The Department of Reflection

When: September 28 From 6:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M., October 12 , October 26

Where: 2100 Collins Ave

About: Designed as a reflection of Miami Beach City Hall’s interior spaces, the department’s Main Office will become a hub, meeting place, and flex space for the Department of Reflection; giving the public insight into its current research and work with the city. The site will be an approachable and dialogue-friendly environment, open to the public every Saturday from 2 to 6pm or by appointment. Exchange around Miami Beach’s sea level rise and climate change mitigation efforts, and their effects locally, regionally, and globally will be encouraged via:

Interactive installations
Public events every other Saturday
Bookleggers Library
Bicycle Rental
and more!

The Department of Reflection in its pursuit to encourage deeper and more meaningful contemplation and speculation of the City of Miami Beach, its residents, and its place in the world has invited the prominent national organization the Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO) for a special visit and review. IQECO is a collaborative organism looking to find and create alternatives. They believe the solutions to environmental degradation are found on the periphery and seek to bring them to the forefront of public consciousness. Guided by queer and feminist theory and decolonial thinking, IQECO works to undo dangerously destructive human-centric hierarchies—or even flip them—to look at the critical importance of things happening invisibly; underground and out of sight. On this visit to Miami Beach, IQECO will install a temporary reading room for their hybridized publication project Common Survival, which is an unbound collection of 33 objects made by over 40 artists based in 7 countries. Work was selected by an open call for projects that presented survival strategies for folx and creatures alike living in an uncertain climate. Using this work as a departure point, The Institute of Queer Ecology will lead discussions with residents and Department of Reflection staff, after which they will give their recommendations to the city.

Saturday, September 28, 6-8pm
with Sasha Wortzel and Archival Feedback

The Department of Reflection in its belief that a greater understanding and reexamination of our individual and communal regional histories can act as a guiding force with decision making in our immediate future has invited the Sasha Wortzel and Archival Feedback to share their excavating research-based work with Miami Beach Residents.

Sasha Wortzel is an artist and filmmaker working between New York City and Miami. Blending documentary and narrative forms, her films, installations, and performances explore how structures of power shape our lives around race, gender, desire, and landscape.

Archival Feedback is and experimental sound art duo/collective based in Miami, FL and comprised of Emile Milgrim and T. Wheeler Castillo. Engaged in various critical dialogues of the moment, the environment is approached as a studio in the field, accessing the landscape through the soundscape.

Saturday, October 12
with Elite Kedan and Realie B. Taimond (aka Bow Ty)

The Department of Reflection concerns itself deeply with the uncertain and oftentimes perplexing ways private interests influences public policy, but also realize the various and intersecting systems we all currently live in. With this in mind, we’ve invited Elite Kedan and Realie B. Taimond to present their important and critical specializations with Miami Beach Residents.

Elite Kedan is an artist and registered architect based in Miami. Her combined work explores how technology and production methods intersect with human behavior, public space, historical context and meaning. She is currently a resident artist at ArtCenter/South Florida and is co-founder and member of the collaborative (Alliance of the Southern Triangle), an initiative exploring how artistic and cultural possibilities can be reimagined in light of climate change and political volatility by leveraging the dynamics already in process.

Saturday, October 26
with Rob Goyanes, Julian Pardo, and Willy Smart

The Department of Reflection celebrates it’s final weeks at it’s current location by revisiting explorations made by Rob Goyanes, inviting a new voice currently based in Pittsburgh (Willy Smart), and caps things off with a warm communal meal organized by Julian Pardo.

Rob Goyanes is from Miami, Florida and lives in Ridgewood, Queens. His writing has appeared in e-flux journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, Miami Herald, and elsewhere. He’s contributed essays to several exhibition catalogues, including the one for “Songs for Sabotage,” the 2018 Triennial at the New Museum. On his writing, the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “That sounds right.”

Julian Pardo is a multidisciplinary artist based in Miami who uses photography, ceramics and repurposed materials such furniture, lamps and glass .

Willy Smart is an artist who works in presentational and propositional forms. Willy makes lectures, sculpture, and publications that propose extended modes and objects of reading and recording. Willy directs the conceptual record label Fake Music (fakemusic.org).