Video, chairs and spatialized stereo sound

Toma Peiu & Luiza Pârvu

Seven Scenes from a Neighborhood Café uses single take scenes and location sound recorded at Cafe Lily’s, an unpretentious Korean-Uzbek-Soviet diner at the heart of the Russian speaking community in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, NY. There can be no community without communion, and communion only becomes tangible when a genuine connection is achieved. To experience the installation, the visitor needs to approach the projection screen and the amplified column-speakers, using their body as a contact microphone. Mirroring the exercise of community making, intimacy with the medium and the place evoked by the installation becomes a condition for the relation between the artifact and the person seeking to engage with it.