Cross/Walks: Weaving Fabric Row

Producer: Hana Iverson

Cross/Walks: Weaving Fabric Row is a video of an art installation and location- based project by Hana Iverson, in collaboration with students from Neighborhood Narratives, a locative media education initiative. The project offered an open-ended portrait of a community: South Philadelphia’s Fabric Row, the spine of an evolving, historically Jewish neighborhood. Visitors to Fabric Row called their cell phones to hear voices of the street, follow Hana’s path or offer their own contributions. Neighborhood anecdotes were triggered in the gallery installation, by movement through the space. The students spent several months on Fourth Street, recording interviews with shop owners, taking photographs and developing a pocket map. The students’ photographic portraits of Fourth Street can be seen at www.cross-walks.org.

Hana Iverson is a media artist with a focus on networked communities and wireless technologies. Her public projects, Cross/Walks: Weaving Fabric Row and View from the Balcony along with her education initiative Neighborhood Narratives, engages the neighborhood as social practice to explore questions about place, embodiment, and social engagement inside of mobile and other alternative forms of distribution. Iverson is the Visiting Scholar with the Institute for Woman and Art at Rutgers University (NJ), and founder and director of the Neighborhood Narratives Project, http://www.neighborhoodnarratives.net.