Landscapes of Quarantine: Context/Shift.
location:
Storefront for Art and Architecture
New York City.
exhibition:
Landscapes of Quarantine.
curators:
Geoff Manaugh + Nicola Twilley.
funding:
New York State Council on the Arts
2008 Independent Research Grant.
date/status:
2010/completed.
key points:
investigation, design research, quarantine spaces, group exhibition, investigation of medical
infrastructure, installation piece.
From the curators:
"By mounting a dynamic prosthesis out of biosecure Tyvek onto the already- porous Storefront facade [by architect Steven Holl and artist Vito Acconci, the installation] plays with quarantine's ability to blur boundaries and limit movement. Quarantine can impose a temporary border around a country, building, or bedroom; it can equally externalize national borders back to a traveler's or immigrant's point of origin through the imposition of pre-departure sanitary regulations. Shifting hygienic boundaries in this way - for example, by inserting a piece of public health infrastructure into a suburban home - dramatically changes our understanding and experience of [familiar] space."
“The house where he lived was quarantined, and all the people directly exposed were confined in it...Quarantine houses had guards stationed about them, who allowed no one to go in or out during the season of quarantine. [...] In one of the houses quarantined, there were 31 laboring men who were inclined to object to the rules of quarantine. One escaped, but he was taken back when found, and a guard, with a rifle and instructions to shoot should he attempt to escape, was put over him...”
-SCIENCE, A Weekly Newspaper of All the Arts and Sciences, v. XIII no. 323, April 12, 1889, p. 278.