Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

The identity of urban space is charged with ephemerality and malleability which can be crafted through various movements in the city. This paper examines the procession to understand how such a ritualized movement weaves and crafts disparate urban spaces as it traverses the city. In 2002, a pilgrimage procession dubbed the “Modern Procession” carried reproductions of Modern Museum of Art’s most famous works from MoMA in Manhattan on 53rd Street to its temporary location in Queens on 33rd Street. The procession temporarily dwelled the streets, engaged participants and spectators with an ephemeral realm that evoked dreams and imagination in a crafted fluid urban space, thus displaying a dramatized surrealist phenomenon. The ritual and its movement became a process of place-making that transformed the urban space into a mnemonic landscape of objects, bodies, movements and commemorations, crafting a surrealist urban identity. The urban space consequently entered an ephemeral state that can be described as a liminal phase by which the secular urban space becomes sacred, a concept defined by Arnold van Gennep and further discussed by Victor Turner. How does the transformation of urban identity through place-making disclose the relations between liminality and surrealism? How can liminality in urban space response to the dialectics of secular and sacred in urbanity? This paper investigates the MoMA’s Modern Procession in order to understand the role of place-making in ritual procession generally and specifically, and concurrently explores the liminality in urban space through a surrealist lens to further understand the identities of urban space.