Not An Alternative

Conflux Festival Talk: Occupations & Interventions on the Urban/Cultural Landscape

Date: Friday 9.18
Start Time: 4:00pm
Location: Rm. 101, Barney building, 34 Stuyvesant Street, New York NY 10003

Spray-painted orange markings on the street, actors dressing and working as construction workers, agents performing in place of spokespeople for realty corporations, homeless people adopting the tools and symbols of construction. At first glance, these may seem to share no relation. However if looked at from the correct perspective they become visible as an emerging movement.

The Real Estate Industry is an investigative project dedicated to the documentation and analysis of phenomena proliferating at the periphery of the real estate industry. Not An Alternative will present our findings from this research, offering a guided tour of occupations and interventions on the urban landscape and subversions of the symbols that structure or govern the use of space. This will provide a contextualizing frame through which to understand our work against the greater context of contemporary cultural practitioners working on the issue of land use.

We will also present our recent collaborations with Picture The Homeless, including a building occupation and homeless tent city installation. With video and images, we’ll unpack the projects as case studies of our practice as a non-for-profit cultural production company.

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Not An Alternative is a volunteer run non-profit organization based in Brooklyn, New York whose work involves both questioning the tools of advertising, marketing, public relations and spectacle production and also leveraging them to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. The group’s mission is not to promote alternatives, but to shift symbolic terrain, transforming the subject matters they engage so as to show them to be their own alternative. Projects include The Production Company, Terra Incognita (an online tv show), The Real Estate Industry, and The Change You Want To See Gallery, a multi-purpose venue where free lectures, workshops, screenings and artist talks occur.