Event details
Saturday, September 14, 2024
11 am–3 pm

Chelsea Recreation Center
430 West 25th Street
New York, New York

Free. Spaces are limited; registration opens Friday, September 6.

How do we create and maintain relationships with our built environment? Organized by Camila Palomino and Alix Vernet, Memory Textures invites participants to an afternoon of studying urban surfaces in Chelsea and building tools to record public space. Participants will examine inscriptions—from patterns to lettering across surfaces and sidewalks—and learn how to archive these impressions with techniques usually reserved for studying antiquity, collapsing temporalities and creating a personal collection of urban texture and memory. 

Camila Palomino is a curator, researcher, and writer from Queens. Her research is invested in aesthetic and political relationships between urban infrastructures and memory. Palomino has organized exhibitions and programs at Abrons Arts Center, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; SculptureCenter, Queens; and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, New York. In 2023, Palomino was the co-editor of Viscose Journal’s fifth issue, “Retail,” which focused on the role of fashion retail within urban spatial politics.

Alix Vernet examines and extends the social histories of built environments through the creation of direct clay reliefs and guerilla molds of urban surfaces, a process she calls street castings. Her work looks at the rituals, disappearances, and apparitions contained in the material life of buildings. Frequently her projects involve long-term collaborations with both official and unofficial custodians of public life, including maintenance workers, museum conservators, pedestrians, and neighbors. Vernet’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Helena Anrather, New York, and group exhibitions at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; and Soft Opening, London.

About the program series
Activations is a series of interdisciplinary public programs designed by artists in response to civic spaces in New York. Each activation invites participants to encounter a ready-made site through the lens of an artistic practice, reimagining them as spaces of creative possibility. All are welcome to participate.