It looks like it could all end before it has begun. Well, it has actually begun but has not officially finished. More rightly it began last October as a seed of an idea and has steadily branched out. The Museum of Urban Design (MUD) is an artwork, an offshoot project of artecoculture. MUD is comprised of a rare collection of genetic resources (seeds) with interactive displays (chickens, bugs, wildlife). It is a portable vegetable garden, philosophical experiment and chicken wrangling adventure all in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty in Brooklyn.
The crux of the ending of this stage of the Museum’s development lies in the complications of the building of the Vitrine and the possible need to disassemble it and move it before it has been completed. The Vitrine, which will be the more permanent display area for the chickens, has yet to be completed though we are constantly working on it. There have been many delays due to the weather, lack of transport and in the nature of a project that is a new experience, unforeseeable planning delays. The Vitrine is a roughly 6 by 7 foot chicken coop that is designed to be flat packed into a moving van along with the rest of the Museum. Made partly of recycled materials from local businesses that would otherwise have gone into landfill, it also doubles, if required, as an emergency shelter during extreme power outages. In the first 5 months of the Museum there were 3 blackouts. The staff accommodations are powered by electricity so continued warmth is a concern in the winter. We, the staff of the Museum have never built a structure and James is not handy (but is an excellent learner) so I am teaching him as we go along.
Construction has continued outdoors through the natural forces of rain, wind, the hottest summer on record in New York, constant fruit battering from a very productive Mulberry tree, fly population explosion from said fruit, swamp like mosquito infestation and the continued production and cleaning of temporary shelters for the expanding space needs of the growing chickens. Final completion seems to be constantly close but for one complication after another.
This week, the Museum’s possible ending before it had begun, was due in part to natural and man made disasters. In the beginning of the week, while correcting an overlap in the ceiling slats in the Vitrine, I inadvertently made the most frequent, classic and generally most bloody art school injury manifest, that of the box cutter slash. The chisel I had been working with was too thin as I worked upside down correcting the overlap to two ceiling pieces, so I switched to a utility knife which eventually slid across the slick as silk wood, into my index finger almost taking the side tip of it off. Really, the cut couldn’t be that bad, could it, as I staunchly refused to look at it. After hours waiting in emergency the next day, the kind doctor who saw it said ‘Wow! That’s a deep cut.’ The recourse after waiting so long was not stitches, too late for those but skin glue. Only thing though, I could not get it wet and I could not let it touch anything, i.e. gloves were out. I did get antibiotics to cure the cut and my five week old brutal bronchial infection along with a Tetanus shot. This seemed workable; James would have to clean the temporary brooder/coop for a while, is all, while I worked with one finger pointing upward to the sky as though I was hoping for free tickets to a Grateful Dead concert.
Then came the flood. At 4:30am on the 1st of October, it rained and rained and all the rainwater from the roof channels into our basement drain. It could not take the flow, even though James bailed like mad, soaked to the skin as I grabbed things off the floor. Then the sewer backed up and the shit flowed in up from the furnace room’s drain, meeting the 6 inch tidal bore of fresh water from the roof as that drain failed to function.
So the question is all about continuation. Will the museum have to move sooner than anticipated or no? We are in the midst of a cleanup and progressing on the Vitrine regardless, while the squirrel is discovering one of the seven apples from our apple tree in a bucket and is now bothering the lemon cucumbers. Ouroboros indeed.
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