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Dimes Square as Physical and Symbolic Stage

Project by Alexa Dannis

This self-mythologizing triangle, carved from the edge of Chinatown, operates as a human playground whose newly-conceptualized boundaries are both exclusionary and continually negotiated. The project visualizes the moment where the technical and social occupy the same representational language— tracing how hidden systems surface through rupture. A leaking vent, a piled trash bag, or a cracked sidewalk mark points where infrastructures of plumbing, sewage, utilities, and waste choreograph public life. These interruptions destabilize the distinction between front and back, spectacle and support, visibility and concealment. The representation of these systems functions as an x-ray of participation, revealing how maintenance, consumption, and performance form a shared metabolism. Directional flows of the desirable and undesirable form a map of power. Trash pickup locations— sites of accumulation that demonstrate temporal rhythms of work— dictate how space is occupied. This merges infrastructural mapping with bodily choreography of who takes up space.