Carlo Bevilacqua photos

see the photos by Carlo Bevilacqua
"Into the Silence"---Hermits of the Third Millennium & Gisbert Lippelt Low Cost Life
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/hermits-of-the-third-millennium/#postComment

 http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/hermits-of-the-third-millennium/#postComment 

The Collyer Brothers

When Mark mentioned this project to me, the Collyer Brothers were the first people who popped into my mind. We talked at the meeting about hermits who withdraw to better themselves and the world, but Homer and Langley Collyer strike me because they withdrew from the world within the world. They holed up in their brownstone in the middle of Harlem, amassed 130 tons of... stuff, and died protecting it (Langley constructed booby traps to protect the house; one of them blinded his brother Homer, and another killed Langley himself, after which Homer starved). This kind of hermitage is the opposite of the spiritually cleansing that we've been talking about. There doesn't seem to be anything religious and healing about it: it was claustrophobic and compulsive and crushing. The brothers did, however, have a very close relationship (no pun intended). After Homer was blinded, Langley tended to him lovingly. He fed Homer 100 oranges per week to try and restore his sight, and was so confident he would be successful that he saved every newspaper he could get his hands on so Homer could catch up on the news.

A slide-show of the Collyer brownstone excavation:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/collyer-brothers-brownstone-gallery-1.1187698

A tale of their decline:
http://nypress.com/the-collyer-brothers-of-harlem/

Resurrect Dead - Two quasi-hermits in Philadelphia

This is a great, great, great documentary about a local mystery. Someone in South Philly has been placing these strange markers in the street with a bizarre message about Resurrecting the Dead on Planet Jupiter, with references to Kubrik's 2001.

It's great because it explores the mystery from the perspective from another outsider, a local artist who is obsessed with solving the mystery of the person who is making these markings. It's definitely a hermit case like we were discussed at the meeting- a city dweller completely shut off, able to create a hermitage in a busy city.

Here's the official site:
http://www.resurrectdead.com/

There's a trailer there but if you have netflix you can watch the whole thing on Watch Instantly.

We were talking about people's desire to go "off-line" at our last meeting, which reminded me of this blog I read called The Verge which has an ongoing series called "offline" in which one of their reporters has not used the internet for an entire year, and writes about the difficulties of not doing so.

It really highlights how quickly we've become dependent on this resource in almost every facet of our daily lives and brings to the front some of the charm but also a lot of the difficulties that most of us would have with "going off the grid"

Here's a link to all of the articles so far:
http://www.theverge.com/label/offline

But here's a link to one I found the most interesting and a little more directly relevant to our project, about existing during Hurricane Sandy:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/2/3591234/offline-the-hurricane-paul-miller

His use and definition of the term "online presence" is interesting in terms of how we see ourselves, versus how we assume people see us, and whether or not those are meaningful perspectives

We wandered around Goodhart today exploring unique places as potential areas for use in the piece. Here are some photos of those spaces!

Standing on the Balcony looking into the adjunct office window

Looking out of the window above the Teaching Theater catwalk

The old grid above the scene shop

The women's costume storage, with a vista like view out of the window

Maiko doing some exploring of a stairwell

The basement...

A small door in the basement

The same door from the outside

also outside

The music room balcony

An incongruous feature

The long view of the arches on the driveway side of Goodhart

Can you get a blog from a hermit?

Blog of a "part-time secular hermit".

Some Hermits in Philadelphia

A religious hermit, described in the NY Times (2001)

The hermits of the Wissahickon.
and...some more on them.

The hermitage of St. Joseph, Coatesville, PA

A starting point.

Given: a parallel universe in which Goodhart and its environs are occupied by hermits, each of whom has staked out her space, each of whom subsists there (at least sometimes) in a full, rich practice of solitude. Perhaps they come here occasionally, like locusts, from their other lives, to retreat, to re-root, to restore...and perhaps to join in a few communal expressions of shared presence.

(This is not Tony and Tina's Wedding or a theme park adventure; the statement above is a proposition for a self-conscious performance: the performers are themselves. Or, they are versions of themselves choosing to explore the porousness of identity. They are themselves fantastic. Engaged. Occupied.)

A starting point notion: the performance may be made of:

a) solo or assisted solo occupations: each hermit in space, in action, in communion, in public solitude, sharing her exploration and practice. These would need to be performed in cycles, so they could be viewed by small groups of audience members.

b) larger "meeting" pieces. Small clusters of hermits gather to stage communities. Common concerns. Homages. Meditations. Also site specific.

c) a large gathering. In the end and perhaps also at the beginning, establishing (suggesting) the scale of the community.

d) additional actions, perhaps related to duration, that occur outside the time-frame of the "performance."