An Exploration of Gowanus Brooklyn and the Reanimation Library with Elastic City

Tomorrow evening, Elastic City will host an event guided by artist and librarian Andrew Beccone to explore the relationship of a small independent library, Reanimation Library, to its Brooklyn neighborhood, Gowanus. Beccone is the founder of The Reanimation Library, a library with a collection of books noted for their visual content that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Elastic City is a non-profit arts organization based in Brooklyn that commissions both well-known and emerging artists to create participatory walks, some which explicitly engage participants in how to generate poetic moments in public space.

Starting at the Reanimation Library, participants will reproduce images from the library that correspond to one of the above categories and then the group will post these images at sites in the neighborhood that resonate with the categories and the individuals on the walk. Unbinding the Library will prompt the library—itself an imperfect attempt to codify, organize, and control information—to spontaneously release some of its contents into the more loosely structured organization of its immediate urban setting.

We previously covered the Elastic City’s walk that questioned the privatization of public space at Lincoln Center and at The New Museum’s NYC 1993 Exhibit.