Roaming Academy: New York, May 2013 - Sarah Jones

warm air rushes from sozza jones on Vimeo.

Warm Air Rushes, 2013:

Two girls work in a diner in New York, they are visible as two employees in the booming food services industry in Manhattan. However, their socio-economic position, due to the under valued nature of their labour, renders them invisible at the same time. In 2007 the overall average annual wage in restaurants was $23,537, just 12 percent over the poverty threshold of $21,027 for a family of four at the time. Despite the tremendous job growth during the period, the average annual wage of restaurant workers did not change between 2000 and 2007.[1] Two girls work in Manhattan, but they cannot afford to live there. They catch the New York subway from the outskirts of the city everyday to work for minimum wage. They pass underneath the world's most famous skyline; a skyline that was altered irreparably with the event's surrounding the twin towers on September 11, 2001.

Recently in New York in 2013, I sat with a friend on the New York Subway, where it runs above ground in Queens. Two girls sat on the train and looked back over the New York skyline, the new One World Trade Centre building reflected the last bit of sunlight across the city. The resurrection of the icon struck me as profoundly sad. We discuss incessantly how many things have changed in New York, with global repercussions, since the collapse of the twin towers. But in New York city the average annual wage of restaurant workers has remained the same; the train trip to work is the same; the food is the same, the hours are the same. The One World Trade Centre and its economic value within the structure of global capitalism, is visible from everywhere, but two girls remain persistently invisible.

The horizontal silver trains track the movement of the invisible, whilst the vertical resurrection of the World trade centre tracks the movement of the visible. However, there has been a change; an unspeakable awareness of an otherness within New York and it's inhabitants. An opening up of the world, answered with an increase in the closing down effect of security. A warm breeze from somewhere else blows across a city that attempts to close its doors and its windows in the wake of a national tragedy. What will be remembered of the original twin towers when their shining body doubles re-complete the New York skyline?  What will change and what will stay the same?

Warm Air Rushes is an attempt to examine visibility and invisibility - through the micropolitics of a local economy – and a collapsing of time within the events of the last ten years in New York at the level of affective experience.

[1] May 2009 report by the Market Information System (NYCLMIS) Gauging Employment Prospects in New York, City 2009.