Circumambulate*

Since 2017, Working Title

A long-term project based on an ongoing photographic study (since 2013) of the physical and digital transformations in New York's Financial District driven by a variety of (financial) formgiving processes. The anticipated outcomes will include installations, photo series, moving images, and writing.

* Herman Melville in a passage of Moby Dick encourages the reader to "...circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?..." as an opportunity to consciously experience the area that today is known as New York's Financial District.

Claudia Weber The Wall Street Project

Working material

My ongoing interest in the material and form-giving conditions within New York's Financial District, often experienced through its architectural and sculptural artifacts, began during a ten-month-long studio residency in the district, awarded by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) for 2009/10. Since then it has grown into the long-term project Circumambulate (working title), which continues my general exploration into both physical and digital methods of place-making and the ideological structures on which they rest.

Over the last decade the Financial District has been transformed from a financial hub to an upscale residential neighborhood, indicating that the financial industry has mostly moved elsewhere both in terms of physical and digital presence. Yet this perception would significantly underestimate the lasting physical and conceptual impact that finance's formgiving power had and continues to have both on this local neighborhood as well as generally on societal and ecological structures.

Reflecting on the district's history of trade and its evolving built environment (including its mythological, metaphorical, and artistic representations), as well as its contemporary use of matter and language (including code), Circumambulate is both an acknowledgement of finance's immensely influential role as a conceptual sculptor, and a challenge to the value system that it has introduced into the relationship of matter, form, and purpose.

Circumambulate (formerly known as Share) received a grant from the Puffin Foundation (2015) and support from Latitude, Chicago (2017)

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