vvitalny

Hinge Figures: A Doorway to North Brooklyn History

Pick a doorbell. Any doorbell. Press it. Maybe you’ll hear Donnie Brasco discussing his dealings with the mafia or highlights from the 1955 World Series between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees. Or it might be President Truman delivering the momentous speech that ends World War Two. Press all of them, and you’ll be guided through 90 years of history in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick at “Hinge Figures,” an installation conceived by arts collective vvitalny.

Tusia Dabrowska and Clara Ines Schuhmacher make up the Brooklyn-based arts collective. (In Polish, witalny means “vital”.) They installed the Brooklyn Arts Council-funded “Hinge Figures” last Friday, September 2nd, only to have it damaged two days later by vandals. They are hoping to re-install their piece, which they said symbolizes the line between people’s public and private lives. “Even though people live in my building, I hear what they do,” Schuhmacher said. “I don’t know them. We probably have a lot of similarities since we live in the same place. ‘Hinge Figures’ is an effort to take negativity away from how people categorize other people and communities.”

In an effort to preserve the project, the two partners are trying to put as many parts of the installation on their website as possible. They also plan to scan and upload the postcards people left about what the doors made them think of. “Many of the responses described the history of their area or building, and we were pleasantly surprised at how poetic and intimate many of them were,” they said.

Dabrowska and Schuhmacher are a bit weary of transferring their project to a private space, since it was in the public eye at their McCarren Park location at North 12th Street and Bedford Avenue. “There are certain elements about the public space that are important to us, and which we would like to somehow re-create or allude to in its new iteration,” they said. “For example, accessibility is the number one priority for us. After considering different areas of the park itself, we chose the particular corner specifically because it seemed that there the widest range of community members would have the opportunity to see it. Another thing is that in public, rules around interactivity and engagement are not explicitly stated, and it was interesting for us to see how passersby would approach the piece, hesitate a moment, and then discover there were other levels to the installation that they could discover.”

In a gallery, Schuhmacher said there might be certain rules and restrictions, and Dabrowska said this location change will affect the experience and impact of it. “It’s important for us to find a way for the piece not to impose its interactive component on the viewer,” they said. “We’d want the doorbells and their sound stories to continue to surprise and maybe provide a small treat to individuals.”

While the two look for a home for their current project, Schuhmacher and Dabrowska are preparing for their next show. The second in a series of projects known as “Poles on Poles,” will run from October 1st – October 12th at the Brooklyn Artists Gym in Gowanus. Its focus is on Poland through the lens of American poetry, and, just like “Hinge Figures,” shines a light on cultural differences and the relationships between people of dissimilar nationalities. The entire series as a whole deals with the historically Polish neighborhood of Greenpoint to explore the ties between Poland and the United States.

With all of their projects, they just hope to get people talking. “The goal of ‘Hinge Figures’ was to spark conversations,” Dabrowska said. “It’s about looking at different ways to approach homemaking and how people bring about their own cultural [and] historical experience. But at the same time, it’s about bringing in new experiences.”

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