[URBANTH-L] ANN: Engaging the City presents the Lost Highway Expedition (Kyong Park lecture, NY)

[Angela Jancius]

ENGAGING THE CITY presents

LOST HIGHWAY EXPEDITION

A lecture by
KYONG PARK

Tuesday, February 27, 7pm
Miguel Abreu Gallery
36 Orchard Street (between Canal & Hester)
Tel 212.995.1774

Seating is limited. RSVP dfabricius at earthlink.net

>From July 30 to August 24, 2006, a collection of individuals from three 
continents traveled together through Ljubljana, Zagreb, Novi Sad, Belgrade, 
Skopje, Prishtina, Tirana, Podgorica and Sarajevo in the Lost Highway 
Expedition. The general path of this 'socio-aesthetic movement' was to 
discover new ideas and practices of Balkanization. The importance of 
understanding Balkanization has been underestimated, as we begin to see more 
and more of such fragmentation in the proliferation of economic, social and 
cultural enclaves, extraterritorial phenomena, shrinking cities, global 
cities, "tiger mappings" of political territories, gerrymandering of voting 
districts and other apartheids.

 About 100 travelers joined more than 200 participants from the region, 
moving as a network of smaller groups with paths over a wider area. The 
participants often moved from one group to another, and entered and left the 
expedition at any point. The Lost Highway Expedition was intentionally 
under-programmed to become an anarchistic practice of cultural production. 
By motivating the participants to define the project and its programs, it 
was also an experiment in the behavior of an emergent swarm. As a 
decentralized and non-hierarchical network, it was designed to produce 
multiple process and independent projects after the expedition - i.e., 
exhibitions, forums, publications, workshops.

Kyong Park was the founding director of Centrala Foundation for Future 
Cities in Rotterdam (2005), the editor of Urban Ecology: Detroit and Beyond 
(2005), a co-curator for "Shrinking Cities" in Berlin (2002-2004), a 
founding member of the International Center for Urban Ecology in Detroit 
(1999-2001), a curator of the Kwangju Biennale in South Korea (1997) and the 
founder/director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York 
(1982-98).

Lost Highway Expedition is a project by Centrala Foundation and the School 
of Missing Studies. Its founding members are Azra Aksamija, Katherine Carl, 
Ana Dzokic, Ivan Kucina, Marc Neelen, Kyong Park, Marjetica Potrc and Srdjan 
Jovanovic Weiss, together with partners in the cities of the Lost Highway 
Expedition.

Engaging the City is an independent monthly lecture series that serves as a 
venue for individuals in a variety of professions who engage the 
extraordinary and exciting complexity of contemporary cities in novel ways. 
Lecturers are from the fields of architecture, urban planning, and urban 
design, but also art, philosophy, film, and activism.

This lecture is supported by The New York State Council on the Arts
and The Four of Babylon