FLEFF

Open Space

A Year-Long Nomadic Exploration

Open Space assumes myriad forms. It migrates across diverse practices. It loosens multiple meanings. It roves across technologies, social relations, landscape design, politics, ecology, development, critical theory, media formations.

Russian steppes, American frontiers, Argentine pampas, and arctic tundras sustain vast ecological systems where imagination and ideology interact.  In international landscape design, Open Space creates natural areas for public recreation, ecology, and aesthetics:  Terelj, Yosemite, Tiananmen Square, Central Park..  In communications, Open Space invents a collaborative zone where all participants contribute to the outcome. 

Open Space implicates the films of John Ford, Deepa Mehta, Tony Cokes and Ursula Biemann; the music of A.R. Rahman, Miles Davis, and Madonna; the open textualities of the The Wire, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Nollywood; the collaborations of Eyebeam, Empyre, Ubuntu, The School of Perpetual Training, Open Cinema. 

Open Space swaps rigid vertical hierarchies for more fluid horizontal modes. Open Space catalyzes collaboration, communication, convenings. Open Space spawns biodiversity, public usage, green neighborhoods, cultural resources, land protection beyond development.

Open Space stirs up new ways to work, active participation, lived phenomena, surprise. Open Space is Prairie School architecture, the Social Forum, The First International. Open Space is Banksy,  Dog Boys, urban disruptions, the other campaign.

Throughout 2009 and 2010, FLEFF explores open space with nomadic routes and provisional maps. How do we find open spaces in geography, community, melody, materiality, digitality, virtuality,?   How do we identify, locate, question,  create, and  imagine open space(s)? What spaces have openings? Can an opening be a space? How do we open space?  Can open space be a noun, a verb, an adverb,  an adjective?

Open Space: terra incognito.

---Thomas Shevory and Patricia Zimmermann, August 2009