LABOR OF LOVE
CENTRAL PARK COMPETITION
In 2018 landscape architecture journal LA+ invited submissions for an international open design ideas competition to “reimagine and redesign” New York’s Central Park for the 21st century.
The competion brief was in the form of a ficto-critical news announcement that Central Park had been attacked by a cadre of eco-terrorists calling themselves “the Gaians.” The previous Saturday the group had released an army of mechanical bees and beetles throughout the park. Over the weekend the techno-insects had completely defoliated the vegetation, denuding the whole park of living plant matter, and then self-destructed on the Sunday evening. All that was left was a devastated landscape.
The LA+ competition called for the park to be redesigned from scratch.
Our entry, like the call itself a playfully serious conceit, was in the form of a gallery exhibition staged by a Native American art collective of Lenape artists known as Labor of Love. The Lenape tribe, part of the larger Delaware Tribal Confederation, was the main tribe that had inhabited the island of Manhatta (the Indian name) prior to the coming of Europeans. They were killed and driven out by the Dutch and their successor colonists. The Labor of Love exhibition documented the return of Central Park to the Native American peoples who had once flourished there.
Labor of Love mounted a display of the relevant documents, including pictures drawn by their children showing the kids flying back to Central Park from their reservation in Oklahoma, and images of how they might re-establish their traditional lifeways there in the middle of New York City.
The exhibition consisted of:
o A map of Manhattan showing Central Park as New Indian Territory
o Watercolor portraits of the members of the Labor of Love collective
o An email from the Elder Services Program of the Delaware Tribe of Indians stating that tribal leaders will be traveling to New York to take over Central Park
o A Wikipedia entry that explains the repatriation of the park to the Lenape peoples
o A copy of the Deed of Gift that returns Central Park from State of New York ownership to the Delaware tribes
o Childrens’ drawings showing their delight in their new land
o A diagram showing the planned future use of the park
Competition Team
Rod Barnett
Jacqueline Margetts
Nona Davitaia