install at Bleeker St., NYC, MTA Subway Station
site-specific intervention, photographic documentation
archival digital prints
variable
2009-ongoing
The “Get Lost!” project restores NYC’s Metropolitan Transit
Authority’s subway maps, signs and place names, to what they
may have geographically looked and sounded like prior to colonial
intervention in 1609.
Documented through photography, the restorations based on the
18th century military cartography and toponymy of the city erase
400 years of accumulated history. Place names, neighborhoods,
and subway lines are erased, returning New York City to it’s
original green spaces, streams, ponds, and shores the Lenni
Lenape Indians once inhabited.
Returned and inserted back into the subway system, these
restorations provide riders and the public a glimpse of the native,
colonial, and military traces of New York City.