Multimedia site performance (2006)
Artistic Directors: Dolores Wilber and B.J. Krivanek
Produced by Community Architexts

“Coming and Going” presented in a commuter parking lot in Uptown, Chicago, appropriated the parking lot and backdrop of elevated train traffic, projecting digital video, text and image, deploying actors, a choral ensemble (performing Bach, Morten Lauridsen, and Ernani Agular), cars and a moving van. Incorporating the Samuel Beckett short play Come and Go (1965), this work underlined particular themes—transience, displacement, instability, desertion, and fear—that resonate for the various communities that co-exist uneasily in the gentrifying community. Described as “site activation” rather than installation or performance, the work is architectural, incorporating the urban landscape, viewers, and passersby. The anchor of the work is a body of census, real estate, and neighborhood research producing a text, image and video demographic profile of the neighborhood. This research highlighted the community as a port of entry for migrant populations with no other place to go (the poor, the barely working class, immigrants and the physically and mentally challenged), along with figures on rent and sales, including dyads of the social roles describing the relationships of the people of the neighborhood. These included dozens of pragmatic and poetic dyads: tenant-landlord, dreamer-pragmatist, slacker-go-getter, and relative-stranger. Produced by Community Architexts, this collaboration by Dolores Wilber (Wholesale Chicago) and BJ Krivanek (Community Architexts) team up with Daniel Wallenberg/ conductor of the Music Institute of Chicago, Chicago performers Julie Laffin, Carla Owens and New York performer, Joseph Silovsky, who will conducted a series of suitcase performances.

Photos © Dan Rest