Flatlands Av.

The collective place of memory

The state-subsidized residential buildings of the Linden and Boulevard Project in Brooklyn, East New York dating from the late 1950s appear unapproachable and cold.  

Wortman under construction, Linden Houses, 1957

apartment floorplans and street map of Linden Houses

apartment floorplans of Linden Houses

reworks on chat room conversations of ex inhabitants of the Linden and Boulevard Projects, East New York, Brooklyn

A place; a non-place. Once designed on the drawing boards of the city planners as a flourishing district, following the serious unrest of the civil rights movement and the resulting urban decay, many of the Italian, Jewish and Afro-American inhabitants had left this neighborhood by the mid-1970s.
 

By 1965, with integration hitting the ENY -East New York- Projects, the descendants of the New Lots Boys, a gang established in 1942, named after the New Lots Boulevard, had spawned the SPONGE movement - “Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything.”
Up until that point, Linden Boulevard had been a hard and fast dividing line between the races. Some ENY residents took issue when the line was crossed. “I am Jim Crow and I shall live forever,” the ENY segregationists declared.

Since then, this district has been home almost exclusively to the black population. The former inhabitants were scattered to the four winds and lost
touch with each other. Thanks to a private campaign, a website was launched in 1998. In the chat room, former inhabitants share their memories and revive their former local community in virtual terms. People reassure each other that they are not lost: “I’m not lost, I just split.” They still perceive themselves as part of a bygone urban history. Myths and real experiences intermingle.
 

reworks on chat room conversations of ex inhabitants of the Linden and Boulevard Projects, East New York, Brooklyn

drawing adaption from a photograph

historic photograph

The reconstruction in cyberspace of this place, where the users spent their childhood and youth, serves as the basis for Zanni’s video entitled Flatlands Av. Real people cannot be seen. The forcefulness of the location and a human voiceover engender intensity. In this work, the narration stands for the endless movement of memory, lending dynamism to the depersonalized place.
For this subtle work, fragments of conversations from the chat room were combined as a text collage. Spoken by an actor, they simulate recordings on a telephone answering machine. Ostensibly, trivial details are exchanged. The conversations revolve around the first kiss, secret cigarettes, and confrontations with the police, racial conflicts, friendships and disappointments.

 

drawing adaption from photograph

historic photograph

Although the sentences relate to each other and form a conversation between Johnny, Jack, Steve, Scott and Harvey, separated by a bleep, the words directed at an interlocutor withdraw into an ominous, impersonal void. The voice remains monotonous and has no individual timbre.
 

reworks on chat room conversations of ex inhabitants of the Linden and Boulevard Projects, East New York, Brooklyn

In July 1965, SPONGE (Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything) leader Sandy “Reb” McMenemon was invited to attend a meeting convened by Mayor John Lindsay. He accepted the invitation. With a handshake, McMenemon agreed to end the East New York race riots of 1965.

This echoes the timeless anonymity emanating from the tall façades of the buildings shown in the video. Static photographs of the apartment blocks hint only vaguely at lives lived within. Bare branches sway noiselessly before rigid walls. The streets and sidewalks are deserted. Nothing allows us to put this place in a precise context. The fragments of the housing estate, filmed at sunset and in heavy snow, underline the revocation of accuracy. The irritation of our vision by the flurry of snow and the increasing darkness symbolizes the hazy, indistinct moments during a process of remembrance.
Short scenes from Scorsese’s GoodFellas featuring the young Henry Hill are inserted into the video. The film is set at the time invoked in the chat room. Both in real life and as a film character, Henry Hill is a classic gangster from Brooklyn, East New York.
 

reworks on chat room conversations of ex inhabitants of the Linden and Boulevard Projects, East New York, Brooklyn

In the scenes from GoodFellas used here, Henry Hill represents the young men of the district; he gazes dreamily out of the window, leaves the table at which the family is eating, and waves to his mother from the street.
 

movie still of Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese, 1990

movie still of Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese, 1990

Zanni’s combination of found footage and her own video material raises the question of whether the lives of the people who meet in the chat room could also have turned out differently. At the same time, this work refers to our tendency to romanticize our own history and to dream of living our lives as film heroes.
By combining the documentary material from the chat room with the pictures, the artist succeeds in creating an atmospheric intensity that does not reproduce an easy-going lightness of being. Instead, a doubt – perhaps even the fear of not having been noticed and thus of not having existed – is formulated in the emphatic question, “Do you remember me?”

 

reworks on chat room conversations of ex inhabitants of the Linden and Boulevard Projects, East New York, Brooklyn

moviestills from GoodFellas, Martin Scorsese, 1990;
pics and video by Margot Zanni, 2007
screenshots from chats Linden and Boulevard Projects
text by Rayelle Niemann, 2007 

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