Please click on image to download 2017 Zine
The Year of the TransHistorical is an exploration in revealing the site we call Mildred’s Lane. There are an astonishing number of narratives and mysteries still to be discovered in this designed and bewildering environment.
Mildred’s Lane hosts a multitude of creative practitioners collaboratively working, living, and researching in a landscape. These investigations include the adaptive reuse of vernacular 19th-century outbuildings, landscape interventions, follies, architectural projects, lectures, workshops, environmental activism, foraging and creative domesticating.
The Mildred House is a scaled farmhouse that historical preservationist, Richard Pieper[1], dates circa 1830; yet it features an eighteenth-century hearth. Mildred Miller was a woman farmer living there in the twentieth century. For decades she dwelt alone and isolated on the property. We named the site in memory of her remarkable agrarian life.
At Mildred’s Lane, we nurture, enhance and collaborate with this landscape. At the intersections of the organized historical periods and disciplines living side-by-side are the emergent and boundless poetics of the playful transhistoricity[2] of domesticity – ‘houseness[3].’ The Mildred House is a transhistorical vessel. Theorist Keith Jenkins[4] says that history is about power. There is an inherent greediness in it, even capitalistic. Who does it benefit? Isn’t there always some inherent ideology when we differentiate right from wrong, and especially the good from the bad; such questions are at the core of our search for a new approach toward what to do with history here.
Mildred's Lane as a think tank, residency program, and making/doing workshops explore archaeological methodologies and tools to understand more deeply the physical site. Artist and other cultural producers with a core concern for history and archaeology will be brought to bear on the curiosity of vernacular structures on the property.
The Mildred’s Lane TransHistorical Society and Museum is a land trust becoming for the preservation of a contemporary/historical site living with the past, present and future; thus, coevolving a complex(ity) that concerns our very being – creatively, environmentally, socially and politically.
The Mildred’s Lane TransHistorical Society and Museum. Photo courtesy of Mildred’s Lane c. 2000
[1] Richard Pieper, Adjunct Professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Director of Preservation at Jan Hird Pokorny and Associates.
[2] Transhistoricity is the quality of holding throughout human history, not merely within the frame of reference of a particular form of society at a particular stage of historical development. From Wikipedia
[3] “Even more than adults do, children seem to instinctively grasp the deepest meanings of houseness––the full significance of territory and shelter, the metaphysics of inside and out, the symbolism of doors and windows and roofs.” Henry David Thoreau
[4] Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History, 1991.
Mildred’s Lane Sessions 2017
More involvements, contributors and collaborations to be announced this spring; but, briefly here, the sessions 2017 include:
Paul Bartow / David Brooks / D. Graham Burnett / Jorge Colombo / Mark Dion / Jeff Dolven / Juliet Dunn / Joanna Ebenstein / Hope Ginsburg / Gary Graham / Pablo Helguera / Jeffrey Jenkins / Cameron Klavsen / Athena Kokoronis / Petra Lange-Berndt / Isobel R. Lister / Robert Marbury / Jan Mun / Megan O’Connell / Claire Pentecost / Virginia Poundstone / Rebecca Purcell / J. Morgan Puett / James Prosek / Sal Randolph / Gina Siepel / Mark Thomann / Cesar Valdes / Robert Williams / Caroline Woolard / Amy Yoes / and others to be announced very soon
