still hadn’t been spoken for. “A lot of you really got into the process, time-wise, working on it and then stepping back and talking to people and coming back to it. Then there are other people who just like to attack it,” he said, adding that last-minute volunteers could still come for a crash installation-making session.


The New York Sun

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