André Lepecki: nomadic new york - minor new york

Rationale: nomadic new york - minor new york

Lets start with the cliché: “New York is always in movement.” We know this expression too well. Its familiarity bespeaks the ways New York City has been represented and projected across the globe for over a century as the absolute emblem of the “successes” of capitalist modernity in the West and, more recently, of its neo-liberal, post-modern, post-industrial variations.

Even when the city stood still for a day five years ago, even when it had to stop, due to death and sorrow, it was as if shock had appeared only to make it regain even more momentum, even more speed, and right away. Immediately. One still day, one horror day … and then New York fast-forwarding back to the days ahead, New York stepping with even more frenzy into the agitated demands of its major cadence: the demands of keep moving, of keep being true no matter what to its trademarked identity as a restless, sleepless, hyper-active, and always fast-moving city.

But -- against this display of endless mobilization, fast-paced consumption, zooming capital flows, and frantic oscillations between market euphorias and market dysphorias, there are many other ways of living and creating many other movements. Alternative ways of performing life that reveal another New York, filled with many other smaller cities and circuits in it. These are non-spectacular movements -- proposing other speeds and pauses, and other aims, vibrations, rhythms, affects, effects, and modes of sensibilities, modes of performance. These modes pay attention to elusive movements, invisible movements, subtle movements, movements of thought, movements of images, movements of sounds, of words, of migrants, of immigrants, of bodies, of policies, of laws, words, images, sounds. Movement of concepts and concepts of movements that help create “minor” cities within New York -- cities living well beyond the cliché.These other cities are intrinsically nomadic, defined by flux and forces rather than streets and concrete. Their creation and dissolution are inevitably political performances, inevitably involving or invoking temporary collectives, inevitably populating fringe spaces, inevitably creating a different time, while also using and deploying and being energized by all the “major” resources of the city and its clichés.

To create art in a “minor” mode is to make of one’s citizenship a permanent nomadic project. It is to travel long distances, across cultures, languages, dialects, ethnicities, flavors, even while staying put in the middle of the city. Or, conversely, it is to create a set of New York expatriates who, despite no longer being in the city physically, continue to permanently return to it, re-live it, expand it, re-invent it, and re-dimension it, true nomads making New York their ground and ever fertile territory.

nomadic new york then. just like that. with no capital letters.

André Lepecki