Takashi Horisaki

Social Dress LES – Material Memories focuses on the local history and potential futures of the Lower East Side community, seeking a self-driven representation of the neighborhood through the collaborative voices of its residents. This interactive project is based on a series of summer workshops, held both indoors and outside, engaging both visitors and longer-term residents of the housing complexes in the area. Horisaki and his team worked with workshop participants to create thin fabric-like latex casts of the surfaces of objects that are personally significant to them, as well as neighborhood architecture.

While helping participants replicate personal effects from trophies to coins, records to chinaware, and even brick or stone architecture, Horisaki and his team encouraged participants to tell the personal stories behind these objects and spaces. Completed casts will be incorporated into an installation at Pier 42. With their permission, residents’ stories are recorded and will be incorporated into the development of a performance, publication or sound installation, where personal histories and visions will be shared with both community members and the wider public.

Project Team: Takashi Horisaki, Bethany Chan, Bianca Yee, Cole Tracy, Grace Shun, Jordan Delzell, Meredith Cristal, Nissim Ram, Zoe Penina Baker