Constellations Over Playas

"Joseph Moore is an artist and Assistant Professor of Art at the City College of New York. Stephanie Vella is a PhD student in Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where she researches European theatrical modernism and its engagement with spatial, temporal, and racial otherness in primitivism, classicism, and orientalism.

Since 2003 the United States has enacted simulated terrorist attacks against the abandoned mining town, Playas, New Mexico. Constellations Over Playas proposes that we look at this place as an imaginary stage for the dramatization and repetition of collective traumas, a stage where the recreation of the past is used to control the future. Constellations generates iterations of associative networks pulled from the source material the artists have accumulated on their journeys through the area, providing an ephemeral travelogue through the colonial, material, military, imaginary, and cinematic trails that intersect with their investigations of Playas. " -- From Turbulence