Week 12: Textile Détournement Progress

Project Draft

Over the past weeks ive been conducting unauthorized fabric interventions across Astoria Park and surrounding neighborhoods. The interventions function as research by making, testing how public space polices creative expression through both hard arrangements like park rules and soft arrangements like community expectations about what belongs.

Interventions completed:

• Stop sign wrapped 12 inches in red fabric

• Metal fence barriers woven with donated bra straps

• Multiple park benches wrapped in fabric

• Basketball court covered in textile collage, vibrant color disruption

  
  

Documentation approach: Working mostly at night with quick snapshots during installation, then returning in daylight for film/Polaroid documentation. Keeping a low profile during the process, capturing evidence after the fact. The method itself is part of the work: unauthorized gestures that leave traces rather than performances that demand attention.

Conceptual shift: Moved away from including explanatory signage. The work should create friction and questions without didactic framing. Letting the interventions exist as unauthorized gestures makes the institutional response itself become visible as part of the work.

Methodology: Working primarily at night for installation. Returning during daylight to photograph interventions in use and document removal timeline. Capturing both the gestures and their erasure.

Key finding: Smaller interventions on stop signs and fencing persist. Larger disruptions like the basketball court and wrapped benches get removed within 24-48 hours. The removal pattern reveals institutional priorities: minor unauthorized additions are tolerated or overlooked, significant spatial reconfigurations trigger immediate cleanup. The institutional response becomes visible evidence of who controls public space.

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Evaluation Rubric

Primary goal: Make bureaucratic gatekeeping of public art visible through unauthorized textile intervention and institutional response.

What success looks like:

• Final intervention generates community participation before institutional shutdown

• Documentation captures: intervention LEADS TO discovery/use LEADS TO institutional response LEADS TO removal

• Work sparks questions about who authorizes creativity in public space without needing explanatory text

Current open questions:

• Does the work communicate critique of institutional gatekeeping without explanation?

• Should the final intervention prioritize being stopped (confrontation) or invite community co-creation (invitation)?

• How to document removal if it happens when not present?

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What I'll test December 2:

• Does the concept land when explained to classmates?

• Do the interventions read as critique or just random decoration?

• What emotional response do they generate: delight, confusion, annoyance?

• When shown removal documentation, what conclusions do viewers draw?