Freshkills Park’s dramatic landscape, its unique history as NYC’s largest and most notorious landfill, and its future as public park present unique opportunities for art research and cultural programming. Taking advantage of the site’s long term transformation as it gradually opens to the public, Mariel Villeré and Dylan Gauthier have developed Freshkills Park: Field R/D, a flexible residency and research program that provides space, time, and resources for invited artists to engage the site’s history, current conditions, and future. With an emphasis on collaboration with City partners, multidisciplinary researchers, and local stakeholders, participating artists take part in organized site visits, field trips, lectures, reading groups, and film screenings to inform project proposals for Freshkills Park in the near and distant future. On September 23, the first cohort of artists will present work developed over the past year as an exhibition at Freshkills Park Studio + Gallery on Staten Island. At the 8th Floor, in a panel titled “Waste Time: Breakdown, Decay, and Regeneration at Freshkills Park,” the co-curators will be joined by Field R/D artists to share findings from the first year of this experimental residency program, and reflect on how art, science, and public policy have a hand to play in the future evolution of the Freshkills Park site.
Programming for exhibition concurrently on view at the 8th Floor:
http://the8thfloor.org/portfolio/sedimentations-assemblage-as-social-repair