This month, Lara Mimosa Montes will be in residency for two weeks in various parts of the Bronx, attempting to create a psychogeography of the borough c. 1980. During her residency, Lara will visit the Fashion Moda archive at the NYU Fales Library & Special Collections, the Carlos Ortiz archive at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art archives, and the Bronx Documentary Center among others. Read Lara’s artist statement about her project below.

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Picture: Gordon Matta-Clark, Bronx Floor: Floor Hole, 1972. Courtesy of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner.

How does one reencounter what has already passed? What does it mean to return home, to acquaint oneself with the place where one imagines oneself to have, “once upon a time,” been born? To continue writing after the line breaks and into the threshole (that point beyond what the line can no longer hold): the fracture, the break that follows a trauma, a violence, the reasons for having gone . . .

By following situationist practices (such as the dérive, or drift), for this residency, I give myself over to disorientation and le sens de l'heur (happenstance) in order to hone, through writing, an openness to intuition, failure, possibility, and chance. I wish to become familiar with what Ivan Chtcheglov, from his influential early situationist text, “Formulary for a New Urbanism” (1953), describes as “the absence of the object [that] becomes a presence one can feel.” This residency is an attempt “to touch what is missing. Ce qui manque” (Nathanaël, The Sorrow and the Fast of It, 2007). An absence, the Bronx: a feeling through the absence. As such, in addition to situationist practices, traditions of somatic writing and experience also inform the methodology by which I attempt to speak of my travel, a return home. [1]

Part of this residency involves rediscovering through various archival and published ephemera the visual cultures of the Bronx, and, in particular, those that feature the borough as a site-specific backdrop or object of inquiry used by artists working in the Bronx during the 1970s and ‘80s. Important works from this period include: Gordon Matta-Clark’s series Bronx Floors (1972-73); Sophie Calle’s The Bronx (1980); Tim Rollins and K.O.S.’s Bricks (1982-1983) and Amerika—For the People of Bathgate (1988); Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style (1983); the sculptures of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres; and the photographs of Mel Rosenthal, Lisa Kahane, Martha Cooper, Martine Barrat, Sophie Rivera, Perla de Leon, Seis del Sur, among others.

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[1] The figure of the urban wanderer (often male) is generally known as the flâneur.According to Merlin Coverley in his book, Psychogeography (2006): “Both Baudelaire and Benjamin locate the flâneur’s literary conception within a short story by Edgar Allan Poe [“The Man of the Crowd”].“ Poe once lived in the Bronx at 2640 Grand Concourse.

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Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press 2016). She holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’s Poem-A-Day, BOMB, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 McKnight Writing Fellow and CantoMundo Fellow. Currently, she works as a senior editor of Triple Canopy and lives in the Twin Cities. She was born in the Bronx.

This project is made possible by a grant from the Jerome Foundation, https://www.jeromefdn.org.