Stooping, NYC
Columbia University, GSAPP Fall Studio’22;
‘One man's trash is another man’s come up!’ - as proclaimed by Macklemore on ‘Thrift Shop’ rings truer each day.
Essential existence in a modern age where the wage gap seems to widen every single day, yields to ’stooping’ and ’thrifting’ are a necessity ideas. Getting your hands on a vintage Stussy tee or a small piece of history with a mid-century modern cabinet is now more likely and more responsible with the help of these methods. Stooping is an act of skilfully scavenging for furniture from the stoops of New York City - an activity which has its own Instagram page. It is a public spectacle exhibiting bodily performance on all possible scales - societal, environmental, and economical. The economical, environmental, and social disruption of NYC is elevated by climate crisis, pandemic, and inequity. Stooping disrupts that disruption by creating a public performance of objects that delineate the surroundings from such crises.
The furniture pieces act as objects of soft, spatial protests on how the idea of social understanding of living is shifting/expanding in contemporary times. At the same time, this responsibility is also a power. As Audrey Lorde said, the power of the erotic comes from dissolving the hegemonic narratives of capitalism that subjects beauty and eroticism to things complying within that narrative. This simple idea of visual thrifting contests that.
