Chase Manhattan

Chase Manhattan is a psychogeographic dérive that pictures the unbuilding of a skyscraper, which once occupied the whole block on New York’s 270 Park Avenue, while another, taller skyscraper is already being erected on the same site. A dump truck carrying the metal armature and steel beams of the destroyed building is followed across Manhattan to the Holland tunnel headed for a New Jersey scrap site. The new skyscraper was an inaugural project after Bill de Blasio’s re-zoning of East Midtown in 2019, which enabled the unrestricted sale and trading of air rights between the 57 blocks that comprise it.

The sound is part of the work’s geography: a Downtown soundtrack to Uptown images mirroring the mythological bifurcation of the New York dream. Aside from the fact that Stubborn is a band composed of New York artists Brad Kronz, Jeffery Joyal, and Valerie Keane, the drone conveys the somber funeral contemplation and the dreary carnivalism of Koolhaas’ Delirious New York. The second portion is played by KVANTUM (Stefan Tcherepnin and Paul Sigerhall), that plays like a casual post-opening jam session that speeds up to hysteric, uncontrolled rupture.