During a residency in New York City, in the shortest month of the year, February 2024, I walked and walked and walked. In my practice, walking is an important way to do research and understand the sensitivity of a place. Walking is a form and format which provides a timeline for connections and allows discoveries to accumulate.
While in New York, I could do research for a project I was developing, the Weathering Weaver. This focused my attention, helping me see the city like a “material-meteorologist.” Suddenly, there were crayon drawings of the sun on the street.
This booklet is one of four I assembled during this period. Its 10-by-15-centimeter plastic folders hold printed images, found objects like a child’s sun drawing, and small yarn-weavings depicting colour details. I collected engravings I found in the pavement, weathered stones, rhythms of the fluid systems, grids, the pigeons everywhere, who mistake the city’s buildings for cliffs. Other booklets contain cyanotypes I made with snow or street-textured papers. Printing the images created a spatial organisation method for the content I found over time. In the process of compiling, I intuitively placed images in the folders to materialize the rhythms I discovered on my walks.
I used a frame to look around: the “viewfinder” tool inspired by the artist Sister Mary Corita, who had an innovative approach to design and teaching. This tool helps to bring focus to visually rich and stimulating surroundings and invites us to practice a different way of seeing the world. I cut a square out of a postcard-sized paper, then looked at the city through it or held it in front of my camera or placed it on top of something that interested me, bringing the process of editing directly into my surroundings. Sometimes, the city itself provided a frame in the form of a telescope or a window in a construction wall. It was an ongoing play of zooming in and out, connecting visual lines and stories.
This booklet starts at Madison Square Park, where, in the run-up to the total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024, scientists and staff from the Simons Foundation hosted solar viewing sessions. There was a telescope positioned to follow the moving sun, and we could ask about what we saw through the lens. The view of the sun was filtered orange, the same orange as the skies eight months earlier, when Canadian wildfires triggered air quality alerts for most of New York. As part of my residency research, I asked people who I visited and met if they had captured that particular orange sky, and if so, if it was possible to receive these images, which were filtered by the soot in the air.
The booklet continues with a sepia-colored image of a cloud stamped “Property of the New York Public Library Picture Library,” followed by a picture of a big white clouded sky in The Hague, which is framed by an altocumulus cloud formation above Prospect Park. On the last page, windings made with yarn evoke the textures and colours found walking along the beach to Rockaway Point on a grey, windy day. I can still recall how happy I was to see that horizon, and I later learned that most New Yorkers long to see such an expansive view now and then. While the wide windows of some skyscrapers provide another form of openness, the sky and its clouds are almost always framed.
Being in a city like New York, it’s perhaps inevitable to start seeing doubles. Following things that are alike can be a way to get grip on the visual and textural richness of this big city. Sometimes, a small coincidence can provide the right focus to connect the dots of a new place. But to be in close connection and communication with people who have all the same name is perhaps more than coincidental. During that shortest month of 2024, I shared an apartment with one Benjamin, worked and socialized in the office of my friend, another Benjamin, and continued a thread of visual correspondence with Mr. Benjamin on the West Coast.
To thank each of them for sharing time, I wrote them some notes, notes which I have yet to send. Notes on the weather we shared.
Dear Benjamin,
Thank you for sharing time and space in Ocean Hill from where we both set off on our expeditions. Sometimes we met or walked along, combining British and Dutch habits and storylines. You explored your talent and initiated lightness for data-storage and awareness of HTML. I went back with an oversized suitcase too heavily loaded with images and colour swatches. This maker and material hand-thinker observed your simplistic and dedicated lifestyle. Next time, I will bring rolled oats & GF pasta.
All best,
Aliki
Dear Benjamin,
To be in NYC was a beautiful and intense paralleling experience. Death and spring starting together in one month. Looked up to the sky every day and watched the trees each morning from the daybed. The trees accompanied me through the loss of dear Lizan. The picture library and the many, many, many steps taken in roaming around brought an eclectic yet streamlined pattern of observations. Thank you very much again for being part of exploring the city and its rhythms. A visual note hereby.
Best,
Aliki
Dear Benjamin,
Every day when I took a picture of the sky, you still framed yourself in bed. Between sheets dried in sunshine, warm air, another sky. I collected a lot of skies. In particular the orange ones that patchwork their spaces amidst the skyscraper collective after the wildfires. I talk in lines, I draw in threads, meanwhile the company of being together in this place might have let us visit the sky for real. She left us, and her footstep parted, leaving a network of lines, the echo of her passing mirrored in the concrete “you're alive.”
My regards,
Aliki
Aliki van der Kruijs is a textile designer and researcher. Her New York residency, through WantedDesign’s International Residents program, was supported by the Consulate General of the Netherlands.
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