Occupying space; Reality Properties, Fake Estates and Odd lots

A year after his death, Gordon Matta-Clark received a angry latter from the city of New York Tax authority for the unpaid real-estate tax on his 15 plots of land. His widow and manager of the estate didn't really understand what was happening. He was a poor artist, not a land owner.

Years earlier, he discovered that the city was selling odd plots of land for as little as 25$. On auction he bought 15. He meticulously documented the leftover, in-between, mistaken, bureaucratically neglected, junk spaces, trough maps and panorama photographs.

The Block-Seminar will examine the work of Gordon Matta-Clark from three angles:

-what were the socio-economic conditions that led to him having “junk” houses to use as raw material in the first place and what are the parallels to our economic reality today;

-occupying space- how his practice of controlled demolition, “cutting” and trespassing, worked as elements for the creation of social space;

-contemporary examples of art project that have parallels to his Reality Properties: Fake Estates; projects that reconsider the notions of property, ownership and social exchange – the forces that govern our lives.

The seminar will look at mechanisms for taking over physical space, creating a new metabolism, one that evolves, one that can be traded, changing its value and status for a set of time.

If a big economic reset already started, what can we do to prepare? What elements can be taken over? How does one represent that? How can a sketch give instructions on property and ownership over a set period of time?

The students will work on individual proposals, in the forms of sketches with instructions on: how to take-over space in, on, over, under, the KHM. The proposals, together with a collectivity assembled reader will constitute a fanzine as an end result.