Leonard Bopp
The wandering pathways of the Central Park Ramble have been a site of community and solidarity, cruising, and refuge for New York’s LGBT community, from the activism of the queer liberation movement to the darkest days of the AIDS crisis. This project will use sound as a medium to explore the social history of the Central Park Ramble, an important site in LGBT history in New York City. In my recent work, I have been interested in how physical objects and places can be sites of ephemeral moments and hidden histories. This is particularly true for queer histories. As Jose Esteban Muñoz writes in his essay “Ephemera as Evidence,” “queerness is often transmitted covertly,” because “leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open to attack.” This is especially true of the history of the Central Park Ramble, which became a vital site for the queer community in large part because of its unnavigatability, its inscrutability, and its hidden pathways. This work will use sound, archival material, and possibly other media to bring the physicality of ramble into proximity with the ephemeral moments of its past. Part of my project will be based on taking live sound samples from the ramble. During my work on this project, I will wander through the ramble myself, taking samples of found sounds as I walk. At the same time, I will go through the archives at the New York Public Library to collect archival material, including text, photographs, and oral histories. I will then construct a composition from the archival material I assemble and the sound samples I collect, the ultimate form and shape of which will be determined by this material.
Library Mentor: Meredith Kahn