About
SiteWorks: San Francisco Performance 1969-85 is an ongoing site-specific curation of archival remains of past ephemeral art and performance in the present city of San Francisco.
SiteWorks presents memories, traces and archival remains of events that occurred between 1969 and 1985, encompassing the period in which Tom Marioni established and curated the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) at locations on 3rd Street in the SoMa area of the city.
Delivered from an Omeka database through Google Maps such that a walker may encounter and respond to a haunting of the present city through past acts - and the places they defined - Siteworks invites participants to become agents of performance, art and site. By animating a fragmentary archive of performance through real places, SiteWorks creates spaces for recollection, imagination, and intervention, provoking present enactments of the city's spaces in response to fragmentary remains of ephemeral events. SiteWorks is a locus for the creation of cultural histories in which participants implicitly act out and narrate relationships between distinct times and sites.
SiteWorks delivers events to open source maps filtered by 'collections' or 'tags'. Collections include individual 'events', an exhibition history, Eleanor Coppola's Windows, a work articulated across 54 different locations, and peripatetic performances. These collections can be treated as discrete groups of works or as a totality of events. 'Tags' group events by theme, artist, mode of work, and many other connections. SiteWorks may be explored in relation to specific places and routes, searched by artist and work, by a wide range of themes, and in free search.
Participants may record and share their memories, corrections, additions, and emotional or creative responses to a mapping of real and imaginary places and events to generate new and diverse engagements across diverse communities of users.
As it develops, SiteWorks will incorporate spatial histories to connect these site-specific performances to political and social events and contexts that may inform their meaning.
