22 Unrealized Public Project Proposals
By Temporary Services with illustrations by Kione Kochi
Half Letter Press, Fort Wayne, IN and Chicago, IL, 2023
Pages: 36
Dimensions: 5.5 in x 8.5 in
Cover: Paper
Binding: staple-bound
Process: offset
Color: Full color cover and interior
Edition 1000
ISBN: 9781732051485
Never before shared historical material from Temporary Services, freshly illustrated by Kione Kochi. The ideas in this publication were generated back in 2008 for an arts organization in New York City after they invited us to propose something big. None of them were accepted and we are presenting them here for the first time.
Back in 2008, a curator friend of ours reached out to us after they landed a job working for a New York-based arts organization that mounts large scale public projects. We had worked with this curator before, but not this organization. The curator encouraged us to pitch ideas for a massive project we could work on together. Because the intention with this booklet is to focus on our proposals rather than what could have happened, we’ll just call the proposal recipient: [art organization].
The proposal process was not particularly transparent. We had no idea what our budget could be or how the decision-making process might work. We had been commissioned to do some public projects before but generally on a smaller scale, with modest budgets and/ or borrowed resources. More frequently we just worked within our own means and pursued ideas for situating our work in shared city spaces without obtaining permission or seeking funding. Any of these proposed ideas, if executed at the scales suggested, would have forced us to dramatically restructure our lives in ways that—reading this list today—feels hard to imagine.
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Such a fun zine
I’m a super fan of TS collaborations with artist Kione Kochi and this might be my favorite yet. Kochi’s playful illustrations perfectly capture the fun and unrestrained creativity TS brings to their proposed projects.