Touches

Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles has made it her life’s work to dignify and celebrate the often unseen and disregarded work of maintenance workers; the men and women who keep megacities such as New York running. The official, but unpaid, artist in residence of the New York Sanitation department she spent almost a year between 1979 and 1980 shaking the hand of over 8500 sanitation workers, telling them ‘Thank you for keeping New York alive’.

Ukeles work has only recently found the appreciative audience and respect in deserves with Queens museum in New York staging a retrospective of her work, complete with mirrored garbage truck and LED lit map of her route around New York.

Writer and artist Andrea Mason pays homage to Ukeles with her own piece TOUCHES, of which she says:

‘These reverbing 8,500 “touches”, unknowable yet human, bring to mind the social ecology of urban living, at once necessary and a challenge, as well as celebrating the nature of community, and the notion that the key to a city’s sustainability and transformability lies in the endurance of its communities.

Touches is extracted from a longer work-in-progress, a Fluxus novel about waste; an assemblage piece which utilises inventory, micro fiction, diary entry, haikuesque prose poetry, and concrete prose, which investigates the daily systems of life and the body, as well as societal systems and the entropy, or waste, therein.’

Kathleen McCaul

Mega City Fictions is a project by Kathleen McCaul, funded by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership, and produced in collaboration with UEA's Boiler House Press.

Megacity Fictions aims to investigate how writers and artists are responding to vast cityscapes which mutate and spread at unparalleled rates, often displaying extremes of global wealth and poverty; vertical towers built on new economic wealth surrounded by sprawls of immigrant slums. Submissions in creative non-fiction, fiction, ficto-critical writing, photography and digital art that explore particular megacities, and the concept of massive urban hubs in general, are all invited.

• https://megacityfictions.com/journal/art...