When You Cut Into the Present the Future Leaks Out is the title of the exhibition curated by Regine Basha for No Longer Empty at the Old Bronx Borough Courthouse, a neo-classical building, built between 1905 and 1914 and attributed to architects Michael John Garvin and Oscar Florianus Bluemner. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in Bronx County, the Courthouse has been shuttered for 37 years. The exhibition, which runs on three floors of the building, is a rather complex project that contemplates a constellation of many narrations within a bigger one. This articulated structure is indeed able to engage with the space – the building itself as well as the territory and the local community – and the artworks on many levels.
Claudio Zecchi: I would like to talk about this exhibition as if it was a book. A book with a preface and an appendix, but also with ghosts and side traces to be discovered from time to time; a book with many chapters that you can open as you wish without necessarily respecting a strict order. A sort of 21st-century novel in which the “fil rouge” that grasps the exhibition, lighting up the entire structure, is a diachronic, narrative tension between past, present and future as already warned by the title chosen by the curator (a quote by beat generation poet William S. Burroughs).
How does the exhibition intend to deal with these three different tenses: the past, the present and the future?
Rachel Gugelberger: Employing the structure of the book is an interesting proposition. However, there is no narrative arc being presented here. While the Courthouse is taken as both theme and main character, the exhibition deliberately counters the possibility of a single story or history pertaining to the Courthouse, the neighborhood in which it is situated and the Bronx borough at large. If anything, yes, the works in the exhibition can be perceived as an appendix; “a section of additional matter” to an account of past events.
Regine Basha: It’s interesting that you bring up the book as a model because for me it’s quite the opposite: a non-linear structure motivated along the lines of cut and paste, hence the title’s significance. It’s about a reshuffling of content to create new meanings, new possibilities. Burroughs considered this method a portal. Physically and architecturally one can also consider the sculptural practice of Gordon Matta-Clark, who coined the term “anti-monument” as he literally cut through physical space to create new time, space and perspectives. And then of course there is hip-hop, which emerged in the South Bronx, and is rooted in the oral, aural, physical and visual, speaking truth to power.
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