Artist Statement

This video essay results from a research trip to Miami Beach, Florida, in November of 2016, to attend Tide by Side, a processional performance celebrating the opening of the Faena Arts District. The performance was curated by New Orleans-based independent curator Claire Tancons, in collaboration with a number of local, national and international artists. The essay works performatively, through a blend of narration and images (still and moving), to register the contradictions of the event and its political-economic and ecological surround. A version of the essay was presented as a performance lecture at PSi#23: OverFlow in Hamburg. For this submission, I have reworked it in video form.



References

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 2013.

Bruck, Connie. “The Billionaire’s Playlist.” The New Yorker, January 20, 2014, 40-51.

Faena Arts. Faena Forum Grand Opening November 2016. Print publication.

Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (Sept-Oct. 2008), 23-40.

Ross, Kristin. Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London: Verso, 2015.

Sloterdijk, Peter. In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalisation. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

Tancons, Claire. “Curating Carnival? Performance in Contemporary Caribbean Art.” In David A. Bailey, Allissandra Cummins, Axel Lapp and Allison Thompson, eds., Curating in the Caribbean. Berlin: The Green Box, 2012.

---. “Taking it to the Streets: African Diasporic Public Ceremonial Culture Then and Now.” NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art 34:1 (June 2014), 60-65.

---

Gabriel Levine is Sessional Assistant Professor of Drama Studies in the Department of Multidisciplinary Studies, Glendon College, York University. He holds a PhD from the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, York University. A musician and performance-maker, his work has toured widely and been presented at international festivals in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. His essays have been published in the Journal of Curatorial Studies, PUBLIC, and TOPIA: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. In 2016, he curated Animate Entities: Objects in Performance, a two-day symposium and festival at the University of Toronto. His book Practice, co-edited with Marcus Boon, will be published in Spring 2018 in the MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery series Documents of Contemporary Art.