Wall Street occupennial – Open call to artists

The Wall Street Occupennial is an urgent call for artists to contribute to the ongoing Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement currently centered at Liberty Plaza in the Financial District of New York City. The Occupennial is founded on the belief that artists have a crucial role to play in helping to elaborate and sustain the democratic public space that is currently being created by the occupation of Liberty Plaza.

The Occupennial embraces the fact that the OWS movement is not reducible to a single “message” or even a particular set of policy prescriptions; in the most general sense, OWS and its affiliated movements around the world are about democratization, the first manifestation of which has often been the unauthorized occupation of nominally public streets, buildings, and plazas ranging from Tahrir Square to the Wisconsin State House.

While it echoes the familiar art-world term “biennial,” the Occupennial is unencumbered by any predetermined curatorial program or institutional apparatus. It exists instead as an imaginative umbrella-concept and pragmatic media platform (wallstreetoccupennial.tumblr.com) through which diverse activities might be brought into alliance around both the specific site of Liberty Plaza and other occupation-sites throughout the United States and the rest of the world.

The Occupennial encourages contributions that engage the physical site of Liberty plaza and its occupants, and that can unfold in as timely a manner as possible. For those contributors unable to be physically present at the site itself, projects that are digitally-based (photos, videos, texts, graphics) are encouraged, but also long-distance ideas capable of on-site realization by interested collaborators. These might encompass sign-making, performative gestures, tours, choreographic scores, acoustic experiments, historical reenactments, or ephemeral architectures.

Occupy Wall Street:https://occupywallst.org
Occupennial Website: https://occupennial.org/
http://wallstreetoccupennial.tumblr.com/calltoartists