Discordant crossroads is a seven-day examination of place, consciousness, mediations, and inhabited experiences. The purpose is to shift my lenses on ordinary existence using field observation, embodied experience— in looking for easy ways to work academically that suit my life as a laborer— web maps, audio, video, photography, diaristic and narrative essay writing. These techniques and methods I’m calling intermedial bricolage.

ARTIST STATEMENT.
My name is Alex Puricelli, and I am a white Cis-hetero able-bodied male laborer/activist/artist/scholar This project is an experiment in what I am terming intermedial bricolage to combine a narrative photo essay web mapping, situated embodied research, media studies, modes of black queer feminist Marxist and ecological theory and critique to document and interrogate my quotidian experiences through and around labor.

INTERMEDIAL BRICOLAGE.
Intermediality is a term used in Radiant Infrastructures which, “allows for a capacious notion of media by enabling the mixing of different formats platforms and technologies and interlinking…discursive materialist, sensory, and phenomenological dimensions,” (Mukherjee 2020). Bricolage means to use the tools at hand to assemble a larger project from existing traces and encounters, to reshape what you have to craft something more (Brooks 2021). Embodied research focuses on qualitative analysis of “alternate ways people have of experiencing, understanding, and narrating the world…gesture, affect, intonation and other embodied modes of expression reveal deep meanings,” according to performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood (Adeyemi, 2022). All these techniques meet where I am situated as a laborer and help my academic/artist work arise from my circumstances and position.

DISCORDANT CROSSROADS SUMMARY.

Discordance is a concept I am still developing which seeks to name the feeling of hope dread and contradiction—potential for liberty or ambivalence—that characterizes the resonant relationship to quotidian life in the contemporary.

The work was conducted with seven days of field notes documented with brief written remarks and photographs. Roughly 420 photographs were taken over the course of that week. Following this I reconstructed the narrative on each day and traced my movements on a web map. The narrative and photos were then overlaid on the map to create a cohesive piece to enable multiple forms of examination to coexist simultaneously. While logging my movement for seven days, my partner and dog were driving across country from New York City to Santa Cruz CA.

Each destination from November 25 th to Saturday December 2 nd I labeled crossroads and summoned an artifact from the place to exposit briefly how our space as we inhabit it engenders power structures draws drawn across all dimensions of our material world. Capitalism, racism, nationalism, cis-heteropatriarchal normativity, anthropocentrism, classism, environmental and ecological collapse draw a gritted line across every frame of our time which constructs our very notion of reality and our sense of normalcy. At times, the urgency of our lives as they occur within the parameters of a working day, may cause us to take for granted the built world and all it engenders. At other times, we may be consciously or unconsciously aware of the power structures we’re a part of and readily involved with and their impacts on us or our ecologies. This experiment in bricolage and mapping will attempt to bring the moment into focus in a way that hopes to unsettle the opacity of normativity on space-time and to seek clarity on the ways we embody contradictions as they become inhabited in our effort to make the day (Hartman 2019).

This is a story of urban ecological discordances and my attunement to them. I want to describe what it feels like to move about a place like New York city’s megalopolis through my professional dispositional and intersectional perspectives. And I want to make clear to myself just how attuned I’ve become. I am choosing to recollect each day from photos because I believe the impressions my experiences leave on me are powerful enough to be conjured and learn from readily given the correct prompts. Recall seems a vital skill when so much of material reality is deliberately obfuscated through various interrelated forms of alienation.

PRELIMINARY FINDINGS.

By mapping, photographing, and making diaristic observations about my embodied experience, I gave name to the tensions underlying my existence. Not only the power structures largely governing space/time as we inhabit it (racism, classism, cis heteronormativity, climate disruption, etc.) but how our subjective embodiment of our social/personal roles resonates with and against our being as we live within the contemporary built world. Discordance is our life reverberating against and synchronizing with these tensions while continually normalizing to carry forth a sense of a ordinary existence. It’s not the type of non sequitur like having a party while the aboard a sinking ship, it’s more like there’s always a train going overhead and you have to have all conversations at that volume, or if we were all zombies then we’d stop noticing the smell of rotting flesh. I believe that our tensions become so multitudinous and simultaneous, that not only can we disregard them, we can stop being aware that we’re doing so. Human discordance is life in an unbalanced ecology. Discordant crossroads is the act of living out these tensions in routine.

Between November 24 th and December 2 nd, I took and gathered roughly 420 images. The first thing to note is my perspective behind the lens is searching without not within—typically. I was looking for signs of discordance through my senses, my mood and emotions didn’t first occur to me to be noteworthy.

This was a thought exercise that situated my crossroads for me. In that way, the scope and scale of this project may be quite limited. However, this was a necessary step for my academic trajectory. The act of assembling the intermedial bricolage has provided me a space to consider each part of my life practice in separation and totality. I began to disassemble my subjective experience in a way that was a novel experience for me. When recalling and reconstructing, the tensions I was feeling began to emerge more vividly and that’s exactly the discordance I am attempting to describe and document. Revealing the tensions underneath my subjective experience has given name to the social and personal roles I am circumstantially negotiating—opposing or claiming—simultaneously and their interferences with one another.

On Tuesdays I am a romantic partner and dog dad for an hour,then a technician for the rest of the morning. I race back home to become a scholar, and once the evening resumes, my domestic life does as well. Technically in that time, I am supposed to provide a few more hours of work to my profession to meet 8hrs, but no one comes inquiring, so I leave that tension unresolved. While navigating that and switching back and forth, I also attempt to be aware of my social privileges and how they may impact my public practices. In that rack focus I think it’s hard to keep the background in view. Although my experiences may be specific, I do not believe these daily confusions are unique. In fact, obfuscation seems like the principal design of capitalist social arrangements.

What this project has prepared me for is to approach next semester —the thesis semester— with a situated set of more dynamic understandings with myself and a framework in intermediate bricolage to manage the tensions and transitions of quotidian life which ultimately help define discordance as an actionable crossroads. Finally, the act of recollection confirmed that the feelings experienced in ordinary moments leave lasting impressions that have edifying potential.

A NOTE ON THE USAGE OF QUEER, BLACK, FEMINIST THOUGHT:
I embrace these methods as a mode of reflexivity and as an acknowledgement that my intersectional identity and upbringing in the insular suburbs makes my perspective insufficient to account for modernity (Madison, 2006).

LABOR?
I’m an operation and maintenance technician for urban commercial roof-mounted photovoltaic systems. Jargon Mc’Jargonson.

INTENTIONS.
— Trace crossroads of capitalism white sis heteropatriarchy or multiracial multi-sex, multi-gendered or abolitionist geographies.
— Draw my focus on embodied contradictions becoming inhabited through my behavior.
— Situate my practice as an artist/activist/scholar as comprised of my best attempt to retain new information.
— To enhance my sense of normalcy in the quotidian context of white cis-heteropatriarchal hegemony and the global ecology of racial capitalism.
— Be self-critical, reflective and open.
— Speculate on the dominant unconscious modes of hegemonic interpersonal transmissions.
— To pay closer attention to find a more edifying moments to help me consider where my crossroads lead me and how my practices may become more coherent research methods.
— Further define quotidian human discordance I know I can feel in my experiences.
— To find the discordant threads in my quotidian existence.
— To practice the application of queer black feminist theory and methodology to reject automatic normativity of cis-white heteropatriarchy.
— Discordant crossroads is primarily a tool for me to check my privilege lenses and complacency to ordinary death and slow violence to help me process the daily counters of existence entrenched in urbanity and modernity.
— My situated practices are tactile means to produce thought within daily laboring routines.
— When I research it is typically to learn from my own edification. I do not seek academic status.
— How I transfer knowledge is usually socially situated in small group or one-on-one midstream impromptus.
— Potentially I will publish speculative fiction and continue the practice of sharing thought online to reach a wider audiences in the future. I speculate whether I want to write for profit or public usage.
— Eventually my intention is to return to public education and teach at public school in SF CA.

DISCORDANT CROSSROADS NARRATIVE.

11/24/23
Day 1

The story starts on the New York City ferry on the Friday after Thanksgiving and my seven-year anniversary with my partner Ashleigh. We rode to Governors Island to spend time together. In two days, her and our dog Delta will trek across country to California, so we spend every moment possible together. My work is place bound, hers is not, so we cannot travel together. She’ll be gone until New Year’s Day. My initial feelings in this project were a sense of social loneliness approaching. I notice only white people at leisure on the ferry all day. This day is when I decided that this project could be clarifying. The first piece of clarity I can derive is that my focus was on my own life and love l, it took me all day to realize I was in a majority white cis-heteronormative space as a comfortable place to express romance.

11/26/23
Day 2
Ash and delta leave in the morning and I’m unable to get out of my own head. This tension of losing my family and home connection for more than a month is exhausting to hold. Since I’m going to spend the next week behind the lens, documenting ordinary life, a slice-of-life film may provide orientation. The cinema offers a chance to enter closely on subjective experience. I chose Radical in hopes to inspire me to reach for the potential in myself and others to spark personal connections to learning our everyday lives and situated experiences. There was a middle-aged black man, looked around 50 years old, sitting in my seat at the theater. I thought to myself, it’s always middle age black folks taking other people’s seats nonchalantly in movie theaters… and I immediately reached into my memory, because I go to the cinema a lot, to justify this as an observation, not a racist stereotype. These thoughts were a reflex I caught myself in at that point. I wondered how much my territoriality around a seat at the cinema was related to my white maleness. Then I stopped looking at the dude and tried to forget about the seat somewhat successfully. Mostly women–educators I guessed—were in the movie. We were all sobbing together. Next, Killers of the Flower Moon help set the stakes for the power of interpersonal transmissions of white supremacist discordance.

11/27/23
Day 3
I learned almost everything about PV O&M from a man who came to the US from Burkina Faso to work and provide for his two kids back home. Since I grew my hair out He says, I look like Jesus. He smiles when you call him Picasso for doing a good job at work and he often prefers for me to take pictures while he does the work so the image reveals black skin being a hard worker. He’s a person who is alwayss teaching me to look closer. And he often shines through his contradictions as an alienated wage laborer and land owning patriarch. When I pressed him on associating me with white Jesus he said yes but why Jesus is the stereotypical image.

11/28/23
DAY 4
When I arrived at Cube Smart in flushing Queens, a few mini trash tornadoes were sweeping through the parking lot. My task for work here was to energize this newly constructed PV system. That means I am the first person to turn it on and see if it produces power. It did, I established its first connection to the grid. I want to talk more about this double valence of power. Consider this an intro. The install guys were there, so I had to warn everyone about the hazards… not to touch anything or unplug wires… I used to be on that crew. They labor 7 1/2 hours a day on the roof. The installation crew is completely alienated from the principle commodity that our profession provides: power. Most never see what happens after they lay the last panel and are so far removed, they may not know what they don’t know. Most of the guys made a point to come over and chat with me to catch up. Some guys asked me for advice. It reminded me I have a lot of social currency with working class men.

11/29/23
Day 5
I went for a yearly check up at the doctor. Alcohol abuse had previously caused some fat buildup in my bloodstream. My thyroid is also unbalanced because of it too and it affects my mood; at least now I know why that’s happening. The fat in my blood is back to normal this year after being dry since March, but my thyroid is worse. That’s some discordance and accordance happening with my body and the relationship it has with the ecology. As soon as doc heard I worked in solar he wanted my professional opinion. He told me he owned a home in Long Island where he said his wife, not him, wanted solar panels. Even though he pays the bills and he doesn’t mind the gas. He claimed his wife must be given what she wants even if it is unreasonable. So, they proceeded to have two trees chopped down in their yard based on a handshake sort of deal. Then the solar representative moved on and they have two less trees. Cause some guy told him to, that was all the legitimacy required.

11/30/23
Day 6
I’m thinking about a few things with Queen Center Mall in Elmhurst. First, what a monstrosity. It took me about an hour and a half to find the right spot where I was sent to work after navigating the parking structure and the security company. Almost all the folks working security were women mostly college age by appearances. The mall has five floors and is more than a city block in size. It’s a no man’s land of highways, strodes, and chain stores with parking lots. On the roof, someone had taken some bricks used to weigh the system down and smashed a few panels in. The damage was a lot more significant than I typically see, like they brought the bricks down multiple times in the same place. The excessive Lotto and cigarette trash, human shit and piss in the stairwell. A six-story fake Christmas tree. Cartoonish crags in the walls where rats retreated suddenly. Broken into items in the parking garage, people lurking in the shadows, and what looked like middle school students fucking with shit, seemingly retreating in the stairwells for sex, and some being trailed by security guards. Kids at noon on a Thursday in the parking garage of a shopping mall situated like an old claw foot tub rusting on a huge plot of land. One of the most racially mixed neighborhoods in NYC or Queens with this massive waste of space occupying it and employing it’s young women to police it’s children. Who is this ecology serving?

12/2/23 Day 7 I needed apples and they’re gorgeous at this one stand at the McCarran green market. I had so much damn schoolwork—I could see no future. It took me a full hour of debating with myself whether I had the time to walk and buy apples at the market. The apples are top notch and I’m from apple country upstate, so it’s like this undying pleasure that’s always stays consistent—my relationship to eating apples. So, I went, and I bought about 15 apples. And I went a little further and bought a ridiculous jumpsuit at Buffalo exchange. I saw a bufflehead and found a new part of the luxury redevelopment on the East River on Greenpoint’s waterfront open. And I ended this watching a seaplane take flight. They called the De Havilland the workhorse of the north, another nickname is the Beaver. This plane has these names because transforming ecology of the North Country, including Canada, was impossible without the ability to take flight and land on water with a vessel powerful enough to haul people and materials.

Link(s) to full project:

• Link 1 - felt.com/map/Discordant-Crossroads-p6zFJZwERaGVs7M7pNJbHD?loc=34.51,-98.1,5z
• Link 2 - storymaps.com/stories/d6e0f4a6de404ec397582804ce60699e